We round off this week's discussion with something very real that some consider a threat. Project twenty twenty five is something that is on the horizon and is here in front of us, and it could fundamentally change the way public education works. We're going to have Scott tell us about it.
Scott Project twenty twenty five, a conservative policy agenda crafted for the next Republican president, proposes eliminating the federal Department of Education, privatizing student loans, and implementing federal parental rights legislation. Developed by the Heritage Foundation and supported by Trump allies, it seeks to fundamentally restructure K twelve and higher education
funding and curriculum. Critics argue a devastate public education, with Sky Perriman of Democracy Forward calling it a wrecking ball to the system. The plan includes dismantling Title I funding for low income schools, reducing federal oversight, and privatizing student loans, which could limit educational access and quality. While former President Trump has distanced himself from the Democrats, Warrant reflects this potential presidency's direction. The plan has faced backlash for its
perceived undermining of civil rights protections and diversity efforts. In education. This story is from the Hill by Lexi Lonis on July twelfth, twenty twenty four.
Thank you, Scott, And I'm going to go ahead and give the first question to you, since you are an educator. Sure, Project twenty twenty five actually proposes the elimination of the Department of Education and a significant reorganization of K through twelve education funding. How might these changes impact the quality and equity of public education in the United States?
Oh?
Boy, okay, So where should I Where should I start? I'll start with the quote where we got that wrecking ball thing that I was just talking about. This is from like I mentioned, sky Perrman, he's the president and CEO of Democracy Forward. The quote says, it is not hyperbole to say that Project twenty twenty five would be a wrecking ball to the public education in this country, and it seeks to radically undermine and undercut the ability of people to get a quality education in this country.
And then even goes further and seeks to transform our public education system and our public schools into ideological extremist spaces. And I agree with that. I think that's not hyperbole to say that this is an existential threat to public education as we know it. And I think that the effects that they are, at least the effects that they
were talking about in this particular article. I'm sure the Project twenty twenty five document itself is just the gift that keeps on giving, which is horrible thing after a horrible thing. This article was particularly focused on the changes to education, and I think there's kind of a two prong approach here. One is, get them while they're young, right, it's going to control the content of K twelve education.
This is going to be done using things like school vouchers, which reroutes money from or which can reroute money from public schools to private schools. And we cover that all the time in the nonprofit. It's the school about your issue and skewed content standards either dropping important material like different racial issues and so forth can be dropped from from the curriculum and adding things like Bible study and so. Uh so we're skewing the content, and uh we're redirecting
the funds keep biggotry alive. And well, so it's going to remove protections for vulnerable, marginized and minority students. Bigotry encourages division and a divided population is easier to control, okay, And so by removing those protections that we have fought long and hard to get these students, is just going to be pushing us back back into the you know,
back into the dark ages, right uh. And then also to defund programs that are intended to increase opportunities for underprivileged students and so getting so getting them while they're young. That's that's phase one. Phase two, UH is put them
down and keep them down. They're going to be destroying the effectiveness of student loan programs by deregulation, deregulation and privatization, and so privatization is going to allow them to uh siphon funds off to these private loan organizations, and then regulation deregulation is basically an invitation for more and more severe predatory types of loans. And that what that's going to do is that's going to undercut many, many portions of the population. Their ability to get an education is
going to be severely hampered. And and you know, to me, that's the frustrating thing. If if knowledge is power, this is basically just a big power grab. They want to control the flow of information and they want to control our ability to get that kind of information. Uh, it moves the focus of education from empowerment to basically mental enslavement. You know, if you remove a person's ability to think on their own and investigate, you remove their power to
take their lives in a direction that they want. And it's not and it's shifting that focus. It's not about enabling personal improvement anymore. It's not about contributing to the betterment of us all anymore. Now, it's about perpetuating that division, about sacrificing the many for the betterment of the few. And that's not education at all. That's bastardizing an educational system into a tool for control. And so if there's anything that is sacrilege in my eyes, this is it.
You know.
We talked earlier this week about the zig Lag organization that talked about what they want to do as far as like taking over the Seven Mountains, and one portion of that was education. And it seems like that Project twenty twenty five, especially when we're talking about how we want to consolidate the majority of the powers in the exec executive Pridge in order to tate how all the other federal benches to the states and the municipalities actually
function would definitely be something that is concerning. And even I was even thinking about to your point, Scott, when you were talking about student loans and like you know, basically like the restructuring of the of basically the Department
of Education, especially when it came to regulation. I don't know if you all remember, but a lot of for profit schools got suit I want to say, like in the I want to say, like around the time period where Obama took off, and then we had a former president who will name nameless, who also had a for
profit school that had to settle. And a lot of times that these for profit schools were sued was because their curricula that they said would be able to prepare students for the future for them to be able to get jobs was basically a lot. And you even had like some for profit schools who had accreditation, but the accreditation that they the accreditation standards those particular for profit
schools were not keeping up with. Now that we have Project twenty twenty five, and you know, depending on how things go in the fall and how things would be implemented, that could very much so be a threat in the way that you know, some of these schools are structured, and what could be an oversight as far as like making sure that curriculum is meeting standard practices, making sure that the schools themselves are teaching robust lessons in order
to prepare students for the future instead of actually, you know, saying like everybody has to study the Bible. I guess like everybody's going to turn into a theocrat right now, and that's going to help us in the future. Right I don't think so is going to be definitely the problem. But you know, I'm coming to you Eli because you said something very interesting about you agree with something concerning the Project twenty twenty five.
