Education Is Where the Future Begins

For more than five decades, the Equal Educational Opportunities Act has carried a promise that should be pretty simple: every child deserves a real opportunity to learn, grow, and succeed. Not just the children who live in the right ZIP code, speak the right language, come from the right family, or happen to fit neatly into systems that were designed with students like them in mind. Every child deserves that opportunity, because education is not simply another government program. I believe education is essential infrastructure. Roads move people. Power lines move energy. Schools move civilization forward.

Everything we say we want for Utah’s future depends, in one way or another, on what happens in our classrooms today. If we want a state that can compete economically, innovate, solve difficult problems, strengthen our democracy, and prepare for challenges we cannot yet imagine, then every student needs access to a quality public education. And access has to mean more than simply being allowed through the front door. It means designing schools around the reality that children are different, supporting students with disabilities instead of treating accommodations as an afterthought, providing language access so families can meaningfully participate in their children’s education, making sure transportation actually gets kids to school, expanding early childhood education families can afford, properly funding classrooms, supporting qualified teachers and librarians, investing in arts and technical education, providing free school lunches, and making sure opportunity does not depend on how much money a family has.

Accessibility is not about lowering expectations. It is about removing unnecessary barriers so more students actually have the opportunity to meet those expectations. Too often, we design institutions around some imaginary “average” person and then act surprised when real human beings do not fit the template. Good public policy works the other way around. We recognize human difference from the beginning, and we build systems flexible enough to serve the people who actually use them. That is especially important in education, because children are not interchangeable parts moving through an assembly line. They are individuals, and the job of a good school system should be to help each of them develop the tools they need to succeed.

This is where one of my deepest governing philosophies comes in: infinite diversity in infinite combinations. I have always loved that phrase because it describes much more than tolerance. Diversity is not something we reluctantly make room for after everything else has been decided. It is one of the fundamental sources of strength in a healthy society. Our children do not all learn the same way, come from the same backgrounds, speak the same languages at home, share the same abilities, cultures, faiths, family structures, interests, talents, or dreams— and thank goodness for that. A society where everyone thinks the same way, learns the same way, and sees the world the same way is not stronger. It is smaller.

Some of the children sitting in Utah classrooms today will become engineers, nurses, teachers, electricians, scientists, artists, mechanics, entrepreneurs, caregivers, programmers, firefighters, musicians, researchers, farmers, public servants, and people working in professions that may not even exist yet. Some will discover abilities no standardized test could have predicted. Some will struggle in one subject and flourish in another. Some will need additional support. Some will need a different path altogether. The purpose of public education should not be to force all of those children into one mold. It should be to give them the foundation, knowledge, confidence, critical-thinking skills, creativity, and opportunity to discover what they are capable of becoming.

And when we build schools that actually make room for that diversity, everyone benefits. We create stronger students because children learn alongside people whose experiences are different from their own. We create stronger communities because education becomes one of the places where people learn how to live together in a pluralistic society. We create more innovation because new ideas are born when different perspectives, experiences, talents, and ways of thinking meet each other. And we create a more resilient Utah because societies capable of drawing upon the talents of all their people are better prepared for whatever comes next.

This is also why I get so frustrated when so much legislative energy is spent turning our schools into culture-war battlegrounds. Utah faces real educational challenges, and those are what lawmakers should be spending their time on. We should be talking about literacy. Teacher retention. Classroom resources. Special education. School meals. Transportation. Career and technical education. Mental health. Early childhood development. The arts. Preparing students for an economy being transformed by technology. Those are governing questions. Those are the questions that actually determine what kind of Utah we will be twenty, fifty, or even one hundred years from now.

Education policy requires us to think beyond the next election cycle because the investments we make in a first-grade classroom today may not fully reveal themselves for decades. That is what stewardship looks like. We are temporary caretakers of institutions our children and grandchildren will inherit, and we have an obligation to leave those institutions stronger, more accessible, more inclusive, and more capable than we found them. The future is not something that simply happens to us. It is something we build together, and few decisions will shape that future more profoundly than what we choose to invest in our children today.

Every child deserves a fair shot. Every child deserves to belong. Every child deserves a school that sees their potential instead of defining them by the barriers standing in their way, and every child deserves the tools to discover what they are capable of becoming. That is not just education policy. It is an investment in Utah’s economy, our communities, our democracy, and the generations that will come after us. Education is where the future begins, and dignity is how we build it.