Doug Porter is a writer based in San Diego, and he has some warnings about the fallout of the dismantling of the department of education.
Amid a staged set of young people seated at desks on risers on Thursday, President Trump signed a long-promised executive order for cabinet secretary Linda McMahon to begin shutting down the Department of Education.
“We’re going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible,” Trump said.
According to Article I of the Constitution, only Congress can shut down the education department. For this reason, no other modern president has attempted to unilaterally shutter a federal department. There are already lawsuits challenging the order, but the intention by Trump is to leave an entity so worthless that Congress will feel obligated to make the death blow.
Hollowing out of the Department of Education is following the formula drawn up by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. It’s all there on page 319 of their manifesto.
At Civil Discourse, Joyce Vance spelled out the reasoning in an essay published last summer, where she concluded:
- Trump and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 authors are afraid of an open marketplace of ideas where kids learn to think for themselves. Kids can learn about—and learn from—the history of slavery in this country. The idea that it must be suppressed because it might make white kids feel bad is ridiculous.
- The more we know of our history, events like the internment of Japanese Americans in camps during World War II, or the treatment of Irish, Italian, Jewish, and other immigrants as they came to country, the better we can become. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. That seems to be the plan here.
The hacking away of the Department of Education by the Trump administration is just the beginning of Make America Ignorant Again. Public schools will be the first to suffer, and there are positively vile actions coming for institutions of higher education.
Like other major MAGA/DOGE overhauls within the federal government, the premises for undoing public education are faulty. Maybe faulty is too nice a word; let’s call it a pack of lies, playing on misconceptions and misinformation circulating among the public.
Today’s essay will be focused on K-12 systems. Later on, I’ll get to higher education, as I sort the debris arising from the flood of actions from the Trump administration .
Before I get into the particulars, let’s take a look at the bigger picture, namely an understanding of the purpose of public education. There are different answers to that question, based on who is getting educated, and what the needs of a society are.
In western societies, dating back to the Prussian empire’s standardization and mandatory regimens, the spread of mass primary education outside the church and home was an effort to advance economies. If you look at how, where and why public education was adopted, it’s increasingly obvious that mass primary education also is used as a tool for social control.
These days universal public education is considered to be part of a the social compacts government made to address the needs of the citizenry. If you realize that a big part of the MAGA agenda is the dissolution and or privatization of social services, then the need to dismantle the Education Department makes more sense.