What The Heck Did Vance Just Say About Education??

Vance just spoke at a Christian nationalist rally in Monroeville (a Pittsburgh suburb), and some of it was about education. We need to look at the whole thing (I'll include the full clip at the end of the post so you can check my work).

The particular section people are buzzing about is kicked off by audience member Rose Owens who introduces herself as a former teacher who currently works at a homeschool enrichment center. She wants to know what we can do to save our schools and our children from socialism. 

Vance starts by complimenting her family, and then launches into the first part of his answer (at about 13:45). I'm going to add punctuation and paragraphs not to make it sound less awful, but to make it more readable:

Some of the stuff that they're teaching in American schools in 2024, that that's not just liberalism that is crazy and we've got to get it out of our schools or it's going to poison the minds of our young people. And we've got to start today in fact we should have started yesterday, and and ma'am what a big part of this-- and I I've tried to understand this I've been a senator for a couple years and I've tried to understand where is all this crazy curriculum coming from and the honest and unfortunate answer is very often it's paid for by tax dollars. 

In other words it's paid for by those of us in this room, and you ask how that happened is is the answer is well the Federal Department of Education pays a lot of money to develop curriculum that goes into our schools. Well, the money the people they give money to are very often some of the most radical organizations in the world that are developing curriculum that is pro- socialism I would say pro- racism that teaches really crazy ideas on gender that we just don't want in American schools. 

And yeah, I mean it has two negative consequences well first of all the American education system used to be the envy of the world rich or poor alike we believe in this country that every person deserves a quality education. Well, now we've got American children who can't add 5 plus 5 but they can tell you that there are 87 different genders, and I think both of those things are related because we're teaching kids radical ideas we're not teaching them the basics. We're not teaching them reading, writing, arithmetic-- the things that every child needs in order to live a good life.  

And that is to your point this creeping socialism in our schools we've got to get it out of there and I think we cutoff the money stop spending your tax dollars on radical organizations that are poisoned in the minds of our kids.

Lots of people are jumping on this to say that Vance wants to defund public education. I'm not sure that's what he said, exactly. In context, I think it's just as likely he meant to offer one more reason that he wants to end the Department of Education-- because it gives money to radical organizations that create socialist curricula that schools then use. I can easily believe that Vance and his buddies want to end public education; I'm not sure even they are foolish enough to say so out loud. 

There's lots else to unpack. The "envy of the world" bullshit that nods to the myth of a golden age of education that never existed. Those golden days were marked by low level of participation, i.e. many many school-aged children didn't finish school, or even come close. There is not point in history when we were beating the world at education. And I defy you to find any public school classroom in the country where a teacher is skipping 5 + 5 in order to teach about 87 genders. Who has time for socialist indoctrination?

Also notable, and problematic because so few people will recognize it as a lie, is this business about federally-funded curriculum development. That's a thing that does not happen, and which cannot happen because it is illegal for the feds to meddle in curriculum (c.f. a thousand arguments surrounding Common Core). Anyone who believes this is welcome to give me just one example of a curriculum that was developed with federal funding and/or distributed by the feds afterwards.

So if Vance wants to defund the Department of Ed to stop it from doing things that it doesn't do, that certainly seems to suggest that he would also target those folks who actually do it. 

There are other edu-nuggets in this discussion. While chatting with Owens about the challenges of homeschooling, he says this, with his characteristic lack of any irony:

Maybe it is the hardest job in the world to homeschool a seven year old.

Just imagine, JD, what it would be like to teach a whole roomful of them.

Vance also makes his plug for choice, noting that Pennsylvania "could have done a better job here" and then states one of the great mysteries of the culture panic choicer crowd:

We need to give every American Family choice and if we give American parents more choices, they're not going to choose socialism. They're not going to choose racial craziness. They're going to choose good education for their children, and that is the best way to cut out this rot in American public education.

 So even though schools board are elected by local voters, somehow those local voters would all quit the local school system if they could. Who has captured these local districts, and how have they done it? There's a culture panic story that says that back in the seventies, when lefties couldn't take over the country, they just took over key institutions and have been enforcing their ideology ever since, somehow. Teacher programs are all indoctrinating teachers (because one can easily convince a 20-year-old to jettison all their beliefs in favor of liberalism) and somehow all the elected school board go along with it.

Or maybe what Vance means is that Real Americans will want to get out of the public system and get away from Those Peoples' Children. 

Vance also recollects that he was "lucky enough" to go to school in the 1990's, when "we told American children that it didn't matter whether you were Black or White or any other skin color, it just mattered what your character was as a person." And even though he went to a low-ranking high school in Ohio, he got a good education. So maybe that Socialist takeover was more recent? Is Vance nostalgic for the Bill Clinton Presidency? 

The 90's are an interesting choice, because the 90's were the time of Outcome Based Education, an idea that sort of sept the nation and which was protested bitterly by culture warriors of the day like Phyllis Schafly and Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson, who were sure that it was part of a liberal socialist plot that was ruining American schools. So it's possible that Vance's problem is just early-onset Old Fart Syndrome ("Back in my day, we didn't have this ding dangy foolishness"). 

Or perhaps he just adopted an assortment of stances as a tactical maneuver for the election. But this anti-public education stance is in line with the position of the New Apostolic Reformation dominionist folks he was talking to-- public education must either be taken over or taken out. It's impossible how much of this is plain old lying and how much is just because Vance doesn't have a damn clue about how schools actually work. This is not someone I want to see anywhere near the White House.