Are we 'the biggest dummies' in the world?

At a town hall last week, Sen. Troy McKeown made a curious comment about the state of education.

“We build the biggest dummies in the world,” he said.

On its own, it’s not a positive quote. And I don’t agree with it. But what’s the context?

He was talking about how Wyoming spends thousands of dollars more per student than neighboring states (Idaho and Utah), yet Wyoming students’ test scores are slightly higher than the scores of our neighbors’ students.

That’s not a very nice thing to say about anyone, particularly children. But it also doesn’t make much sense. Wyoming’s test scores are slightly higher than Idaho and Utah. Already, that disproves his claim that Wyoming has the biggest dummies in the world. You can’t be the biggest dummy in the world if there are people scoring lower than you.

That’s just basic facts and logic.

For decades, Wyoming has watched as its young people move away and find jobs in other states. If Wyoming kids were “dummies,” as the good senator claims, then why would companies in other states want to hire those kids? Is this just a massive prank by Wyoming? Are we churning out “dummies” for other states to bring down their value? Of course not.

Over the last decade, I’ve been to nearly all of the schools in Campbell County, and I’ve gotten to write about some very neat things the students are doing. They’re learning how to code, they’re speaking two languages, they’re building tiny houses, they’re teaching younger students. Now, sure, schools will typically invite the media to cover something positive. I’m not going to get asked to do a story on students doing below-average work.

But the point is, there are hundreds of high-performing students in this district. They will go on to do great things. They are not dummies. And even if there are underperforming students, we should be encouraging them to do better, not calling them names.

Here’s an idea: If we don’t like the numbers, let’s fire the people who come up with the numbers, and hire someone who will give us numbers that we do like. Or just do away with the numbers altogether. That’s what one certain administration has done.

In late March, the First Lady, Melania Trump, hosted a global summit at the White House. She showed up with an AI robot that she claims could be the next step in the evolution of education. She also gave a shout-out to “best-in-class companies” like Meta, Palantir, Google, X, OpenAI and Microsoft.

“Through the use of AI, we can now access centuries worth of humanity’s knowledge base,” she said.

There’s another way of accessing centuries worth of knowledge: It’s called reading a book.

Now, artificial intelligence has its place in education, such as the manikin at Gillette College that allows nursing students to run through different simulations. But I don’t trust a robot to actually give instruction to children.

If the White House wants to get in bed with big tech and have billionaires dictate public education, that’s their decision. It’s a bad decision, in my opinion, but what do I know?

In fact, why stop at robot teachers? Let’s just go full robot. We could replace poor-performing human students with robot students who can be programmed to get perfect test scores, and lazy parents can be replaced by robot parents who can give the robot children the care they need.

There’s no way this can go horribly wrong, and it’ll get our test scores up, because at the end of the day, that’s what really matters.