Joy Pullmann, a nationally-recognized education expert, claims that “normal people in fly-over country” feel exploited by cultural and political elites who have moved from not listening to the people, to exploiting them.
What worries the education expert — who is now the managing editor of The Federalist — the most about a Hillary Clinton presidency is “the distaste factor” stemming from the former secretary of state raising her child with nannies. According to Pullmann, Hillary is “so out of touch” with so little to share with parents.
Pullmann continues in the exclusive interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation by mentioning that Clinton is aligned “with the elitist way of looking at children as units on a production line to reengineer a perfect society.” Pullmann says Clinton’s focus on a child is more like “stamping on him as a piece of iron.”
The education expert’s favorite long shot presidential nominee — when it comes to education policy — is Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. In this exclusive video, she critiques Jeb Bush as “the biggest supporter of Common Core in the Republican field.”
To this young mother of four, the Common Core Standards clarified the “difference between what parents and teachers want for their children and what politicians think would be the answer.” She added, “Elites tend to think about children as human capital, little products on a production line that they’re massaging to change society.”
To parents, their children are anything but common, and a natural tension has arisen between parents and education elites. Pullmann, who received a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core, explains these political elites in both parties believe “you can push this button and get this result.”
One pet peeve of Pullmann’s is people like President Obama or Bill Gates, “who are empowered to make rule changes, but don’t have to live under the consequences of the system they are creating.” When elites send their own children to private schools but set rules for the rest of us, she explains, this looks more like “exploitation.”
“Systematizing education takes away our ability to fit education to the needs of the child,” she says.
Having co-authored a major report on big data and privacy for the Pioneer Institute called Cogs in the Machine, Pullmann reports a strengthening left-right consensus concerning the government’s use of data to re-engineer society according to elites notion of justice.
This video interview is chock-full of tips and resources for parents, including the website Truth In American Education, Sarah Mackenzie’s blog Amongst Lovely Things, a website called Classical Conversations and a book “Classical Education: A Movement Sweeping America,” about a means of teaching that cultivates virtue, wisdom and a finer focus on the good, the true and the beautiful.
For more on the energetic Joy Pullmann, follow her on Twitter and watch for her at The Federalist. She is also a research fellow on education policy for The Heartland Institute.
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