Education is the Enemy

Something weird happens every time I talk online about having a Liberal Arts degree…my comments fill up with people who tell me my degree was a waste of time and that I could have focused on something that would have made more money.

That is untrue. It is the lie the people in power want us to believe.

By virtue of my Liberal Arts education, I can think critically about politics. I am able to analyze and argue and debate and read and write well because of my education. My education was a springboard from poverty to the middle class.

Or what’s left of the middle class.

I am not going to say that money is unimportant when deciding on a career, but I also know we have absolutely no idea what degrees will help our children and grandchildren earn a living in the future. Every last thing we thought we knew about the workforce is about to change with AI.

I know you have heard of The Heritage Foundation and Project 2025. It is being implemented piece by piece, and a big piece of the project is rolling back public education and higher education.

Project 2025’s educational goal is to strip the federal role in education down to “a statistics-gathering agency that disseminates information to the states.”

That started with the Trump regime’s attempt to dismantle the Department of Education. Though the regime hasn’t been able to completely dismantle the department, because that must be carried out by Congress, they have managed to shrink the department and roll back protections for students.

I am just learning about another part of the plan: Project 2025 lays out a framework for evaluating whether a degree program generates earnings for its recipients that exceed those of someone with only a high school diploma.

But those are two metrics that can’t be equated. A teacher will never out-earn a hedge fund manager, but only one of them educates the future.

Professions that require a degree can’t be accomplished without one. No matter how much the regime would like to throw out degrees in critical thinking and complex problem-solving, we will desperately need degrees in the Humanities in the future.

And I don’t think it is an accident that the tech bros and Christian nationalists who wrote Project 2025 tell me that my children should not attend college, while enrolling their own children in elite universities focused on the Liberal Arts and Humanities.

I opened my email a while back to an article by the Missouri Independent. The article is titled, “Missouri Senate looks at funding cuts for ‘low-earning’ college degrees.”

The sponsor of the proposed funding cuts is State Senator Rick Brattin, a lawmaker who once compared abortion to slavery and argued that forced birth “helps women recover from rape or incest.” Yes, he really said that.

Senator Brattin leads the Missouri Senate Education Committee. Senator Brattin has no experience in education and does not hold a college degree. And not to sound elitist or snobby, but our current Governor, Mike Kehoe, also does not hold a college degree. He was preceded by Governor Mike Parson, who did not earn a degree.

I do feel a little uncomfortable speaking about the education my Governors and lawmakers haven’t attained, but I can’t help but acknowledge that Missouri has ranked dead last in the country for a few years now for teacher pay and classroom funding. So many years under Governors and lawmakers who do not prioritize education is glaring. It is harming our children and the state.

I am also not saying every profession should require a degree, but I do think that those making decisions about education should have a degree in education…or a degree in general.

The fact is that most of the people making decisions about education in Missouri are not teachers or administrators. Governor Kehoe created a School Funding Modernization Task Force, and there is not one current public school teacher appointed to the task force, but there is a member of the Soybean Association and one from the Farm Bureau and two members from groups that send Missouri taxpayer money to private religious schools.

But, back to Brattin’s legislation, SB 1617:

The bill’s sponsor, Republican state Sen. Rick Brattin of Harrisonville, said the bill falls in line with new federal regulations and a federal earnings test, which evaluates what is considered “low-earning.”

Do you know which Missouri degree could be eliminated by that standard?

Teaching.

Missouri ranks 50th in the nation in starting teacher pay. I left teaching with an MA and 16 years of experience, making 41K per year. After teacher retirement was taken from my monthly check, I had $2,400 to live on each month. Many Missouri teachers don’t make that. Many bring home less than $2,000 per month.

Even more than the awful salaries for Missouri teachers, over 33% of Missouri schools are forced to operate on a four-day week due to a lack of state funding. These short weeks help struggling schools — mostly rural schools — keep costs down and also allow teachers an extra day to find a side hustle to pay the bills. The four-day week helps many rural schools recruit and retain teachers.

It appears that the “fix” for the education problem in Missouri is not a pay raise for teachers or sending more funding to districts. It seems instead that Missouri Republicans are focused on lowering the standards for teaching.

In 2024, the GOP-dominated Missouri legislature voted that Missouri educators will no longer need a 3.0 grade-point average in their subject area to teach. The threshold for qualifying to teach in the state is now a 2.5 grade-point average in the teacher’s content area.

That is the equivalent of having a C-level understanding of your content.

Currently, a bill in the Missouri House of Representatives could allow prospective educators to earn a temporary teaching certification after two years of college rather than requiring a four-year program.

What are we doing? Why are we doing it? What is going on?

If you had asked me those questions ten years ago, I would have told you that we just needed to lobby our lawmakers to do more for Missouri schools, but I now know this was all by design. It was a plan to pull funding and resources away from public schools to create chaos. It was the intentional dumbing-down of public schools and public school graduates.

It worked.

Missouri is the Show-Me State, and we are showing the entire country what it looks like to delegitimize and upset an entire educational system.

The weakening of public schools and the devaluing of teachers and the dismissal of the Liberal Arts are part of a deliberate effort to reshape America into a place where fewer people can think critically or organize collectively or question the power of those in power.

The degrees that teach empathy and communication and critical thinking don’t make us “low-earning.” They make us dangerous. Dangerous to those who benefit from ignorance.

They make us capable of seeing the plan and saying it out loud.

~Jess