Kevin Carey tackles the elder statesman’s new book on education:
Paul’s misguided philosophy is rooted in a radically simplistic view of education. To him, education is just a matter of assigning students books to read and papers to write, using an “ideologically safe” curriculum. He deplores educators who “assume that the parents are not competent to be the sole providers of education.” But parents aren’t competent to be the sole providers of many important things. Ron Paul is an Ob-Gyn with an M.D. from DukeUniversity. Does he think babies should be delivered by people who learned everything they know from books and YouTube?
But the Ron Paul school revolution actually does make sense in one particular way.
His plan is explicitly designed to catch students on the cusp of adolescence and direct them toward an isolated learning experience focused exclusively on reading, writing, and debate, with no exposure to heterodox views. He is aiming for the Atlas Shrugged window, when young people have an excess of conviction and a deficit of experience, when they are more clever than wise. His program will shield students from the evils of liberalism and, worse, Keynesianism, and train them to argue their cause with facility and zeal. It is a plan for the mass creation of crackpot autodidacts who are impervious to any evidence that contradicts their simple worldviews.
The Dish 