Believe man on that it is not as sinister as it sounds. The area. The single point on which I agree with what I've read from Project twenty twenty five is that, Yeah, let's fundamentally restructure the curriculum of kindergartens up through tertier education. Let's do that. Let's make that better.
Where we don't agree is where is the people that wrote like this document, or who are running the Heritage Fund Foundation, or the people that are involved and trying to make these changes are more of the same people that should not be structuring education. Get professional experience to educators that understand, you know, not just educating, but you know, other things, and have them create an educational structure that
is going to like be be beneficial. It is in our best interest to have an educated society, unless your goal is like ignorant obedience, which I think a strong argument could be made that that is, you know, the goal of some individuals that happen to have a lot of power. But if that weren't the case, if we could have an educated society with an accessible quality education, that we're going to start to see things get better. But I don't think that's what they want.
Yeah, I think mostly because we covered it so many times. It's not necessarily about making things better. It's more about this consolidating and holding on to power. And I am now coming to you, Jonathan, because I know that I've heard a lot of doubles speak in my life, and I think that you have as well. But what are your concerns when it concerns twenty twenty.
I have quite a few, and I have heard a lot of double speak in my life, But this is really bad. Destroying the Department of Education means that there's no watchdog over education in the country and they don't want one. Betsy never mind, I won't say specific names. Some people in the last administration who were were higher up in the education department attempted to destroy it from that position. So now they're literally saying they're going to
destroy it. You want to give the states the freedom quotes in quotes to underfund and destroy public education. So what are you saying if you only want private schools and only those rich enough to afford them can get across get a good access to good education. That's one of the things that Jefferson was afraid of. Actually, when
we just established public education. Thomas Jefferson pushed for the education because he was of the opinion that in a democracy, the citizenship citizenry must be able to think, address the questions of the day, and understand the people they are
voting for and what their positions are. If you keep populations dimmed down and without the benefit of a decent education, and you only educate them to be in a trade so that they can be there, they won't know that they're working for slave wages and they're not able to pursue careers that would put them in positions of power. They are trying to strip the entire people of the of the United States of that power, and they're they're
starting it with their seven Mountains. But what they really want to do is make sure that their particular viewpoint is forced down people's throats, and that the people are not taught enough critical thinking and enough have enough education and knowledge about the world to do anything but what they want them to do. And that's the problem that I have with it. Education should be under the control of educators, not people who have ulterior agendas that they
are trying to fulfill. Our population needs to be educated, and they need to have the skills in thinking and in analysis to be able to create the society that we all want. They've been dumbing down the education for a while, and they really need to. We are falling behind radically in education. We are something like twenty sixth in all the nations. I don't have that specifically, but I think that's the last stat I saw, And then there was another one that said.
We were eighteen. But what are we as the United States doing anywhere but the top five, if not the number one in education? What are we doing to our kids? You know, what are we doing to the next generation. Why aren't we bringing them to the point where they know enough math, science, English, literature and history to be able to make the next leap in our society to a better and more equitable and more inclusive society. That's what's bothering about the whole thing.
You know. It says something about being in the richest nation, one of the richest nations in the world, and still being damn near thirty in the world when it comes to education, and how you have to pay basically an exorbitant amount of money in order for you to be able to be properly educated depending on what go and we're already having issues when it comes to standards, how you know, how people are educated, especially when we're looking
at K through twelve. I think of my own city and how depending on what neighborhood that you're in in public school would be a determining factor on the quality of education that you're going to get, even though that everybody in the city is paying property taxes and those property taxes are supposed to be going to fund the school, but there's definitely a difference for those who happen to be in a higher tax bracket on how their schools look versus other neighborhoods where that is not the case,
and it's unfortunate that we have this. The only thing I can really call it as an ideological extremism coming from Project twenty twenty five that could possibly be very
detrimental to our already very much so broken educational system. So, Scott, I'm wondering, with this extremism that we're seeing with Project twenty twenty five and the shift that the authors want to do, especially when it comes to specific cultural and political viewpoints, how could these changes actually impact academic freedom and diversity of perspectives in schools and universities.
