"Trust Authority"

We've been hearing the demands that we trust the experts for a while now. Again, this is a myopic, half-brained, verbal ejaculation. Many people, including me, have pointed out that most people who say this are really saying, "Trust authority."

The thing is, when it comes to these people's attitudes, they kinda showed their cards when they started applying the same rhetoric to public schools.

I mean, pro-government people kinda needed to come up with something. There has to be a reason to defend these people, who are supposed to be public servants, having parents addressed at school board meetings for orderly conduct (that wasn't a typo). There has to be a justifiable reason for the opponents of school choice for why so many school districts were barring parents from speaking, or even attending meetings.

Well, they went for the expert thing. They decided to take the angle that the people established in the education system were better equipped to make these decisions, and that time shouldn't be wasted on the plebes that are the parents (aka, their customers).

The thing is, during Covid, the experts to whom they were referring could be reasonably called "experts." I hate Fauci; but, he knows more than me on this issue. Even in that case, though, the "Trust the experts" rhetoric falls apart under scrutiny. There were a lot of experts who knew a lot more than 99.5% of us who disagreed. A lot of the honest experts admitted that they were still operating in the dark. The best you could get by shouting, "Trust the experts" when shouting it at a person with an IQ above room temperature is, "Well, we trust different experts."

When you're appealing to the expertise of the people who work in public schooling, you're pissing on your own feet.

First off, even dealing with a lot of the shoddy metrics that people use, most teachers, administrators, and pubic officials don't have advanced degrees. Even if they do, it's rarely relevant to the study of how education actually works or doesn't work. Nobody that these people are pointing to who we must trust are actual educationalists like the late, great Sir. Ken Robinson (who was a school choice advocate, by the way).

What's somewhat illustrative of this is the teaching of foreign languages.

How many of my American friends wish that they spoke a second language? I do.

How many of you know that it's easier to learn languages when you're a child? How long have you known that? I don't remember when I didn't know that. It's conventional wisdom. It's kinda self-evident. We all learned our first language at its basic, conversational level with little conscious effort.

We know that the science is entirely on the side of teaching languages younger. We also have multi-decade research about ESL students learning math and science in classes taught in English as opposed to their first languages -- the students taught in English overwhelming did better long term.

Still, generally, the policies in our public schools are to teach languages later, and to teach math and science to ESL students in their native languages. We all know that this doesn't work. Trusting these people with our children's education is like trusting a mechanic to fix your car after he fucked up your oil changes every 3,000 miles for twenty years because, well, "He's a mechanic, and I'm not."

No, this isn't about you having trust and reverence for the people who have risen to the highest levels of their disciplines. This is about people on your side having control for the moment and you trying to keep those people free from criticism.