Mount Stupid vs. the Valley of Arrogance

The whole point of an elected board is to have a group of people who act as a check and balance against the hired administrative “experts”. Electing a group of the same “experts” results in the fox guarding the henhouse. You gotta be at the peak of Mt. Stupid to miss that obvious intention.

Well, aren’t we embarrassed? 

John Doughney says those of us who cast ballots for two of the current GCISD board members are at the “peak of Mt. Stupid”. Although he may have arrived at that conclusion after a road trip down Divisiveness Highway, let’s try adopting his logic for a moment (just for fun).

According to the career educator, John Doughney, we’ve elected a couple of people to our local school board whose only real prior exposure to how education systems work is the years they were students at the receiving end of the system. He proposes that’s because the intelligent voters were asleep, and the rest of us were too stupid to realize that we should be electing people who have been specifically trained and immersed in education theory and practice.

We have similar “stupidity” in other systems.

Extending this former educator’s logic, it becomes clear that we should be electing executives from Pfizer and Moderna to Congress in order to intelligently resolve and prevent pandemics.

We should appoint the top executives and directors from RoundUp manufacturer and agricultural seed monopoly Monsanto to head the USDA.

We have tons of lawyers elected to Congress, whose role is to create and establish laws. Just look at the glowing popularity reflected in that august body’s approval ratings!

There are hundreds of government departments, commissions, and boards in which we have frequently made the mistake of electing or appointing the average citizen instead of selecting the well-trained experts in the field.

Indeed, one is at the summit of Mt. Intellectual when one realizes that our forefathers created a system whereby bodies of experts should have their power and authority balanced by an identical body of the same experts.

Does Mr. Doughney mean to say that trained educators who have careers in the bubble of our assembly-line education system are the only people capable of running a school system properly? In that case, Mr. Doughney, why do we even need school boards? 

I wonder if it’s depressing to blog from the Valley of Arrogance.