JD Vance on the Ordering of Loves

I think there's this massive over focus that is a little anachronistic in our time on universal college for all, and that's the framework into which everyone is placed. We don't have enough focus on vocational training, on basic life skills, training, on all kinds of things that I think would be really valuable. And what we've seen is just because everyone

in high school wants to go to college. And we've seen basically this dumbing down of every level of the education system in this country, where the kinds of jobs that you know, fifty years ago needed a high school diploma now need a college degree. The jobs that needed a college degree today need a master's degree. My father in law is this very rare bird. He is an engineer for Cummins, which makes you know, all kinds of engines and things like that. Who does not have a

bachelor's degree. He just has an associate's degree. I'm guessing Cummins hasn't hired anyone without a bachelor's degree in decades. And he's a great engineer. He's got a ton of patents to his name. He's been working there consistently for the really really long time, does really great work. But you know, he learned to be an engineer, you know, taking tractors apart and putting them all back together, you know,

on the farm in Minnesota. At any rate, the whole orientation of modern day California public education, California public high schools, is around college gaining access to college. And I think the paradigmatic tragedy of this was about that must have

been about five or six years ago. I think it was just before COVID, or maybe in the thick of COVID, President Unified proudly announced that they were taking one of their junior high school shop class buildings and turning it into an e sports arena, like a professional video games arena. And what was the rationale. Well, all, there are colleges that offer scholarships for e sports. Great, that's great. Yes, more time glued to a screen playing video games doing

something useless sounds good. Now I want to With that said, that is my baseline skepticism of public education. It seems like there's an effort by the Presdent Unified Board of Trustees to do something to turn the district around, and the district is a train wreck in a lot of respects. Academic scores are terrible, true, you know, not attending school is terribly high. We have not that there was a massive dip in academic performance all around following COVID, and

it hasn't bumped back up yet. It seems like it's have not recovered from the loss of learning experience during the COVID no year two years of to you know,

nightmare two year period. And in general Presney Unified. Most of the stories we read about Fresney Unified are stuff about, you know, arguments between the union and the Board of Trustees over money and this attitude that the point, this attitude that is very widespread throughout California, which is that the point of public schools is that it's a job.

It's a jobs program for adults. And that's so much of the agenda of these public schools is driven by the teachers union, which the job of a teacher's union is not to teach kids. The job of a teacher's union the telos towards which it is ordered, its end goal, the purpose for which it exists. The purpose of the union is not really to educate kids. It's the purpose of the union is to get more money for adults. More money, more jobs, more members, better pay, better hours,

better benefits. That's the job of Presney Unified, of the Presney Unified Teachers Union. That is its goal. That is the thing towards which it is ordered. So I don't find it to be and sometimes that interest is in conflict with academic achievement. So here's the Board of Trustees with kind of this very coming from the trustees side. Puff piece, sort of a puff piece. I guess it's

in GV wire. I guess it shouldn't call it a puff piece, but it's definitely very pro trustees and actually takes some shots at Bob Nelson, the former superintendent at Fresney Unified, and kind of shade a lot of this. I mean. Gv wire is owned by Darius Semi, who's been a long relationship with Susan Wittrap, who's a member of the Fresne Unified School Board. Noneth All that being said, here's the piece written by Anya Anya Ellis at GV wire.

Simplicity is in at Fresnew Unified. The twenty plus initiatives of the past to help struggling with students have been replaced with four goals. Meanwhile, expectations are way up for students, teachers, and administrators. And these goals and expectations must be embraced by the district's new superintendent, whether that is interim Superintendent Misty Hurr or someone else emerging from a national search. We're still hunting, still hunting for superintendent for Fresney Unified.

We have to be great at a few things, and I think what the board has allowed us to do for the first time in Fresney Unified is to go from very big to now very narrow, said Misty Herr. These initial seeds of what could become an academic renaissance for the long struggling district. It could then again maybe it could not, were developed at community listening sessions. In December, trustees and the interim superintendent's team refined those ideas, which

were approved at a recent school board meeting. Under a two year, one hundred thousand dollars contract, the school board receives guidance from the Council of Great City Schools, a group that strives to improve student outcomes at seventy eight of the nation's largest urban public school systems. Yes, this is the consultant that the President Unified hired. They're paying them one hundred thousand dollars to help them find their superintendent and help the board figure out how to do

