Dear Senator,

I am writing to share with you my concern that President Trump is considering the possibility of eliminating the US Department of Education. I am all for overhauling it, but not for shutting it down. I attended public schools throughout my primary education (from 1966-1978). I got my undergraduate degrees from a private University, but my MS and PhD from public universities.

As a child, my mother, who was a very artistic Danish immigrant and often commented on how young America was compared to Europe, taught me to think of the federal government metaphorically as the brains of “Little Lady Liberty.”  Now, I am a 64-year-old elder, a retired naval officer with a lot of practical experience in “the real world” and a ton of education. My mother’s mother was a professional pianist who didn’t appreciate education so she took my mother out of school after the sixth grade. That was her greatest regret, so she encouraged me to get all the education I could. I received degrees in physics (BS and MS), engineering (BS), medical physics (PhD), theology (still studying), and an MA in national security and strategic studies from the Naval War College, and I still see the federal government metaphorically as the brains of “Lady Liberty.” I see the Department of Education as a neuron in her brain.

Lady Liberty… Woke? No, She just Woke-Up with a Hangover

After a great deal of reflecting on that metaphor, I began to realize that Lady Liberty really was still a child when I was growing up, as my mother implied. I also realized that she just woke up and is experiencing her first day of young adulthood. Apparently, for the last ten years or so, she had been experimenting with “spirits” and mind-altering drugs. Whenever she got caught by her conscience, which she never acknowledged as even being real, she would either turn her head and refuse to look at the truth or try to lie her way out of whatever she had done. But inside, she knew the truth. Intuitively, she understood the concept of what “truth itself” meant, in contrast with specific truths, and she knew she wasn’t being truthful to herself or anyone else. She had just lost her way and today, she woke up with the worst hangover in her life.

She opened her eyes, because she heard the voice of reason, and saw the light of truth. But then she closed them again and began to reflect on her life. She remembered the joy of victory, having won some major wars, and the agony of defeat, although she had never been severely beaten. Now, because she is both Republican and Democrat, she is feeling the agony of defeat… self-defeat. She literally beat herself up last night. Now, she thinks she is ready to listen to her conscience. Now maybe she will begin to realize what her parents meant by  the importance of finding and truly understanding “the way, the truth and the life.”

As a young adult, I was just like young Lady Liberty. But I still loved truth as if it were my mother. I rejected Christianity and wanted to find my own way. I discovered I could find truth in science, through the art of science, which I fell in love with. I worshipped truth itself, the truth that science promised to show me by letting me peak inside a bunch of individual truths. I worshipped truth itself as if it were God. But then, when I reached mid-life adulthood, I realize that she (science) had betrayed me. When it got right down to it, “she” wasn’t even sure what gender she was. It wasn’t until I learned the science of art, which is the artistic expression of truth itself, that I finally recognized what Christianity was about and the role that science has played in my life. As I reflect on my life, I see it all as a play, and Lady Liberty is realizing that it will end as a tragedy if she has a stroke and her left side goes limp. It is an interactive play and she can turn it into the form of the classic mythological “hero’s journey.” According to Joseph Campbell, what makes it a classic is the three-part structure of the “monomyth” (separation, initiation and return).

Intermission

Apparently, it is intermission. Here’s a few thought bubbles:

• You might be asking, “What is the point of getting so artsy-fartsy about this? I thought you were writing about your concern that President Trump might shut down the US Department of Education.”
• That is indeed what I am writing about. But I hope to address that concern truthfully and make my point about keeping that department, but overhauling it to serve the true purpose, as a leadership organization that leads toward truth. I also hope that you will pass it on.
• This is the science of art. It may take a little getting used to. It helped me see that everyone has to see the truth for themselves. The art of science gave us the tools to measure, understand, and write about specific truths, but following science, as if it was eternal and unchanging, is part of what got us into this mess.
• The science of art is about expressing truth itself with metaphors that use a bunch of truths (and there are a ton of them in science) that surround “the point.” That is the point of getting artsy-fartsy. So please stay with me.

