Foxes and Hens
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Governing.com’s 13th Floor blog has an interesting post on the Montana House’s Education committee leader. I know what you’re thinking: “How on earth could that be interesting?”. It’s interesting because Mr. Jore is completely against compulsory school attendance and homeschooled his own kids so that they would not go through the Montana school system.
The post goes on to describe why the author believes that it is a good idea to have Mr. Jore as the chairperson of the education committee citing examples of farm pork in the Federal budget and the presence of only farm-state Congressmen on the relevant farm committees.
I agree with Mr. Greenblatt that the committee should consist of more than simply those looking for handouts. Critics are good in any group situation in order to avoid groupthink. That’s a concept taught in any beginning level Organizational Behavior class. However, when the critic rises to the level of leader of the group it jeopardizes the group’s functionality as a whole. The discussion stops being about how to improve education in the state (or whatever the group is working on) but rather whether we should have compulsory education at all. That’s an outlier position and is not helpful to solving the very real problem of education in this country.
Mr. Greenblatt states that we should have more than hens guarding the henhouse, but it’s not much better to allow those that want to destroy the henhouse to guard it.