its job. You may ask yourself why did these people run for the school board when they didn't maybe have a clear sense of Why would these people run for the school board and then hire a consultant for how to do their jobs? Wouldn't you have hoped when they were running that hes I'm qualified to be on the school board? Yeah? Here we are. Recognizing a problem is the first step to solving a problem. And Misty Herr,

unlike retired superintendent Bob Nelson, is confronting the challenges head on. Wow, just what a drive by at Bob Nelson. Hey GV wire, you realize you're what are your writers here? It's just absolutely assassinating poor Bob Nelson sitting in his office at Fresno, at Fresno State, in his little sinecure job that he abandoned Fresno Unified for. I was like, hey, what do

you mean? I wasn't confronting the challenges head on. Her said quote, I will be the first to say that our academic game gains have been minimal, actually dismal, to say the least. At that meeting, the trustees adopted the district's four goals for student achievement and the so called guardrails to address community concerns and aid in realizing the goals. These are focused on community engagement, equitable access. Don't know what that means. Equitable access? Do we mean like actual

equity or do we mean like DEI equity? Effective staff? And the health and wellness of students and staff. Why are we caring about the health and wellness? This is a school, It's not a hospital anyway. What are the goals there have been? Were those not the goals? Those are the guardrails? Okay, we have guardrails and we have goals. See how simple? This is see how effectively they're using their taxpayer dollars to organize themselves to teach your kids.

All right, here are the goals. Three have been nailed down in the fourth awaits of benchmark, so we're not even done with all four goals, but here we go. First graders will be proficient in first Graders proficient in literacy will increase from forty eight percent in June of twenty twenty four to eighty percent in June of twenty thirty. Okay, so we have six years to bring the literacy rate

among first graders up thirty two points. Students graduating from high school who are college and career ready will rise from forty three percent in June of twenty twenty four to sixty four percent by June of twenty thirty. Okay, So the idea is that's going to improve by twenty points over the next six years. I mean, I appreciate that they're setting a goal and trying to pursue it. I mean I'm a little skeptical if they're if it's

gonna happen, but hey, good good for them. I guess third through eighth grade students more than one year behind in English Language Arts and who make more than one year's growth will increase from ten percent in June twenty twenty four to fifty percent by June of twenty thirty, and the district will track sixth eighth and the twelfth grade students for Portrait of a Learner competencies with a

percentage goal set soon for June of twenty thirty. Okay, so those are I think the sixth eighth and twelfth grade thing. Those are like the standardized tests that sort of measure student achievement that are kind of the benchmark for a lot of California educational stats. Portrait of a learn Okay, Yeah, Portrait of a learner refers to traits and skills the district and parents want to see developed during a student's educational journey. Examples include critical thinking, problem solving,

self control, and conflict resolution. Oh maybe this is something different. Many school districts are developing or have put in place Portrait of a Learner goals. The goal sets standards for academic achievement and provide the next superintendent with a clear vision of what the district wants to accomplish, said Trustee Susan Wittrup. This was a huge historical step for our district,

said Wittrup. Now after the meeting, school board president Valerie Davis said, this is the first time we've done this type of work for our board in our community. We have to start from somewhere, and now comes the the fly in the ointment, the turd in the punch bowl, the Fresno Teachers Association. The Fresno Teachers Association appears far less enthusiastic about the adopted goals than district leadership. While setting gulls, I'm not gonna read the whole quote in

that voice, but here we go. Just know that that's the mental attitude I'm giving to this quote. While setting goals is great, it's clear they're missing the bigger picture. What is the bigger picture? Nothing will change unless they're willing to shift the district's culture. I mean, this seems like it's shifting the culture. It's saying we were going to be free floating to now we're gonna have very defined, like performance based standards for student achievement. That means truly

listening to educators. Yeah, the Teachers' union head is mad they're not truly listening to educators. Valuing all staff members. Do we have to value the janitor or the administrative assistant. I mean, we value them and will treat them nicely, But I don't know that they have too much to say about like academic benchmarks. Addressing the culture of fear slash retribution? What culture of fear or retribution? You guys

have a collectively bargained contract. There's nobody who has better job security against retribution than a California public school unionized teacher. Are you kidding me? The culture of fear and retribution providing real support? You know how many gazillions of dollars President Unified is spending on like school psychologists and stuff like that, and making decisions that reflect what's actually happening

in our classrooms and school sites. Yeah, what's happening in the classrooms and school sites is these kids aren't learning a dang thing, and they're setting expectations that, hey, you better achieve better benchmarks. That was the quote from the teachers union president that will with my interstitial comments by Teachers Union president Manuel Benia said in a text to GV wire reporter Nancy Price, why is the teachers union upset? Well, this is why? Again, what is the goal of the

