Is Linda McMahon another Betsy DeVos?

I don't make my educational beliefs a secret. Those who want to learn should be allowed to do so with as little restriction as possible. Schooling is restrictive by nature and therefore detrimental to educational rights.

Government involvement is especially problematic. An educated society is a threat to the government's power. This is why authoritarian governments such as communism, fascism, and national socialism overwhelmingly embrace government control.

We need to stop treating education as a threat to the government's power that must be controlled and restricted. We need to start treating education as the fundamental human right that it is. I want the federal government to get out of the way. I also want state and local governments to get out of the way.

School choice can certainly help in this regard. Most people would learn best outside the confines of a restrictive schooling environment, so I prefer educational choice over school choice. Based on my time served in the government-controlled model, however, I have to say that any choice is better than no choice.

Donald Trump brought in Betsy DeVos for this very reason. Unfortunately, Trump undermined her goals by shifting the focus from reducing government control to a fight over which party controls the propaganda. Ultimately, DeVos was unsuccessful.

I had mixed feelings about DeVos. Overall, I would say I was supportive. School choice would definitely be an improvement over the government defunding the educations of children who leave government control.

I did have some issues with DeVos. Perhaps my biggest came when DeVos brought up the dropout crisis. Not everyone fits the schools. If people leave to pursue a more suitable education, I'm perfectly fine with that. Graduation rates are actually quite high. DeVos indicated that she wanted higher. To me, it seemed like DeVos was trying to use school choice as a tool to ensure all Americans are mere products of our schools.

Trump went a little further when he started his second term. In addition to choice, he also wanted to dismantle the Department of Education. Considering my desire to get the government out of the way, I am certainly supportive of this concept. Once again, Trump has reprioritized areas that I can support in favor of flipping the switch from liberal propaganda to conservative propaganda.

Trump picked a different Secretary of Education. This time, we have Linda McMahon. McMahon seems to be more likely to do Trump's bidding. While she supports choice and the dismantling of the disastrous Department of Education, she also seems more supportive of allowing conservative control.

Like DeVos, I have had a moment that has pushed me away from McMahon. Under McMahon's leadership, I have seen the Department of Education push the same misguided messaging about chronic absenteeism that we saw under the leadership of Miguel Cardona, aka Miguel the Incompetent.

Schools can cause a great deal of harm to mental health. Mental health problems can lead to such things as suicides, violence, and substance abuse. Schools can and occasionally do have lethal consequences. If a child starts resisting mental harm, we should not be pushing them back into the schools that are killing them. In fact, that's one of the reasons I support choice. All children should have the right to pursue a healthy education, even if that can't occur in a government-controlled environment.

There have been other absurdities that the department has recycled from Miguel the Incompetent under McMahon. For example, there’s a commercial encouraging people to become teachers. One of the arguments the commercial makes is that teachers shape lives. Government workers using their position of influence to shape the lives of others is a downright despicable act.

Another example is messaging around the summer slide. Practical learning is not lost. Memorized facts that don’t come up outside of school are forgotten. The existence of the summer slide shows that the schools have messed up priorities. The best way to address the summer slide is to shift the focus from low-value memorization to practical learning.

DeVos and McMahon have a few differences, but they're more the same. Neither one seems to have a proper understanding of the reasons government-controlled schooling has been such a disaster, but they are at least willing to end the government's policy of defunding educations that they can't control and restrict. This is certainly an improvement over Miguel the Incompetent, whose entire solution to our educational crisis was to throw even more taxpayer dollars into ideas that have already been proven not to work.