Op-Ed: Expert confusion weakening America

Many of us find ourselves looking around our hometown and the wider world, wondering why so little seems to work as it should.

Today, we lavish resources like never before on institutions such as schools, prisons, churches, corporations, the military, the courts, the arts, and even the family. These institutions make society function.

Government services and private charities have more money than at any time in history, with unprecedented capabilities to coordinate with one another for the common good. Those who administer them are better educated than ever before.

Yet, it seems that these institutions seem to operate far less effectively than they did more than 50 years ago. Schools have redefined standards so far downward that what knowledge and self-control was once expected of a high school graduate are not reliably present in many of today’s college graduates. Prisons harden criminals rather than deterring them. Our military is being redefined as the world’s most expensive social engineering experiment; reoriented to humanitarian relief at the expense of war-fighting.

People have not simply become less intelligent and more indolent. There is a reason for this generalized deterioration. It is not any kind of conspiracy. Rather, it is a consensus among expert administrators that they can use these institutions to build a better world.

After World War II, new cohorts of university-educated professional specialists were increasingly entrusted to administer our institutions. Theoretically-minded pedagogues displaced teachers and principals as the primary decision-makers within schools.

Prisons were retooled from places of punishment to places of rehabilitation. Churches focused increasingly on social justice over scripture. Police forces shifted from hiring veterans to protect and serve, instead hiring graduates with criminal justice degrees with ideals of taking the violence out of law enforcement.

Instead of erring on the side of public safety and common sense, today’s courts now err on the side of applying utopian procedures that make sense in a courtroom but not the streets. Big business is no longer directed by rags-to-riches entrepreneurs, but by MBAs.

Since the 1960s, the same thing happened in the armed forces, with civilian efficiency experts replacing military officers as the real guiding minds directing our forces. Even straightforward discipline within the family unit was replaced by Dr. Spock’s psychological manipulations.

There is not an institution of our Western Civilization that has not been consumed by these educated theorists. Their consensus is that, being experts steeped in the latest theories, they are far more suited to rule than anyone who actually does “the work.” They alone can use these institutions as tools of progress. In effect, they imply that no one who is really important works in the field.

The prideful self-assurance of these experts has taken all of our institutions off-mission, in pursuit of some fever dream of perfection. They are the hardening of our society’s arteries, and so long as they hold the reins of power our institutions cannot be returned to their real missions to, each in their own way, make our society function.

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In Maine and then Idaho, Ralph K. Ginorio has taught the history of Western Civilization to high school students for nearly a quarter century. He is an “out-of-the-closet” conservative educator with experience in special education, public schools, and charter schools, grades 6-12. He has lived in Coeur d’Alene since 2014. Email: rginorio@cdapress.com