[hakfoo]

It's fascinating how education has COMPLETELY fallen off the radar politically in the last 10-15 years.

Even before we introduced a WWE manager for the Secretary of Education, we stopped discussing educational competitiveness. I can recall a couple decades ago every year or two the news having nervous handwringing stories about "(originally Japanese, then Korean, then Chinese) 6th graders have the math skills to design a full lunar rocket launch system, while American high-school graduates are incapable of filling out a Lotto playslip correctly".

The only time anyone talks about schools now is "is one getting shot up" or "looking for an excuse to ban books or siphon the few remaining dollars the public school programs have left into private/charter/religious schools that aren't necessarily delivering better overall outcomes." Rather than fixing the affordability crisis in secondary education, we're seeing an awful lot of amplification on the "not everyone should go to college" narrative, which might be technically accurate but seems to undermine the Delta Force plan you mentioned even more. Nobody seems to make education a central campaign issue anymore (even before all issues were subsumed by "will there be a fair election next time?")

The only way it makes sense is if we gave up on the idea of education as an economic driver. What is our economic vision for 2050? Feels like the current administration has maybe two ideas left:

* Hope everyone else leaves the petrostate pool, either by supply collapse or market trend/long term economic vision shifts, and then we can be the world's leading supplier of goo, from a puppetized Venezuela and maybe by coaxing Alberta seperatism enough.

* Bully economics, no longer even trying to compete on legitimate product merits and just saying "You'll buy 70,000 Dodge Darts if you don't want us to start shooting up your fishing boats."