Work hard. Be dumb. Vote trump.

Oh, you're right! I should have written "read with comprehension and think critically". Next time!

I'm pretty sure it's not the Right that outsources their thinking to the "expert" class

Yep, the right outsources their thinking to corporate interests and fringe conspiracy whackos. The left aspires to make us all experts at thinking and reading critically.

(Funny you should mention "corporate interests") The Left has spent years telling people to let the elites do their thinking for them and trust everything the self-appointed experts say.

Untrue. The fact that I'm willing to get vaccinated means that I've read up on vaccines in general and enough about even the Covid vaccine to believe that the risks (to my neighbors and myself) are significantly outweighed by the benefits. Both my parents, together with the American kids of their generation, lined up to get a Polio vaccine that had a very small percentage chance of killing them outright, and they and their parents made that choice because it was still better than their odds with Polio Myelitis running loose in the community. Such choices can only be made properly when you have enough math, science, history and reading skill to make them: the Left has consistently supported providing those to everyone and funding that education to make it within everyone's reach: the right has consistently supported limiting and hobbling educators and the free press, reducing everyone's chances of being able to choose well for themselves.

On a side note, polio began to decline before the vaccine was made available.

Untrue?? The Left spent the lockdowns (which turned out to be pointless) demonizing anyone who didn't "trust the experts" who recommended said lockdowns. The ones who "limited and hobbled the free press" were the ones on the Left who used "misinformation" as an excuse to suppress any people and information that contradicted the "scientific consensus". Twitter banned Robert Malone, a doctor who studies MRNA vaccines, for questioning the efficacy of the MRNA-based covid vaccines. Eventually the "experts" admitted, albeit quietly, that the vaccines they wanted to force people to get were neither as safe or effective as they had initially insisted. You're not going to gaslight me into forgetting everything that happened between 2019 and 2022.

If people are undernourished, the solution is to give them less food.

The solution is to abolish the agency that has catastrophically failed to feed them

If a farm is failing to feed people, abolishing the farm will not feed them.

This Trumpian logic is strangely familiar. If only they had enough history to understand the irony.

"the education system ... is run at the state and school district level, very diversely"

Ergo, it's impossible to pin failures of education on one national level agency. First you have to identify the failures and figure out where and how they're happening.

Wouldn't it be the DoE's job to correct failures at the state and local level?

Yes, if they're given enough power to do the job.

Ah yes, the solution is to give bureaucrats more power

Thank you for illustrating why abolishing the Department of Education isn't the answer to the problem.

The DoE is not the farm, it's the bureaucratic entity that is mismanaging the farm

If the students who can't read, write, etc. are equally distributed across the country and have no other circumstances in common, then you might be right. But keep in mind that there's a correlation between parents working more hours and their children doing worse in school because of less time spent with their parents.

It's better if one parent works and the other stays home

I agree. I believe parents should be paid to stay home and do the very important job of raising their children.

Both parents?

"the education system ... is run at the state and school district level, very diversely"

Did you forget you said that?

You mean where the college students beat the professor to death for refusing to deny God's existence?

Oh, you just watched the show . . . the Red Guards beat professors to death for refusing to deny the worth of a liberal education, of math and the sciences. *head shake* Of course they would have Christianized it for TV. Attacking the "educated elite" and bringing mobs of supporters to take down institutions of education in service to the Great Leader was the key tactic of the Cultural Revolution.

It's literally in the book 😂😂😂
And since when does the mainstream film industry "Christianize" anything? Hollywood is overwhelmingly left-wing and has been for years.

Nicely cited. Nevertheless, it's not the God part that has put him (and all the other teachers) on the list. It's their support of learning, sciences and literature: the same things the Right attacks over and over.

See, Mike the Mad Scientist is making my case: he's reading the evidence but leaping to make a wrong inference.

What is the right inference?

Mike is reasoning in advance of his data. Any inference he's making will be wrong. He has two data points: He stipulates to the idea that there are people emerging from our education system who are uneducated, and he knows that the Department of Education puts money into the system. It's a classic correlation/causation moment, and he bombed it.

Or, if he has the data to prove that what's causing failures in the education system (which is run at the state and school district level, very diversely) IS the Department of Education, he's failing to present it in favor of making a snarky generalization, which makes him a very poor persuader (the kindest interpretation of his behavior I can find).

If education is run at the state and local level, then there is no reason it cannot continue without the Department of Education

"the education system ... is run at the state and school district level, very diversely"

Soooo... if the Department of Education is doing its job of allocating funds, establishing educational standards, testing thresholds, requirements for institutional accreditation but the U.S. educational system is "failing" under state and school district-level management, how will abolishing the DOE correct the state and school district-level mismanagement again?

"It can't be the federal government's fault; it must be the individual school districts themselves!"

"It can't be the individual school districts themselves; it must be the federal government's fault!"

See how facile that is?

Do you trust the federal government

Your words, not mine. But congratulations on admitting the problem isn't at the federal level.

And if it's run badly at a state and local level?

It's being run badly right now

In some areas, yes.

Especially the federal government