Sen. Steven Thayn, the Senate Education Committee chairman, believes the public education system is mediocre and fundamentally flawed because it minimizes the importance of parents in favor of government. 

That’s what, among other things, Thayn shared  with me on the Hoff Time Report last Thursday. 

Thayn is the first Idaho education committee chairman I’m aware of to question the premise of the government-run education system and to call out its failings publicly. 

Still, he said he doubts there are not enough votes on the Senate Education Committee to pass school choice legislation such as an education savings account. He declined to address my questions about whether special interest groups, such as labor unions and the school board’s association, are partly to blame for lack of movement from a Republican-controlled Legislature.

I was disappointed to hear that he’s more geared to preserve the existing school system than I am because he believes that’s what parents want. His self-directed learner legislation that just passed the Senate is school reform at glacial speeds.

It was a fascinating conversation, one that reporters who knew about it might, you know, report on. But of course that has not happened. Instead the press focused on my interviewing Thayn while I had Covid. James Dawson, a reporter for Boise State’s government radio station noted that I started the discussion with Thayn from a separate room because I had a positive Covid test. Dawson reported that I later joined Thayn in person because the video feed malfunctioned. 

Thayn told me at the beginning of the interview he didn’t mind if I’d join him on the set regardless of the positive Covid test. I made a joke about being accused of infecting everyone at the capitol via my interaction with him. Ultimately, the real reason I stayed in another room is because the equipment and studio had already been set up for a video feed inview with the two of us on a split screen. 

In being together, I suppose there’s some risk of spreading this mild Omicron variant between us.  But that’s the risk in living. We all have jobs to do, and when we do that job there’s never no amount of risk involved, whether that’s from driving to work in the morning to climbing a ladder to a tall roof. Mine involves talking to a lot of people, which necessarily means interacting with them.

Here’s the thing. It’s been two years. I’ve had enough. We all have. The world cannot continue to function in fear of Covid, and it doesn’t have to. I’m done playing the game where we’re supposed to pretend the masks, the mandates, the vaccines, the boosters, and the distancing have done or are doing anything.

I’ve always wondered if there was a secondary effect of the government schools system besides the documented absence of skills one should have upon completion of secondary school. Now we know there is: A generation of students who were taught to obey and defend government experts and collectivism. Some of those students grew up to be journalists. 

Thus you have social media giants who censor non-government sanctioned medical views, and journalists who have been taught to pounce on the slightest breach of the government’s phony Covid rules. 

Reporters are so conditioned by the education system that they don’t even pick up on the significance of one of the most important education elected officials in the state describing the state’s education system as mediocre and questioning its whole premise. To them, disregarding government Covid rituals is the greater story.