Which way, USA?

Two videos show two potential futures. Should we keep coddling idiots, or should we invest instead in the truly capable?

A clown walks out of his special education class, goes to the library, and tries to distract a young man studying for a physics exam.

This past Sunday, I saw two videos that really clarify the two potential futures that the USA and the rest of the West must choose. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then these videos are each worth a thousand pictures. Both videos are embedded below. They speak for themselves, so I am presenting them with minimal commentary.

The first video¹ shows a SpaceX rocket landing in a basket attached to a tower. It was widely shared on X, including by Elon Musk. It is truly incredible and inspiring to watch — not just the rocket, but the crowd on hand to celebrate this amazing engineering feat.

Interestingly, after I watched the first video on X, the video below² was the very next one in my feed. The difference between these videos could not have been more stark. Now that you’ve seen the human accomplishment showcased in the first video, observe the animals in second one, especially the female shown at 0:23 in the video, who makes loud sounds approximating human speech, but conveying no substantive meaning besides the fact that she’s retarded and proud of it.

On a different note, have you ever wondered about how much America spends educating her gifted children, compared to how much she spends educating her dunces? Let’s use Pennsylvania as an example, since Pennsylvania seems fairly representative of the nation as a whole (at least as much as any other state could claim to be).

From what I could tell, Pennsylvania is spending about $4.1 million on gifted education programs for the current school year (2023-2024). The funding for Pennsylvania’s gifted education programs was not easy to find — I reviewed the pages on the state department of education’s website pertaining to gifted programs, and though I found a fair amount of material addressing the supposed importance of DEI-related considerations, I could find little in the way of solid numbers showing total spending or spending per student. Based on the Governor’s published recommendations for the budget for the 2023-2024 school year (I was not able to find an enacted budget online that provided the final amount allocated to gifted education for that year), the state had spent none of its own money on gifted programs the previous year and initially planned to do the same in 2023-2024. In 2022-2023, the federal government provided a “Jacob K. Javitz Gifted and Talented Students” Grant totaling $623,000 for the entire state.³ On September 28, 2023, the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) “announced that $3.5 million is now available to expand access to gifted education programming in schools and serve more students through the Pennsylvania Gifted Equity Initiative (PGEI),” and it further noted that such money would be in addition to a Jacob K. Javitz Gifted and Talented Students Grant, making it appear that the grant was ultimately renewed (it did not appear on the governor’s proposed budget for 2023-2024, but perhaps it had just not been finalized yet).⁴ Note the language used. This additional money will “expand access” and “serve more students” through an “Equity Initiative.” The PDE’s announcement goes on to assert that “there is severe underrepresentation of African American, American Indian, and Hispanic/Latino students in gifted education.” The announcement raises more questions than it answers about how the money will be used. Will the $3.5 million be spent trying to get more (mostly non-gifted) children into gifted classes on the basis of race or ethnicity, or will it be spent directly on the gifted classes themselves? But even if we assume all of this $3.5 million will be spent directly on gifted education, that amounts to a little over $4.1 million total (assuming the federal grant for $623K was renewed) being spent on gifted education in the State of Pennsylvania in the 2023-2024 school year. When it comes to state education budgets, $4.1 million is not a lot of money. That’s apparently what the PDE believes gifted education is worth.

Now what about the dunces? How much money is being spent by the State of Pennsylvania on special education? According to the same proposed budget for the 2023-2024 school year, Pennsylvania is spending over $2 billion on special education programs this year: $595,612,000 in federal funds and $1,440,641,000 in state funds.⁵ I’m not great at math, but $2 billion is a lot more than $4.1 million.

If someone is able to find the final amounts budgeted by Pennsylvania for gifted programs and special education, I’d be curious to see what it is, but the underlying pattern is unlikely to change.

In Pennsylvania, as in the rest of the USA, we spend vastly more resources (at least through 12th grade) educating the mentally retarded than we spend educating geniuses. But if we want more engineering marvels, like what’s shown in the video of the SpaceX rocket, we need to spend vastly more on gifted education, and that will probably mean less money to spend on special education programs (this would, in turn, require repealing the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)). Resources are not unlimited; eventually our debt bubble will burst, and the opportunity costs will be too overwhelming to ignore. By funding the education of people like the obnoxiously shrieking moron in the second video, rather than the people who are capable of engineering feats like what is showcased in the SpaceX rocket video, we condemn ourselves to Idiocracy. We desperately need to reverse that pattern.

1. Source for first video: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1845446365717156265

2. Source for second video: https://x.com/WorldDarkWeb/status/1845173310474121642

3. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Summary of the Governor’s Recommended Budget for Fiscal Year 2023-24 (pg. 5): https://www.education.pa.gov/Documents/Teachers-Administrators/School%20Finances/Education%20Budget/LegislativeMaterials/2023-24%20Summary%20of%20the%20Governors%20Recommended%20Budget.pdf

4. Shapiro Administration Announces New Program to Expand Access to Gifted Education in the Commonwealth: https://www.media.pa.gov/Pages/Education-Details.aspx?newsid=1413

5. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Summary of the Governor’s Recommended Budget for Fiscal Year 2023-24 (pg. 42): https://www.education.pa.gov/Documents/Teachers-Administrators/School%20Finances/Education%20Budget/LegislativeMaterials/2023-24%20Summary%20of%20the%20Governors%20Recommended%20Budget.pdf