Make Education Good Again

I hope they knock down the Department of Education

File: Universal Exhibition of Vienna, 1873 - American rural schoolhouse, interior LCCN2004676913.tif - Wikimedia Commons

Several notes before I launch forth into the post of the day. First, I’m so sorry about the failure to livestream last night. Matt had a lot going on, and so did I, and then, at last, fatigue overtook me. I will try to catch a moment sometime this week if no catastrophe befalls me. Second, pray for Megan Basham who is facing a hard cancer diagnosis. Gosh, there is so much to pray for. I’m going to have to rework my list.

Third, you can find me over in WORLD this morning. Check it out!

“I’m a disaster of an intelligent being,” declares Bryan Johnson in the final scene of the Netflix documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever: . He smiles and shrugs, “But you know what, “I’m trying my best.” Johnson is part of the Longevity Community. Don’t Die follows him on his journey to reverse the ravages of age and time. According to the biometrics he has posted about himself, he is much younger than his 46 years of biological age. He is turning back the clock.

Unsurprisingly, it takes a staggering amount of time to keep ahead of his body. He logs a precise amount of perfect sleep every night. As he showed off his sleep chart on camera, my post-menopausal self silently wept into my morning tea (caffeine is apparently not on the menu if you are trying not to die). I paused over my toast to watch him consume his meager ration of vegetables and then admit to always being hungry. I nestled into my comfy chair as he sweated, shirtless, in his home gym. His rigorous exercise routine includes two hours of weights and cardio. To top it off, he downs at least 54 supplements every day. The pill regimen appeared to occupy roughly the amount of time I might spend having lunch with a friend.

Head to WORLD to read the whole thing!

And finally, I think I have discovered why I am having such a hard time settling upon what to write about each morning. Normally, I pop open my phone and am immediately transfixed by various items so ridiculous, so absurd that the words pour forth in a torrent. But recently, I am faced with the discomfiting and unusual exereince that one or two circumstances—not all, but some—that I have longed for in my conscious political life coming to pass. The de-funding of the destruction of children by both abortion and gender “affirming” care, for example, is such a miracle. On the other hand, there is the unnerving revelation that substantial amounts of money supposed to have gone to President Zelinzky didn’t get there. Where did it go? Is this like in Mali when heaps of money was charitably sent by Western governments to pave the roads but the roads were never paved and many dignitaries suddenly built lavish villas along the Niger River in Bamako? Indeed, to discover what sorts of activities USAID has been engaging in around the world is eye-popping and not in a good way.

Leaving all of those consequential and unsettling political machinations to those with a better grasp on America’s place in the world, it is the hint that the Department of Education might be closed down and all the money and authority returned to the states that really makes it seems like marshmellows and sugar plumbs are raining from the sky. It is something I have long desired, though never believed possible. For, it must be observed that the way children are educated very much affects the functioning of the society they belong to and the relative happiness of the people as a whole.

If you go over to the X app, you will find pictures of the Department of Education. Apparently, it looks like this:

This is also what my children’s college library looks like. THE LIBRARY. When you go in there are some rickety and stressful elevators with very dim lighting, as though nuclear waste is about to begin falling from the sky. And there are some large rooms with too bright white light meant for studying. Because it is a library, the preponderance of books, once you finds them, lowers the blood pressure from the initial shock of aesthetic brutalism. But still, it is as though a group of people who hate reading decided to get together and stick it to the book loving population and to ensure that no young college student would be swept away by wonder and beauty.

Can I interrupt myself again? I live two minutes away from an elementary school called Horace Mann that looks like a smaller version building above. Which is to say, a prison. Every day adorable little children trudge there through the fridge tundra to learn about whatever the fad of the day is. What I want to know is, why does the place where children are meant to come spiritually and intellectually alive have to look like a gray, soulless box?

As for the Department of Education, back when it was built, I imagine it didn’t have such a gray pallor, the squalid feeling of corruption and decay. I imagine it was sort of gleaming, and all the people who gazed upon it thought it was progressive and utopic. But back when it was built, there were still things like high social trust, widespread church attendance, and belief in a higher power like God. Nobody imagined that those things would gradually fade away and all would be left would be the hulking, gray shell of hopeless misery. Is it any wonder that most people employed by the federal government prefer to work from home?

If anyone really wants America to be great—or better yet, good—they will knock that thing down like the Berlin Wall and make a beautiful park with swans and ducks and flowers and a bench to sit and read a book.

Have a great day!