teachers Union. The goal of the teachers Union is not to educate children. The goal of the teachers Union, which for some reason is like the major partner in all of this, rather than some kind of like I don't know, parent, like some kind of teacher senate or something like that. The goal of the union, the reason the union exists, is to negotiate with the Board of Trustees for the collectively bargained contract. That's the point it represents the union

members for money. Money is the point of the union. The point of the union is to get more jobs, more pay, more jobs, more pay, better conditions, fewer hours, et cetera for union members. That that is the job of the Teachers Union. That that's the reason it exists. If you set performance metrics for teachers, then you could start holding teachers accountable if they don't hit those metrics, it could threaten those teachers' jobs. They don't want that.

They don't want, I mean necessarily, if you're there to protect every teacher's job, you're going to feel threatened by something like a metric that's put in place for you know, hey, if you don't get your kids to achieve at this level, you know it could reflect poorly on your your performance review.

It could lead to problems. They don't want that. They don't want their teachers to feel any sort of They don't want their teachers to have any kind of sweat about whether or not they're doing their job well enough to hold their job. So that's the that's the rub. They don't teachers' unions constantly are opposed to any kind of metric that's going to measure their performance as reflected in the scores of kids. When we return, I want to talk about the fairness of such standards. I think

there are ways in which it is fair. That is next on the John Drardy Show, there's a bunch of brew haha emanating from Fresno Unified. The board of trustees is setting a couple of big time goals for improving student academic performance, and the union's response is they're just absolute sour grapes over it, just flying the ointment, et cetera. They want no part of this. And I think the basic thing is the point of a union, as I've said,

is to protect jobs. To protect jobs, get better pay for jobs, get better conditions for jobs, fewer hours, more pay, more jobs, total et cetera, et cetera. That is the goal of a union, So a performance metric that union members could fail at and that might result in them getting fired or laid off or whatever. They don't like that.

They don't want any part of that. Now, taking the union side for just a second, for the sake of argument, the retort could be this, listen, if you're going to tie our pay or our jobs to student performance, that's not fair. I can be the best teacher in the world if you give me a classroom full of kids who you know are from broken homes, who don't have supportive parents, who've got stuff going on in their personal lives that prevent them from effectively learning during the day

in the classroom. That's not on me. If they don't achieve. Okay, I can be the best teacher in the world. If this kid individually his mom and dad. If this kid individually, his dad is out of the picture, his mom is smoking weed, and you know it's chaos home life, and blah blah blah blah blah. I can be the best teacher in the world. And this kid could still perform terribly. And you got to look at, well, what is the

standardized testing you're using for measuring this kid's outcomes? What is this that that that's not fair and this isn't fair, and this isn't fair. Bah bah blah blah blah blah blah buth it's not fair. It's not fair to judge teachers purely on the basis of student academic achievement. That's not fair, all right. I can get that on an individual level, But the assumption that's built into those arguments is that actually, student academic achievement is in no way,

shape or form connected to teacher excellence. That teacher excellence basically has absolutely no outcome. There's no difference in outcome based on you know, the world's greatest teacher James Edward James almost from stand and Deliver versus you know, a glorified babysitter's who's popping in, you know the DVD of Gladiator and calling it, you know, ancient history. Like there's no difference, then clearly some outcome based difference is going to get churned out at the end between a really

good teacher and a really crappy teacher. I refuse to believe, and again I'll acknowledge you could have a really good teacher and an individual student who's not going to respond well to that teacher, or because of chaos in their home life or whatever, blah blah blah, maybe that teacher is not going to get through to that kid. Yeah,

I'm sure. Sure a great teacher can have individual students who don't really improve much as a result of that individual great teacher, but not the majority, not the plurality, not most of the kids. If you have a really excellent teacher who's a really really connects with kids and is really motivating that that's the point that that's how we measure teachers who are excellent. That all of us can remember our best teacher, the teacher who dragged the

most good out of us. I remember my fifth grade teacher, Sister Olvito, is the best teacher I ever had. And you know, I remember my favorite college professors, you know, teachers who set high expectations for you and drew those expectations out of you. So I on the Teachers Union is of course going to feel threatened by anything that's measuring student achievement and tying in any way teacher performance

to student achievement. Now they've got the security of knowing they've got their contract in place, which is already signed, sealed, delivered. They've got protections that most of us in the real world would love to have, and better pay than most of us in the real world, you know, who have equivalent levels of education or superior levels of education, would love to have. So they're nervous because they don't think. And this is the problem with our public education system

