Gov. Mitch Daniels' remarks to the Weekly Standard about a truce on social issues captured most of the attention, but his comments on education are just as interesting.

No real surprises here but the governor's choice of words seems to be tailored for the audience. The writer, of course, does his best to characterize Hoosiers as complete rubes. Describing a couple of roofers the governor talked up in an Indianapolis-area McDonalds, Andrew Ferguson writes, "They were extremely genial and had no more than a dozen teeth between them."

Ferguson attempted to flatter the governor by complimenting Indiana schools, describing those he had seen with "immaculate athletic fields, vast cafeterias, swimming pools."

"Yeah, it's a problem," is the governor's reply.

"When we were first campaigning, I started to notice, we'd drive through these rural counties, these very poor counties, and we'd drive up over a hill and on the other side you'd see a brand-new high school that looked like Frank Lloyd Wright had just been there. Enormous gold-plated buildings. It turned out we had higher capital expenditures for educational construction per square foot than any other state. There'd be a bond issue and then the architects and contractors would run amok, spending money on things that had nothing to do with academics. I understand why it happens. The school board likes it because they get to play designer for a year. But we couldn't afford it."

If anyone can point me to a "poor" county with a gold-plated school, I would like to see it. The Indy suburbs don't qualify, even if their school buildings are quite nice.

But the governor was just getting started.

"Only 61 cents of every education dollar gets into the classroom in Indiana," he tells Ferguson, who goes on to breathlessly report that "school funding increased every year under Daniels before the recession, and since the downturn, when most areas of state government have seen cuts of 25 percent or more, education has been reduced by only 2 percent.

"Yet the local school boards and their Democratic allies in the state legislature continue to complain. Daniels calls education funding the bloody shirt' of Indiana politics: 'It doesn't take long before somebody starts waving it.' "

The writer describes another restaurant encounter with the common folk :

"We were having lunch one day at a favorite spot, the St. Louis Street Soda Shop in Vincennes, on the Wabash River. Having resisted the Fried Bologna Sandwich ($3.49, with chips, pickle extra), Daniels was washing down a quarter-pound Coney Island dog with a large butterscotch milkshake — 'the best in the state,' he assured Dolly, the delighted owner — when a reporter from the local radio station appeared. She pressed him on the education budget cuts too. She told him the local school board had just laid off nine teachers and an administrator.

" 'What would you say to those people?' she asked.

"He visibly flinched, just as he had on MitchTV.

" 'I'd say it should have been nine administrators and one teacher. There are 20 things that school board could do before it had to lay off one teacher.' "

I checked the Knox County Community Schools Web site to see just how administrator-heavy the school district might be -- not so much, it appears. The central office staff includes the superintendent, an instructional services director, a Title I coordinator, a gifted and talented program coordinator and a few secretaries. In fact, it doesn't have nine administrators to spare. And the photos suggest the school buildings are not "gold-plated."

The governor manages in the lengthy article to get in another plug for Charles Murray, author of "Real Education" and co-author of "The Bell Curve."

Daniels' most startling comment was on a slightly different topic. He told Ferguson that he would deliver the commencement address at Franklin College the following weekend, where he intended to deliver a counterpoint to President Obama's commencement address call for public service, "in which the president discouraged the pursuit of mere material gain in favor of nonprofit and government work," in the writer's words.

"That strikes me as exactly the wrong message to send to young people," Daniels said. "He's got it completely wrong. Government service -- nonprofits -- all that's fine and necessary. But the host can only stand so many parasites."

There you go -- inspiring words for all of you toiling in the fields of government service and nonprofits.