On April 20, President Donald Trump dropped another executive order: Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities has been received by both supporters and critics as aiming at the complete elimination of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE).
Now, look, if you love your children (which of course you do), then the best thing you can do is take executive control of their education. You could directly educate them. You could hire tutors. You could enroll them in a private school and supplement their acquisition of knowledge. You could join an agrarian commune where humble folk till the soil and collectively edify their young beneath the towering mansion of the commune’s ruling elite.
You’ve got options. But whatever you do, absolutely do not send them to a government school. The state’s claim on our children is, in the first place, ridiculously paradoxical. As a species, if we cannot be trusted to properly educate our own children, then how can any of us be trusted to administer a vast apparatus of lethal aggression? And if we cannot be trusted with a state, how can the state be trusted with our children?
That being said, the elimination (or marginal disruption) of the DOE and the empowerment of states and municipalities regarding education would be a most welcome development. Despite its nice sounding name, the DOE is a fiendish beast that devours the souls of children. It is simultaneously the formal apotheosis and the material negation of free and compulsory education in the West. In short, it is a complete disaster.
School choice advocate Corey DeAngelis told Libertarian Institute senior fellow Tom Woods that Trump’s executive order is intended to reduce the power and responsibilities of the DOE, thereby (hopefully) making it politically viable for Congress to eliminate it. Since Congress created the DOE in 1979, only it can slay the beast.
“The Department of Education doesn’t employ a single teacher, the Department of Education doesn’t educate a single child, and every state already has a Department of Education. Why do we need another one in Washington DC?”
Why indeed? The DOE is the result of diabolical state logic at work. Consider that 455 years before Congress created the DOE, the modern public school was born. In his book Education: Free and Compulsory, economist and historian Murray Rothbard wrote:
“As a result of [Martin] Luther’s urgings, the German state of Gotha founded the first modern public schools in 1524, and Thurungia followed in 1527. Luther himself founded the Saxony School Plan, which later became, in essence, the state education system for most of the Protestant States of Germany.”
Rothbard observed that Luther wanted the government schools to enforce his brand of Protestantism, while a century later, “The ruthless and ascetic Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony were eager to adopt the Calvinist plan of compulsory education in order to insure the creation of good Calvinists and the suppression of any possible dissent.”
Rothbard continued:
“The most important influence in shaping the Massachusetts Bay Colony was its first governor John Winthrop, who ruled the colony for twenty years from its inception in 1630…Winthrop regarded any opposition to the policies of the governor, particularly when he was the governor, as positively seditious.”
Imagine how shocked Luther and Winthrop would be if they could see Massachusetts in 2025. They would certainly inquire what sort of republican principle it was that put a sapphic witch in the governor’s chair. Yet while the content of state indoctrination has evolved, the form of state indoctrination has remained the public school system.
In the nineteenth century, the system shifted toward the “non-sectarian” government supremacist machine we have today. As school teacher and author John Taylor Gatto put it:
“Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.”
Essentially, schools were to provide the state with obedient workers and soldiers. So, even by its own sick agenda, the public school system has clearly gone astray. Do American high school graduates have a reputation as obedient workers? Can we seriously imagine the state conscripting the youth and successfully waging a land war in Iran? Or even unsuccessfully waging a land war in Iran? Ponder that. We might not even have what it takes to lose a war to Iran. It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.
Apparently, the public school system destroyed the intellect of the ruling elite as well. Our foreign policy mandarins have put Iran-aligned Shia forces in control of Iraq, left Afghanistan in the hands of the Taliban, destroyed Ukraine, empowered Russia, and now have us waging an unwinnable war against one of the poorest nations on the planet, Yemen. This conflict has seen dozens of our beloved Reaper drones shot down and an F/A-18 fighter jet fall off an aircraft carrier.
The DOE is a corrupt and self-serving agency that, according to DeAngelis, is “a money laundering operation for the Democratic Party and the teacher unions.”
Forget about enforcing religious ideology or scientifically managing the masses or convincing children they were born in the wrong body. Sure, that’s all fun, and the DOE sits at the top of the state-run school system’s social engineering kookery.
But what the DOE is ultimately about is wearing a swank suit, sitting in an expansive office, sipping a latte, cashing a big check, and feeling important.
Luther and Winthrop would be disappointed to learn a hard lesson: the ultimate problem with government is that it’s a government program.
