I know I shouldn’t be surprised, but still, I am surprised at all the hyperbolic reactions that are being published in response to the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity for official acts.
Biden can assassinate Trump now! Trump will be able to assassinate Biden if he gets elected! Biden can add four more Justices to the Supreme Court! The President can amend the Constitution to make abortion illegal… or legal! Democracy is over! The President is now a king!
But this is what we get for telling generations of students that it’s okay if they can’t read or think clearly about what they’ve read. We’ll just ‘meet them where they are’ and tell them, in overly simple terms, what is in the books they can’t read.
So now, we have hundreds of millions of people who can’t actually read or understand a Supreme Court ruling and who instead have to depend on politicians, political pundits, and podcasters — many of whom are in the same boat — to tell them what’s in the decision. And then they repeat what they’ve heard, even when that bears little or no resemblance to what it actually says. Maybe, especially when that’s the case.
(If someone starts telling you about how awful this decision is, your first question should be: Did you read it? And your second question should be: Then how do you know what it says?)
This is what happens when we forget that public education isn’t about ‘bright futures for children’, or ‘training kids so they can get good jobs’, or ‘developing a work force that can compete on the world stage’, or providing subsidized daycare for parents.
As it says in Article 83 of our state constitution, it’s about ensuring the preservation of a free government. Which is to say, helping each new generation become difficult to lie to.
To paraphrase Jackie Kennedy: If we bungle educating our children, nothing else we do matters very much.
If we ever feel like turning things around, at least with respect to education, Article 3 of our state constitution provides a remedy:
When men enter into a state of society, they surrender up some of their natural rights to that society, in order to ensure the protection of others; and, without such an equivalent, the surrender is void.
That is, public schools could be focused exclusively on helping students develop the skills they need to educate themselves—which turn out to be exactly the same skills they need to avoid being manipulated through deceit: literacy, numeracy, and rationality.
And those are exactly the skills that taxpayers need children to develop in order for their own rights to be protected when those children acquire the right to vote upon reaching an arbitrary age.
And that is exactly what needs to happen if we’re going to preserve a free government.
