UPDATED
The American people recently elected an outsider to run the country, and that outsider has tapped an outsider to clean house at the bloated, micro-managing, leftist U.S. Department of Education, which refuses to follow the Constitution on due process and actively works to deny poor students the right to better their education through school choice.
No surprise, the left is actively trying to derail Betsy DeVos’ nomination (disclosure). One of the biggest complaints voiced against her is her lack of experience in the K-12 grinder, having never been a teacher or administrator in the public school system.
That’s actually a good thing, argues Daniel Hubin on Intellectual Takeout.
Hubin cites G.K. Chesterton’s 1909 essay “The Twelve Men” on why a fresh perspective on a problem is sometimes what’s exactly needed to fix it: “That the more a man looks at a thing, the less he can see it, and the more a man learns a thing the less he knows it. The Fabian argument of the expert, that the man who is trained should be the man who is trusted, would be absolutely unanswerable if it were really true that a man who studied a thing and practiced it every day went on seeing more and more of its significance. But he does not. He goes on seeing less and less of its significance. In the same way, alas! we all go on every day, unless we are continually goading ourselves into gratitude and humility, seeing less and less of the significance of the sky or the stones.”
Hubin goes on to note:
This is the trap of the professional educators. By enveloping themselves in all the current educational statistics, studies, and techniques, they can easily forget what education is and what it was meant to be. By seeing, they cease to see and lose sight of education’s wood among its trees.
The American education system—bureaucratic, massive, and complex—could benefit from fresh eyes, which will have a greater likelihood of perceiving a truth that many experts have missed.
School boards were established to empower ordinary, passionate leaders who understand their local school systems. It might take someone not trained as an educational expert to recognize these local leaders are our greatest asset, not the experts themselves.
MORE: Educators hypocritically rip Betsy DeVos after crying for 16 years about massive federal meddling
Editor’s Note: This post has been amended to include a disclosure.
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