I didn’t like the way I wrote my previous post about dismantling the US Department of Education, so I rewrote it. By the way, it started with “Dear Senator,” but I didn’t actually send it to anyone. I’m just blogging for now. I would like to send a letter to President Trump or his new Secretary of Education simply to say:
The Education Department (ED) should not be dissolved, but rather turned upside-down and inside-out. When it was first started, it needed to be a bureaucratic organization in order to manage the changes that it sought to implement, but now it needs to turn, in both form and function, into something else, to play a leadership role.
If the federal government were the brain of Lady Liberty, the ED would be at the top level of her neural network system. “Lady Liberty” is obviously a personification of the collective Spirit of America. But she is a real being, in principle, and she is still in the process of developing her brain. The ED plays a very important role of informing the body, like the auditory cortex, which receives and processes information from both sides of the head (both sides of the political isle in this metaphor), and the visual cortex, which receives and processes information from the front (where the country is headed). So it should not be dismantled or dissolved. However, it needs to be reformed (turned upside-down) and informed (turned inside-out, made flexible, given adaptive resonance and neuroplasticity of a brain) to give it a new function as a leadership organization. As I reflected on this metaphor, I realized that, when a fetus is ready to be born, the whole thing turns upside-down and the labor process pushes it inside-out, from inside to outside the womb. Isn’t that what the trump administration is doing to the entire government? Turning it upside-down and projecting the truth inside-out?
Rather than trying to control or educate local- and state-level school systems, or dictate policies from the federal level, which is mostly downward communication, the ED’s mission should be flipped to help control and educate and inform our leaders and anyone who is or wants to be involved in politics. This is essential yet sorely lacking, especially for political party leaders and high-level decision makers who make decisions that affect groups of people as a whole. Leaders have done that in past administrations and they continue to do it without really knowing the unbiased ground-truth.
Flipping the ED form and function is comparable to a promotion from a management position to a leadership position in the military and in a business. Any leader should know that “what got you here won’t get you there,” which is also the title of a book that is recommended reading in Navy leadership courses.
How’s that? My auditory cortex would live to hear from you.
I wrote 8 more pages explaining the same process, in principle, three different ways:
- first by using the physiological neural network form-model,
- then with a holomorphic functional-model and
- finally with a parabolic model (to discuss parable-style rhetoric).
I don’t think I should send to the ED Secretary, but might post them here next time. Please let me know if you would like to read them.
The Holomorphic Process 