I don't see how it's an argument from a false premise given that I'm just asking questions and hoping for some conversation, not making a formal argument yet. S

I don't see how it's an argument from a false premise given that I'm just asking questions and hoping for some conversation, not making a formal argument yet. Still, suppose you are inferring an argument I'm making ulteriorly through my questions, and have inferred that I've argued "reducing budgets implies only such classes are cut", then sure, that's technically false. But I'm not making that argument, ulteriorly or otherwise. In my followup I thought I sufficiently clarified that things like pottery and other classes being cut are typical examples of what goes, as something must, but of course not the only things. (And of course necessarily, if such things are already gone, something else must go, like small class sizes.) This is a whole side-show commentary however. My main line of questioning remains: how do you define education and in what way does lacking it matter for the purposes you claim to care about (being able to distinguish reality and fantasy)? Do you want to even venture at broaching the religious question? I'm ok with leaving that to the side. Maybe we can start with the downsides you've extracted out. What subjects are the important ones for which kids must have up to date textbooks in-class, the lack of which will hurt them in distinguishing reality and fantasy? What supplies are proper? What are some objective impacts to learning something when there are student-teacher ratios of 10:1 vs 20:1 vs 50:1? Does the extent of the impact matter by subject? (For the last I'd bet yes given many well funded universities have ratios in the hundreds for certain courses with apparently few if any seriously ill effects.) (To head off another possible point of miscommunication, I don't dispute that nebulous unfactored "education" can have more benefits than just distinguishing reality and fantasy and that various positive aspects might not impact that particular aspect at all, I just want to target that particular one for what you'd like to focus on when "more education" is pumped in, either by the schools that are having their budgets reduced or by the politicians themselves. Maybe that's another form of the question to ask instead? How specifically do you expect the ideal politician to education their constituents (and what's the ideal educator:educatee ratio?))