A humble plea for revolution

 The year is 2086. A teenager approaches her grandparents asking “I just learned in my history reading that you were forced for a long time to go five days a week to a school run by the government. Is that true?” 

“Yes, we really were.” 

“What did they do,” she asks skeptically, “yell at you to keep quiet, make you eat prison food and make you ask for permission to go to the bathroom?” 

“Yes, for more than a century, that’s how it went. It got really awful and it kept getting worse until the Kentucky Tea Party Battle of 2026-27 started turning everything around.” 

“It had gotten so bad that the newspapers nearly went out of business because almost no one could read more than a few words at a time.” 

“That’s ridiculous,” she mutters, nearly dumbstruck. “So, what sparked the battle?   

“Everyone found out about the Kentucky Early Graduation Program and started signing their kids up for it. The people running the government eventually figured out what that would do to their power and started trying to repeal it, but they couldn’t do it and the harder they fought, the more people signed up. Eventually, most people started learning on their own, thinking for themselves and the whole system collapsed. As self-education had developed over time and more people opted out of the system, the old ways actually just faded away pretty quietly.” 

“That’s wild,” she exclaimed. “How did we get so far off track in America?” 

“Public education was started in Massachusetts four hundred years ago by people escaping a government that was trying to be their God. The idea was to teach children how to read the Bible so they could figure out for themselves who their God is. In 1865, a beautiful thing happened. The 13th Ammendment was ratified, forbidding the government from enslaving people. That lasted until 1913, when the 16th Ammendment allowed government to enslave everyone. It’s a long story.”    

“During World War One, schools started shifting their focus from teaching kids how to think to teaching kids how to be good employees. They kept lowering standards over time until only the brightest students could read or think much at all, but they could all follow simple directions without asking questions.” 

“The Kentucky Early Graduation Program was passed relatively quietly in 2009 and sat mostly dormant until late in 2026. The reason for its slow adoption was that when a student graduated a year or more early, half the money his or her school district would have gotten for that student went into a college scholarship fund for that student. This one thing encouraged students to learn faster and when they figured out how much more fun that was, they started thinking for themselves. This inspired people to start looking for ways to grow their wealth outside of government control and it didn’t take long for them to see how much better that worked.” 

“Until this happened, Kentucky was one of the worst run and least educated states. The Kentucky Early Graduation Program created a firestorm of intellectual curiosity just as it effectively defunded the least efficient parts of the system. As other states saw how Kentucky did it, they all followed along.” 

We don't know our neighbors anymore

 What is one idea that could quickly have the biggest positive impact on Kentucky’s future?

Sorry to hit you with a big question like that out of the blue, but while you’re thinking about it, I will give you mine and – fair warning – this might take a minute to wrap your head around.

I think the most potent public policy innovation we could enact almost right away is to eliminate all the rules currently limiting teacher certification and put all full-time public school teaching jobs on the ballot in each individual school district for four-year terms.

There are some things government just doesn’t do well by itself and the evidence keeps piling higher to demonstrate that public school teacher certification is a big, expensive one.

And you should care about that because we allowed public schooling to go off the rails so long ago we can’t even see how we went wrong and in ignorance of the issue in its proper context we’ve lost ability to see what is coming next. And if we don’t fix it soon, what is coming next is ugly.

I’m betting you have never heard of the Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647. In the early 1600s, thousands of Puritans fled religious persecution in England, came to America and invented public schooling so people would know how to read the Bible for themselves. In 1647 in Massachusetts colony, the Act mandated creation of public schools for that reason. Rapid general improvement in literacy, productivity and

prosperity ensued.

Public education became a thing in America so people could think for themselves as a protection against tyranny and poverty. This one factor was key in America’s rise to ascendancy in the world.

An important shift happened around World War One, though, as rapid large-scale industrialization introduced a new impatience with hard, slow learning of classical education and becoming independent thinkers in favor of a process to methodically create usefulness.

Critical thinking remains a fashionable term on the surface in education circles, but inarguably the system’s focus has long since shifted from inspiring an ability to ask deep questions to facing forward and quietly following instructions. The worsening student loan crisis, growing underemployment crisis and declining literacy rates contrast starkly for those still capable of critical thinking with rapidly increasing rates of high school graduation.

We could do a lot worse than to just shut down public schools rather than continuing to throw good money after bad, or we could choose to right the ship of public education by removing arbitrary standards of teacher certification and returning accountability to parents and their neighbors interested in reversing our slide into Idiocracy.

If you are still with me or are ready to engage in the lost art of firing off an angry letter to the editor – which would be extremely cool, by the way – the other big issue is teacher pay which we fix by eliminating the schedule of teacher salaries based on seniority in favor of giving principals and/or school boards total discretion in rewarding superior talent with superior pay limited only by available resources and incentivizing inferior classroom occupants to move on with pay cuts. We could combat temptation to wield this power over teacher pay corruptly by making the position of principal an elected office, too. 

This push to create a new, unfamiliar voting practice surely seems to be an odd tangent, but it isn’t. Scientific literature has been slow to recognize societal devastation wrecked by the fact that we don’t know our neighbors anymore. Students in classrooms often don’t know the name of the student behind the next desk. Lack of communication with human beings is on the way to becoming an inescapably obvious threat to mental health within a decade. This is a powerful way to fight back against that.