Matt Walsh: “The public school system itself needs to be abolished”

Walsh: “Kill the Department of Education, kill it with fire, burn it down, dance around its ashes”

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From the September 24, 2024, edition of The Daily Wire's The Matt Walsh Show

MATT WALSH (HOST): But Trump should do it anyway. He'll have nothing to lose. Final term, he's almost 80 years-old. They hate his guts anyway. They wanna put him in prison. They wanna kill him. They've tried to do both. So, you know, go in there like a damn wrecking ball, a bull in a China shop, whatever metaphor you like, and get it done. I mean, this should be a day one priority. Kill the Department of Education, kill it with fire, burn it down, dance around its ashes — metaphorically I mean, not literally — in a poetic sense, burn it down, and dance around its ashes joyously.

And as Trump briefly pointed out in that clip, if we're judging our current education system by its fruits, as we should, then the case is basically closed here. I mean, the fruits, the results are abysmal. The education system is simply failing to educate a huge number of kids who go through the system. I'd say it's failing to properly educate basically all of them.

The Department of Education was founded about forty years ago or so. So just ask yourself this, are kids today generally better educated than kids forty years ago? Does anyone think that? Anyone at all? Take an 18-year-old high school graduate — let's go back to 1954, just to make it nice and, you know, round numbers — 18-year-old high school graduate in 1954, 18-year-old high school graduate in 2024 — who's better educated? Who is more literate? Who is more knowledgeable about history and literature and civics? Who's a more mature, well-adjusted, well-spoken, articulate person? Is there any question? I mean, would anyone put their money on the 2024 graduate in that race? I don't think so.

That's because our education system is a catastrophic failure. And it's such a failure that it has created a civilization-level crisis, a crisis that cannot be entirely fixed by abolishing the Department of Education because you're still gonna have the public school system — that will still exist. And ultimately, the public school system itself needs to be abolished, the whole thing, the entire system should be dismantled because it is utterly failing in its basic job to educate kids. There are a lot of other reasons why we could — why we should destroy the public school system, get rid of it, abolish it, but you don't really need to get past this, which is they're not doing the job. You've got a whole bunch of poorly educated or basically uneducated, 17 and 18-year-olds grad — you know, coming out of that system after spending 12 to 13 years in it, and they've learned almost nothing. They know basically nothing about the world, about history, about literature, about any of the subjects that they should be well versed in after spending all that time in that system. They know basically nothing.