in California. One of many problems is that so much of it is driven by teachers' unions who are measuring success based on how much money they make for adults. Teachers' unions view schools as jobs programs for adults. That is, that is the their bread and butter of what they're trying to do is to make this in affective jobs program for adults, and that interest is sometimes in direct

conflict with student achievement and demanding excellence from students. When we return, Vice President Vance is driving liberal Christians nuts with his conception of, hey, do you know that there is an order in which we're supposed to love people? Next on the John Girardi Show, a bunch of liberal Christians are just having an absolute meltdown over JD. Vance daring to make a point about, in his case, kind

of Catholic doctrine, but more generally Christian doctrine. So Vance has this tweet out where he's sort of dealing with these various forms of the immigration debate, and Vance is sort of pushing against this notion that theyasically. Advance's thesis is that a lot of government policy has been far more concerned with the plight of people far far away

than for our own citizens. Laying out the red carpet for immigrants at the expense of our own citizens, whose jobs have been shipped overseas, having industries be dominated by foreign laborers rather than our own workers, et cetera, et cetera, is bad. And he talks he talked about he had this tweet out where he says, you're ampling up with the tweet Vance is. Vance was on Fox News and he's talking about like, you're having more compassion for unlawful

aliens than you are for American citizens. And he says, there's a Christian concept that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that you prioritize the rest of the world. He was then criticized for this by this guy named Rory Stewart, this very posh, lefty British journalist, political talker guy, who said, that's a bizarre take on the Gospels. Less Christian and

more pagan tribal. We should start worrying when politicians become theologians. And Vance didn't just sit there and take it. Vance is this is the thing that I'm laughing about. Trump was probably the first politician to really use Twitter to his advantage and really utilize it. But Vance is a millennial. I mean he's only like forty forty one or something

like that. He uses Twitter like I do, and Vance instead of being detached like, oh, I'm the vice president, I'm above this, and Van sas just like, no, I'm gonna respond to this idiot. So he responds to this guy and says, google the words ordo, amorris. Aside from that, the idea that there isn't a hierarchy of obligations violates

basic common sense. Does this guy Rory Stewart really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away does anyone, and then he goes on to bury the guy. He says, I've said before and I'll say it again. The problem with Rory and people like him is that he has an IQ of one hundred and ten and thinks he has an IQ of one hundred and thirty. This false arrogance drives so much elite

failure over the last forty years. Oh geez, can imagine just getting buried like that by the vice president of the United States. Anyway, So what Vance is talking about is Vance mentions this Latin phrase ordo amorus, which means the order of love. And it's this concept that is embedded in a lot of Christian thinkers that our first obligations, that there is basically a hierarchy of our obligations, an

ordering of our obligations. Basically, if you're a father and you just abandon your kids to go on a mission trip to South America and you leave your family in poverty and destitution, and your wife's like, where did our husband go? Why did he leave us? And they're eating beans out of a can because you just left your family. That's a massive dereliction of duty. Okay, we have ordering of obligations that are rooted in and ordering of our loves.

We have certain kinds of loves towards certain kinds of things that impose greater and lesser degrees of obligation on us. A lot of Christian political theory built on the political theory of Aristotle, and you had writers like Thomas Aquinas and others who built on this. Aristotle was a for a lot of Christian thinkers. The philosophical reflections of Aristotle were something that had a lot of truth and a lot of wisdom to it. Aristotle's conception of political order

was that political communities are actually natural things. And this can sometimes be foreign to us as Americans, because as Americans we think of government, or we think of the political community as sort of almost an artificial construct. A lot of American political thought is influenced by the Enlightenment, which has this idea that, well, we have a social contract.

There's nothing natural about us living together, but we all have kind of a shared agreement spoken or unspoken that you know, in our state of nature, we would just be ruthlessly, you know, fighting for our own self interest. But we have this social contract that says, okay, well I'm going to agree not to step on your toes and violate your rights as long as you agree not to step on my toes and violate my rights. And you know, well we will have arms length agreement for

everything to sort of work together on stuff. You know, and that capitalism is built out of that that you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and that the political community is this sort of artificial thing Aristotle, and I think the earlier Christian pre Enlightenment Christian tradition says, no, that that's not actually the case. Living in communities is not unnatural. It's actually built into our nature as human beings. We're designed to live in communities. We are not all,

at our core radically isolated individuals. First and foremost, we all arise from families. We seek to make family units and connections, men with women, producing children. Human beings live together in whether it's families to clans to cities. Aristotle was writing at the time about the polus, which was sort of the Greek The most common sort of unit of Greek political life was the polus, which was basically the word that was used for a city and its

surrounding countryside and farms. The polis was sort of the unit that Aristotle the unit that Aristotle thought of as sort of the the individual political community. And Aristotle talks about how a political community is a natural thing. It's a group of people within a similar locale who are tied to each other by bonds of family, heritage, culture.