Well, that's the target, I mean, that's the main target. It's not that it, like I said before, it's totally bastardizing the entire per purpose of education. By the goal of education is to is for people to learn about the world and to be able to act and to institute change and to push the direction of the world in the direction that is helpful and positive for all of us. You know, we've heard the phrase a rising tide raises all ships, you know, that's kind of what
we're looking for. But instead. What it's doing is it's turning it to a system of using of using we've you know, we use the phrase teach to your children how to think, not what to think, right, and so, and that is the humble way to approach things. It's an optimistic way to approach things. It's working under the assumption that maybe your children can reach a little bit further than you did. You know, maybe they can do a little better than you did, maybe they can learn
things that you didn't know about. And so really, what this is doing is it's taking away that it's taking away that attitude of curiosity, it's taking away that additude of betterment, of empowerment, and it's saying, and you know, we were talking about this and the other segments too, it's turning it into a system of obedience and of putting people into this particular box because this is the box that I was in, and this is the box that my parents were in, and this is the box
that their parents were in, and so this is the box that you should be in. If you're outside of this box, you are wrong, you're bad, you're impure, you're evil, you're whatever. And you know, it's it's it's it's flipping the script there. It's saying that it's not that we want you to learn, it's that we want you to learn these specific things. And if you if you do, if you approach your education that way, then you've eliminated
those opportunities for improvement. You've eliminated those opportunities to expand, to get better. You're even eliminating opportunities for us to keep up with the rest of the world. It's inexcusable for us to have such, you know, such a low performance. And I disagree with a little bit what what Eli was saying. I don't think that our education system needs to be revamped from the ground up. I think that
I think that there's good bones there. I think that I think we have a strong core is to uh, you know, to the way that educators approach education. I think it's and again I'm a teacher, I'm you know, this is a biased opinion, and so you know, take what I say with a grain of salt here. But I think it has a lot to do with the attitude towards education. What people aren't, you know, aren't aren't looking into aren't looking into getting education For what I
would consider the best reasons. You know, they want to get their job, they want to go punch the clock, and they want to move on with their lives. And rather than rather than looking at education as a way of opening yourself up to many opportunities, to many different avenues of investigation and and ways that you can satisfy your curiosity. So I think the changing our educational system in this way, I think is going to we will not have an education system anymore. We will have a
dogma system. We will have indoctrinate Yeah, thank you Jonathan in indoctrination system. And I think that it's it's going to be ultimately to the detriment of us as individuals and as a nation.
Elhy did you want to respond to Scott?
Yeah, I'll say, because you're the one that's an educator. If you and I disagree that about the education system, the likelihood is that I'm wrong.
Not necessarily. Not necessarily, like I said, I have a biased opinion to yourself.
That's argument from authority. But my point is that that is why people like you should be making decisions about the education system and not people like me who don't have experience in that field. And I think you demonstrated that aptly.
And that's what I assumed that you had meant. I didn't mean to be trashing you. It's just that one little nettle in my shoe there.
Come on, Scott, we all knew that you wanted to trash Eli. Well, you know, I mean to to I think to wards like Eli's point about like revamping the education system, and to your point, Scott, about the reasoning behind people wanting to get educated is that we have to kind of look at basically how our society is structured, specifically in the United States that you know, a big emphasis on you know, doing better economically is tased on education.
But we have an issue where we don't have equitable education from you know, from California all the way to New York, you know, from the north to the South and everywhere in between, from Ohio to the US to the coast of Florida. You know, I will not bust that, right, I know, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, from sea to Shining Segma. We're not gonna go there.
I think it was few enough notes that were okay, yeah, yeah, I'm sure that's public.
I'm sure you right should be. But you know, but but still, I think that if we take both of your points about making sure that an education system can foster things like curiosity and in critical thinking, and also the wantingness to become sharper and better, and then having our society structured in a way that those particular values are value would make a huge difference in the way
that education works for everyone who happens to be here. Unfortunately, we don't have that system, or at least it does not exist everywhere. And then because it does not exist everywhere, we have Heritage Foundation and some of the other you know, Christian nationalists crystal fascists that have also helped develop this particular plan come in and say we want to make education even shittier by also using it to like you said,
Scott get A, while they're young, right yep. So I think that if we go back to this whole thing about awareness and how Project twenty twenty five actually approaches and reflects a broader trend of minimizing federal involvement in favor of a market based solution, there goes that capitalism thing. However, the risk of such a drastic overhaul, including worsening educational inequities and undermining the foundational principles that public education should
be accessible and equitable for all. As this debate unfolds, it's crucial for advocates of secularism and humanist values to emphasize the importance of maintaining robust public education systems that serve all students, regardless of their socio economic status, their race, their creed, their color, their sexual orientation, their gender identification, or their status