It is intermission and as the house lights come on, I can see “the house” as Congress, and the people who run the house as actors with lead roles in the play. I realize that I had slept through some of Acts 1 and 2 (The Separation and The Initiation), so I look down at the program in my hands. There, I can see the name of “God” next to “truth itself,” introduced in Act 1. The name “Jesus” appears in Act 2. His name stood for the understanding that “God is with us” and the point of his character was to characterize “the way, the truth and the life.” His primary role was revealed when he said, “For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world — to bear witness to the truth.” You can look that up if you missed it. The script is called the Bible (John 18:37).

The subscript in my personalized program (I guess I was a little slow and needed a special program) explains a few things. It says that “truth itself” is the lighting, both the stage lights and the house lights. “Science” and “Religion” are the speaker system. Most of the speakers broke in Act 2 but are supposed to be fixed in Act 3 (The return).

“Good Conscience” is on the program as being the voice of God. It promises to help the engineers fix the speakers if they listen closely and don’t get distracted again by “Bad Conscience.” Those who already have just need to turn around and get to work. They may get penalized in the end, but for now, most of them still have a role in the production. As the house lights start to dim again and Act 3 begins, I see Donald Trump on stage. According to the program, he is supposed to play the part of Lady Liberty’s Good Conscience.

But wait; some of the speakers are still broken. I heard him say that the Department of Education will be completely dismantled and overhauled. He also threw in a few words about completely shutting it down, obviously to create a little suspense. He seems to be good at that. Most of the speakers are amplifying and echoing that part. I can already feel the tension building as I enter stage right, with young Lady Liberty in the background.

*** Act III Begins

The Education Department (ED) is an extremely important neuron in Liberty’s brain, which is still developing. I agree that the ED needs to be overhauled though. Like most government agencies these days, it turned into a bureaucracy, an organization in which most of the important decisions are made at the top by state officials rather than by elected representatives who, theoretically, stay in constant communication with the people at the front lines, to use a military metaphor.

The NEA, (National Education Association) said it is critically important to have a U.S. Department of Education (ED), and to have the right person running it. According to an article by Amanda Litvinov, (https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/top-three-reasons-linda-mcmahon-should-not-be-secretary-education) they think that Linda McMahon is unqualified. It says that “she has no significant background in public schools nor any understanding of what it takes to help every student thrive.” She has an agenda to privatize public education and she intends to “expand voucher programs, which rob our public schools of resources.”

In my humble opinion, Amanda Litvinov is not qualified to address the issue. The way I understand it, from my education and experience in both management and leadership roles, a leader needs to be someone with strong leadership skills. It is not a management role. Good leaders can lead any organization of any size if, when they were managers they learned, what got you here won’t get you there.  It can be helpful for a leader to have a strong background in the area that they are tasked to lead, but if the organization is already not working, the new hire should NOT be someone who played a role in breaking it.

The federal-level ED is purely a leadership organization and has no management role. Nobody could ever have an understanding of what it takes “to help every student thrive.” Every student is different and the farther removed the leaders are from the actual students, the less qualified they are to manage anything about them. As it stands today, they can barely manage to hear them, much less speak for them.

• Thought bubble: Imagine a neuron in your brain forming a mouth and trying to scream commands at the body, verbally telling it every move to make.

Children who grow up together in a “village” have the most in common. They have a common sense of what life looks like, sounds like, feels like tastes like and smells like. All of those senses will be somewhat different than other communities, and when all of the signals from all of those senses combine inside a neuron, the result is the “common-sense” of that village. So, knowing what works for them is the job of the teachers.

• Program note: This is where the Village People come into Act 3. I enlisted in the Navy in June of 1979 shortly after their song “In the Navy” was released (March 17).
• Personal note: It was actually my girlfriend, who had been in my sister unit in bootcamp, who introduced it to me. If you’re interested, we got married in 1980 and are still happily married today. She finished her enlistment and got out because I got commissioned as an officer. At home, I played the role of leader and she was the manager. She never tried to lead, but when I tried to manage, things could get ugly. She became the full-time mom and homemaker and I continued in my career. This traditional, nuclear-family structure, I am quite sure, is what made our family life successful.

The top-level of any organization should be purely about leadership. It is not the purpose or mission of the federal-level ED to manage anything, not even money. That is the role of management organizations within the state-level EDs, which should have both leadership and management roles. Their purpose is to ensure that the local-level EDs, the local school boards, have what they need to support the schools in their districts.

