The Trump administration has said it will abolish the Department of Education. Based on what I’m seeing, this could happen sooner rather than later, and save taxpayers $70 billion.
More importantly, it will return education to the states completely, which is an essential first step to fixing the whole system. The target is to return education to families and communities in both financing and control. That is the American system. Nothing else will substitute.
Yes, there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth but only from those heavily invested in the status quo, namely the unions and the large public schooling systems. They will object to seeing the flow of funds stop, which is their right and wholly expected. But let’s just state plainly that the federal government should have no role in education. Period.
The Department of Education was a last-minute toss to the teachers’ unions, and Jimmy Carter authorized it in 1979 as he was leaving office. Ronald Reagan campaigned on getting rid of it. It never happened because Reagan had many other fish to fry such as pushing a massive military buildup to fight the Cold War. Everything else was submerged due to that. Government shrank almost none at all during his two terms.
You can agree or disagree, but Trump strives to do exactly what he said he would do. His pick to head the Department of Education will first end all DEI funding and the like and then preside over the Department’s demise. It will be good riddance.
Of all topics in political economy, this is the one that has always confused me. People demand to know that if the federal government did not back education, where would education come from? We have only about 5,000 years of recorded history to give us the answers. Parents want more than anything for their children to be a success in life or at least have the best possible chance. That means education.
There is no aspect of parenting past infancy that is not about education. From potty training to table manners to learning to sit still and not touch hot stoves, it is always about education in some form. What we call “formal education” is about reading, math, and so on, plus of course religion as it relates to family wishes. This belongs in the household and extends from there.
Public education as we know it was a very late development in American history. We’ve only had compulsory education nationally from the 1930s. Quite frankly, it’s been a disaster. Keeping kids out of real life in the commercial sphere has created a cascade of cultural collapse in generation after generation, but that is a subject for another day.
Maybe in 1890, I can understand the drive to create public schools to deal with the waves of immigration and demographic change. Even then, people underestimate the incredible effectiveness of religious institutions and their creation of a vast network of private schools around the country. They were particularly effective in part because they were run not for profit but for love and devotion. As wonderful as capitalism is, nothing beats love and devotion as a motive for doing great things.
When I was a kid, I would travel around with him in this strange land, which has the look and feel of being completely unsettled. Indeed, anyone would die there in a day or two if dropped off in a car. They are called desert mountains, but there is hardly any water and nothing truly edible anywhere. It’s a tremendously scary place actually.
Anyway, we would be driving along and happen upon some adobe ruins. He would stop the car and we would walk there. He would take out his notepad and camera and he would explain that this was a mission church that became a schoolhouse. We would stay for hours looking for artifacts. He did this all over the region.
I could never understand his obsession but later his incredibly well-documented book came out. He had interviewed many aging children and grandchildren of the teachers. He went through their family photos and found rare items. He did this research for many decades until his book was written and published. It remains the only book on the topic.
As he always explained, the schools were neither private nor public but community-run, with the help of parents, pastors, or just young adults who loved educating kids. The kids were hugely diverse. This is an area long populated by four groups: descendents of Spanish immigrants, native tribes, migrant tribes and residents from Mexico, and of course white settlers either from the Northeast U.S. or Germany or elsewhere who started arriving like my family did in the 1820s and 1830s.
As a result, these schools were not really centered on one religious outlook but many: native American belief systems, Protestantism, and Catholicism. It was not an issue. It was the same with language. Somehow, these one-room schoolhouses overcame language and class barriers, too. They served merchants, workers, military, or really just anyone. And his book has all the tales of the teachers.
The teachers were typically young unmarried women ages 15 to 25. They were in charge and they worked extremely hard, trading days and doing private tutoring and managing finances such as they were. These schools and these teachers essentially gave birth to modernity and universal knowledge in the early Texas Republic, in an area of Texas that even today few people even visit.
The lesson I take from all of this is if it can happen in Southwest Texas amidst this crazy environment and wild diversity with almost no resources, it can happen anywhere. The challenges in those days were far beyond what anyone faces today, and yet it happened.
In the 21st century, there is really no excuse for federal involvement in education and not even state involvement. It can happen entirely at the community level with churches, family associations, online, and much more. Indeed, this is what is happening already all over the country with the explosion of home education and hybrid education. People in urban public schools are essentially trapped and doomed unless the system is blown up and allowed to recreate itself.
Even homeschooling was controversial only a few decades ago but no more. When lockdowns came and the schools were closed, people were forced to do what was once illegal: educate their own kids. They discovered or rediscovered parental responsibility. That’s when we saw local uprisings against school boards with people feeling outrage at what the schools had been trying to shove down the kids’ throats.
In any case, there are better ways to go about education. It can evolve from within the structure of the social order without the involvement of government. A first step in any case is to abolish the Department of Education. It’s going to happen soon, I sense it, and good. Then we need to reassess the whole model of public education and this cruel system of compulsory education, which is really just compulsory miseducation and forced boredom.
Give a good life back to the kids and return all education to parents and communities to manage. In your heart, you know this is the right answer. America is just the place for a grand national experiment in freedom in education because this is our history and heritage.
