Independent journalist writes for the Baffler about books from Heritage Foundation president Kevion Roberts and improbable Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Both books theorize about what’s “really” wrong with education in the US, and propose their solutions.
Roberts and Hegseth are wild for the conservative cause du jour, the so-called classical education that, as Roberts defines it, seeks to form virtuous students by grounding them in the best of the Western canon, typically represented by a selective mélange of Greek and Roman texts, early Christian writing, and U.S. founding documents. Hegseth couches his case for classical Christian education in military terms. Yes, students will be immersed in the great books—books that have contributed original ideas to “the conversation about Truth, Goodness, and Beauty that descends from at least three millennia of the Western Christian tradition”—but only after an insurgency defeats the monopoly of “government schools” and “woke” private institutions. “First we survive, then we regroup and reorganize while weakening the control and legitimacy of our foe,” writes Hegseth. “And finally we replace their power structure with reconstructed schools based on freedom and faith.”
But was there ever a time when American schools weren’t somehow bound up with the economy? It can be hard to find an idyllic stretch in which education existed free from the demands of employers, when parents weren’t already steering their offspring away from letters and toward numbers. In The Irony of Early School Reform, his seminal 1968 account of the origins of public schools in Massachusetts, historian Michael Katz describes mid–nineteenth century education boosters as seizing on the practical economic benefits of schooling, not just for laborers but for the state. The industrial and commercial success of Massachusetts was dependent “on the intelligence of the laboring classes upon the land and in the shops and mills,” proclaimed George Boutwell, the state’s education chief from 1855 to 1861. “Thus we connect the productive power of our state with its institutions of learning.”
Such early rhetoric equating education with economic growth went hand in hand with warnings to manual laborers that they needed to skill and school up or else. “Whole classes in our community who, not a generation ago, would have been content to earn their living by unskilled labor, are now thrust from that lower market, and forced to add knowledge and intelligence to the labor of their hands,” cautioned the Brookline School Committee, outside Boston, in 1855. The committee was making the economic case for more schools and schooling, but their dire prediction that entire groups of workers faced imminent obsolescence has more or less driven education policy ever since. The farmer needed scientific knowledge of the soil, insisted these early school reformers, while the construction workers of yore, tasked with erecting the structures of the future, would no longer be able to rely on practical experience—the “ ‘rule of thumb’ of an ignorant mechanic.”
Roughly a century and a half later, the XQ Institute, a corporate-minded school fix-it group cofounded by Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’s billionaire widow, was back with a nearly identically ominous prophecy. In a report from 2018 on the future of work, the group conceded that American high schools had done a fine job preparing youngsters for an industrializing society—but that was then. Today’s students are has-beens before they’ve even begun, asserted the group, ill-equipped for a world of “innovation, customization, globalization, and automation” and almost certain to be replaced by robots. That is, unless high school is transformed. While the precise nature of this transformation was left vague, the rat-a-tat of questionable statistical claims—e.g., that the average young American will hold more than eleven different jobs between the ages of eighteen and fifty—left no doubt as to its urgency. If the vision of education as job training is as old as American schools, the insistent demand that we fix the schools or risk economic collapse has never been far behind.
The right’s portrait of radicals slowly and steadily laying siege to the nation’s education system across the decades en route to socialism also obscures just how thoroughly bipartisan the project of tethering schools ever more tightly to the needs of employers has been. In From the New Deal to the War on Schools, his sweeping 2022 history of federal education policy, political scientist Daniel Moak describes a stifling consensus regarding the purpose and function of education as skills acquisition. The GOP and conservative-minded business groups have long invoked “efficiency” as their sales pitch for this vision, argues Moak: meeting the needs of employers, tying individual earnings to skills, and dominating global economic competition. Liberals have embraced a similar view of schooling but for a very different rationale: that employment-minded education is the best vehicle through which to realize individual success, social mobility, and racial equality. “Elites from across the political spectrum,” concludes Moak, “promote the idea that the public education system should be focused on imparting skills that offer individuals the potential for future success within the existing social and economic order.”