Opinion: Torch the Schools? That's a County Line, Not a Talking Point

Opinion.

On a recent broadcast of The Armstrong & Getty Show, the hosts worked themselves into a full lather over campus free-speech numbers and landed somewhere past frustration and into demolition. One host's answer to the data: "Shut 'em down is the answer." His co-host went further, declaring public education "ruined" and calling for the whole system — kindergarten through graduate school — to be scrapped and started over.

I understand the impulse. The hosts were reacting to survey findings they cited on air showing large shares of college students say shouting down a speaker is sometimes acceptable, and that meaningful percentages self-censor in class discussions or with other students rather than risk their grade or their standing. Those are real numbers worth a serious hearing, wherever they came from. If a campus can't host a disagreement without a riot, something upstream is broken.

But "blow it up" isn't a policy. It's a mood. And the trouble with moods is they don't stop at county lines, or state lines, or the line between K-12 and a state university system, which are not remotely the same institution, funded the same way, or governed by the same people.

Here's the part that should give any states'-rights conservative pause: in the same breath, the hosts turned around and praised the Trump administration's handling of higher education, singling out Justice Department official Harmeet Dhillon for special credit — "Harmeet Dhillon, you're a hero. We love you." That's a fine thing to feel about a federal appointee. It's a strange thing to feel while also arguing the entire public education apparatus should be torn down and rebuilt.

Pick one. Either the fix runs through Washington, in which case you're rooting for federal officials to reshape what happens in a third-grade classroom in your county — which is not how American education has ever worked, and not how it should work. Or the fix runs through your local school board, your state legislature, your state university system's board of regents — the people actually elected or appointed to answer for what gets taught and how speech gets handled on a campus they oversee. You don't get federal heroism and local self-government in the same sentence without contradicting yourself.

School boards in Ohio, Texas, Florida, and dozens of other states have spent the last several years doing exactly what the hosts say they want — rewriting curriculum standards, adjusting civics requirements, setting new rules for speaker policies at state universities. Some of that work has been clumsy. Some of it has drawn lawsuits. But it's happening in statehouses and school board meetings, which is where it belongs, because that's where the people paying the property taxes and sending their kids to these schools actually get a vote.

A national demolition order — even a rhetorical one — skips past all of that. It treats a Wisconsin school district and a California state university system as the same problem with the same solution, cheered on from Washington. That's not a conservative instinct. That's a federal-government instinct wearing conservative language.

If the campus-speech numbers are as bad as the hosts suggest, the honest next step isn't a cable-news-ready call to "blow it up." It's a call to your state legislator asking what the state's flagship university's speaker policy actually says, and whether the state board of education is doing anything about self-censorship rates in its own high schools. That's less satisfying than a rant. It's also the only version of the fix that doesn't require handing more authority over local classrooms to whichever administration happens to be in the White House this decade — the same authority conservatives have spent forty years arguing shouldn't be there in the first place.

Washington should stay in its lane. So should the applause line.

Heard on The Armstrong & Getty Show — Oh God! I'm Going Home! (2026-09-18).