Ignition for Education

Education is not the issue on which the current US presidential election is being fought. The Issues page of Donald Trump’s campaign website does not include a section on education. The Issues page on Kamala Harris’s has a short section that mostly focusses on funding and debt relief for higher education. This isn’t surprising. After all, education policy is mostly made at the state level, not by the federal government.

But this election is all about education and the value that we place on it. To understand this, we have to realize that education drives society towards both egalitarianism and elitism. Done well, it gives all citizens a common body of knowledge and skills, including, most importantly, literacy and numeracy, that enables them to gain and hold employment and to interact with banks, businesses, the legal system, and so on. It does not deliver total equality of opportunity, but it does establish a base level below which people will not usually fall.

But education is also a force for elitism—not hereditary or race or gender-based elitism, but the socially beneficial elitism of the credentialed expert. This person holds higher degrees in her field. She may well have published in a peer-reviewed context. She may hold a position in a university. Education and its institutions hold her up as someone who’s opinions count not because she has a right to express them but because she is qualified to hold them. It is in our best interest to listen to her, including when she debates differences of opinion with her fellow experts.

Donald Trump doesn’t care about the egalitarianism of equal opportunities. That is why, as president, he increased deficit spending (during a period of economic growth) to fund tax cuts for rich people. He cares very much about the cheap egalitarianism that wishes to tear down expertise, whether medical (think COVID), scientific (climate change), economic (barriers to trade, the independence of the Federal Reserve), or legal (the validity of the 2020 election). Along with expertise, he takes aim at the provision of credible information to ordinary people when he attacks the quality news media.

He does these things not because his targets lie but because they tell the truth, and the truth undermines every populist word that jumps, spittle-flecked, from his manipulation-shaping mouth. As a phony, as a liar, as a rich man who is out for the interests of rich men, and as a caster of doubt on credible people and credible information, Donald Trump is an enemy of education.

Kamala Harris, on the other hand, is willing to make her case to the American people without undermining knowledge itself (or democracy itself). She’s willing to acknowledge facts and argue on the basis of them. And she’s willing to listen to people who know what they’re talking about. For what it’s worth, she has this blog’s endorsement for the office of President of the United States.