What the top leadership organization (the neuron if you recall me using that metaphor) needs is information. Our Lady (of Liberty) is an implicit being, which means that she must be in-formed, i.e. formed in the mind, as implied by the word information. The neuron needs information about what is working and what is not working (both of which change every generation) for other schools in other states (Liberty’s common-village-senses). The leadership role is to collect that information from all of the “cell cultures” and analyze it to create provide proven models, along with guidance about how to use the models that fit individual schools that have similar cultures. They should be like gifts to the school, not requirements like today’s “standardized” models. If they are truly reflections of what the children need, the teachers will see that and thank God for the gift.

To the Point

I hope by now you get my point. But I have been running with this idea for many years and since I already wrote the next section, I figure I might as well give it to you.

• My mind is like Forrest Gump. “I ran clear to the ocean. And when I got there, I figured, since I’d gone this far, I might as well turn around, just keep on going. When I got to another ocean, I figured, since I’d gone this far, I might as well just turn back, keep right on going.”

Speaking of forests (like Forrest, only spelled differently): Using Stephen Covey’s analogy of cutting a path through a forest, the workers in the analogy actually do the cutting; they are parents and teachers. Managers (in state and local EDs) make sure they have the best saws and that the saws are sharpened and replaced whenever needed. Leaders (state and federal-level ED) are the ones who climb to the top of the trees so they can see the horizon, to know the direction that the path needs to lead. State leaders look at the same federal leader for signals that include information about what Lady Liberty is doing in the world and models that might help them teach the students what is expected to be the needs of the near future.

As a leader, President Trump could already see the horizon and could see the direction of the rising sun (the unbiased truth). As I recall, Covey told the story and said that when the leader reached the top and finally looked, he called down and said, “WRONG FOREST!” That is exactly what Donal Trump did back in 2016 and is still doing. That is why the Republican Platform is a return to common-sense.

School administrators are supposed to administer to teachers, not try to do their jobs or tell them how to do their jobs. “Administer” can mean to manage, but also to dispense whatever they need to do their job. The word manage is from the Latin manus meaning ‘hand’. A manager hands the workers what they need.

As the head of Radiology Department at a major Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth Va, I was a mid-level manager. I managed the organization, not the people, because I knew that “the organization” does not refer to the people; it refers to the implicit thing that one organizes. I did not tell the experts anything about their specific specialties. However, if the MRI division head, who by the way was an expert in MRI, needed my help because her efforts to communicate with the scheduling division or supply division failed to solve her division’s problems delivering high-quality patient care, then I would step in and look for the root cause of the problem. Local school administrations should manage the organization of local schools and dispense to the teachers everything they need to teach the best that they can. State-level EDs should administrator to the local EDs.

Leaders are not supposed to administer anything. Their purpose is to lead, to steer the ship, if I may switch metaphors. So where do the managers get the resources they need to provide the schools and teachers? Resources are like fuel and in a self-governed fuel system, fuel supply is provided by the governor. Donald Trump sees the reality, that the individual people are real and the organizations are implicit formations, processes that, if performed in accordance with fundamental principles (basic unchanging truths, not values, feel-good methods or narratives), they will operate as if they had minds of their own. As the individual organizations, like local EDs, become properly organized, they will begin to operate like living organs that make up the implicit whole – Lady Liberty’s nervous system. She won’t have to be so nervous every time we approach another election.

What I see on the horizon, which I hope Linda McMahon sees, is not just the “Trump Train”, which could smash right into it. It is not just any education department. It’s THE Education Department. It needs a new name (Change Ed to TED and maybe use TED-Talks to help communicate with the public). It receives all the information needed to steer all the states in the same direction, which is the same direction as the rest of the whole United States Ship, currently named the USS Trump. Rather than trying to scream from Washington and try to teach all the children, like it has been trying to do, they can speak like mature adults and teach members of Congress. They can grade Senators (the leadership role in Congress) and report to our Representatives on their performance at providing their state Governors the right information about what the state EDs need to manage their local schools. That would surely give them a hand.

• Program Note: Give our teachers a hand is a double entendre.
• Final program note: Applaud.  

END