You know. Aristotle would certainly heighten race and religion as being key cornerstones of that, and certainly, I think within in America we value those things a little bit less, and we're far more accommodating to immigrants and people with different religious backgrounds, different racial backgrounds. That not as much the case in Europe, where you know, within Europe, what does it mean to be from Poland? Well, it has something to do a little bit with being of Polish

ancestry and Catholicism. You know, those are things that are important. And Poland has resisted ideas of hey, you should let in, you know, hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants from you know, from the Middle East. They've said, well, no, that would kind of alter our political community in a way that we're not exactly thrilled with. Yes, we will be kind and welcoming and accommoting to refugees, and certainly Poland's been incredibly kind and welcoming, especially to victims from Ukraine of

the war in Ukraine. But there is a kind of ordering there that basically the political community is characterized by people who have commonality. I think we experience this here in the San Joaquin Valley. In America, we I think, in many cases, quite rightly, don't care so much about racial division. I am wonderfully good friends with people who are black and Hispanic and Asian and whatever. We don't make those things as important in America. There are certain

kinds of American ideals that we care about more. But certainly I have closer ties and closer kinship and a kind of closer love for people from the San Joaquin Valley than I do people from San Francisco. It's a different place, a different region, a different culture. It's something I just naturally don't care as much about because I don't have those common experiences, those common ties, those bonds

of affection. You know, I've don't have the kinds of fond memories of driving from my house out to you know, visit someone in sane or in seeing you know, a beautiful sunset, the kinds of things that give me love and affection for this community. It's only for this one. This is where I live, this is where I grew up, and this is something that's natural and something that Dvance is just pointing out that our public it is getting frustrating to the American people. Why did Donald Trump win

this election. I think one of many reasons why is because I think Americans are getting tired of the sort of borderless vision of modern day American liberalism, which does view human beings as just fundamentally isolated atoms, not as members of communities really, and that therefore there's no reason and whatsoever to have any kind of greater love or care concern for an American citizen than for someone coming over the border. Does this mean we should you know?

Does that mean I want Catholic charities to never help a poor person who happens to be an immigrant. No, it's not the case. Our love for our fellow man does extend to everybody, and we should love everyone. But there is a kind of right ordering of our loves. The policies of the United States government should be to

have some greater concern for our own citizen rate. So all of these liberal Christians are just absolutely passing out over Vance saying this and kind of makes me delighted when we return a financial proposal for Christians who think that this concept is evil or bad something that could help me out next on the JOHNS Groarty Show. So all these lefty Christians are freaking out because JD. Van said, Hey, actually American foreign policy should prioritize Americans and that there's

actually nothing Unchristian about it. In fact, Christianity has this kind of built in assumption that we have an ordering of our loves, that we are actually supposed to care about people immediately closest to us first. Now, this is horrifying to liberal Christianity, who embraces a lot of sort of Enlightenment notions of like the social contract, and this idea of human beings as atomized individuals, not as members of families, not as members of communities, not as members

of political communities. Even the idea of the political community as a natural entity is completely foreign to all these people, whether out of ignorance or elite level philosophical rejection of a lot of these principles of Christians and political thinking. To these people who say, no, we shouldn't treat someone outside of our realm of love. There's no ordering of our loves that everyone we need to give everyone. We

have the same obligations to everyone equally. Yes, on a certain baseline level, we do have a certain obligation of basic love, willing the good, willing salvation for everyone. This is what motivates apostles to go to all the ends of the earth and baptize people in the name of the Father and the Son the Holy Spirit, what motivates missionaries to go to India and China. However, if these people do, in fact think that there is no proper ordering of loves, I would like to set up I'm

announcing the John Girardi pay my mortgage VENMO. So any of you liberals who don't think that, think that we love people indiscriminately, I would encourage you to send money to my VENMO to pay off my mortgage. Given that you have no greater or less obligation to me than to your own family or to your own bank account, I would recommend you make a contribution to this very worthy cause. That'll do it. John J Already shows see next time on Power Talk