Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Betsy DeVos wants to shut down the Department of Education
Betsy DeVos wants to shut down the Department of Education
Apr 26, 2025 12:28 AM

She’s not the first Republican to want to do away with the DoE, and with good reason. But as with all deeply entrenched bureaucracies, it may no longer be possible.

Read More…

Betsy DeVos thinks the Department of Education “should not exist.” She’s not the first secretary of education we’ve had who understood her central purpose to be the dissolution of the agency of which she was in charge (until she resigned on January 7, 2021). Ronald Reagan famously pledged the elimination of the office when he ran for president in 1980, promising to undo Carter’s “boondoggle.” Terrel Bell, Reagan’s first secretary of education, insisted that the department should be turned into a foundation, and thus placed under the control of the private sector. Once Bell got wobbly on mitment to eliminate the agency, Reagan turned control over to William Bennett, who actively called for the department’s elimination.

Reagan’s appointment of Bennett to run the agency pointed to a central paradox of modern government: Bureaucratic gains are irreversible, and as a result electoral politics e an petition for control of the bureaucratic apparatus. Conservatives could not eliminate the department they loathed, but they could support a secretary who at least seemed sympathetic to their interests.

It’s in the nature of the idea of “public education” that it will conflict with private ends. Parents are the first and thus primary educators of their children. The only way to bypass this would be to separate infants from their parents at birth, the path suggested by Socrates when he reflected on the proper formation of the guardian class. In Socrates’ ideal city, well-bred children would be placed in the care of nurses whose mitment is to the good of the city.

While it is true that American constitutionalism asked for a well-educated citizenry, the request could never be entertained apart from the demands of liberty and the interests of both households munities to maintain their independence. Education in America stressed both petency and mastery of arts and letters, and this emphasis was always connected to principles of freedom.

As America transformed itself from a Republic of republics to a nation of consequence, the demand for more state control of education increased as well, bringing with it a seismic shift in our understanding of what the schools are, what role they ought to play, and on what principles education ought to be conducted.

Consider, for example, the educational reforms of Horace Mann, who argued vigorously for mon schools that would bring all children into the nation. Mann stressed three previously contestable aspects of public education: It had to pulsory, it had to be universal, and it had to be managed by a centralized bureaucracy. Mann cloaked his understanding of public education in religious language, frequently referring to schools as sacred temples or places where, Christ-like, little children were being called to participate in the kingdom of heaven. Clearly schooled in the Bible and Calvinist theology, Mann sought to connect these to life in a democratic society, whose futurity required prehensive organization and … united effort, acting for mon end and under the focal light of mon intelligence.” Mann viewed local governments as essential “bunglers” who couldn’t move education toward its goal of ensuring national progress. Parents, likewise, were benighted educators who had only a minimal claim to their child’s development. Parents had their children for only a short period of time, after which they would be bequeathed to society as adults. If parents do a bad job with the children, society pays the price. Better, Mann averred, that society intervene early in the process, protect the child from bad parenting, and ensure, via standardized school systems, the production of moral and intelligent adults. One can’t bend an oak, he said, but one can move a seed.

We see a similar emphasis in the development of the National Education Association, the main client connected to DoE policy and largesse. By 1918, the NEA insisted that schools be able to reach their authority back into the home and reform it, since the home was often a bastion of backwardness, ethnic division, and benightedness. The student could then be charged with carrying the ethos of the state back into the household for the purpose of standardizing households.

Such standardization is the key to educational reform in the 20th century. The increase in centralized state authority found its handmaiden in the emergent social sciences, with their emphases on methods, aggregation of populations, and categorization, the last of which tended to see things only as species. These emphases can clearly be found in contemporary education, with the foci on standardized tests, measurable es, and universal curricular guidelines.

This nationalization and standardization received more formal status with the creation of the Department of Education in 1980, whose task it was to nationalize education through data collection and research. The department has not only grown in size since its inception but also has grown to dominate the nation’s educational landscape by using funds to entice schools to pursue both “benchmarks” and, more damningly, social reform. The emphasis on STEM to the exclusion of humane learning serves America’s position as petitor in the local marketplace, and social reform and identity politics provide moral cover. Bureaucrats driven by the current social science research substitute their judgment for that of teachers and parents.

Clearly DoE has taken center stage in the culture wars (consider the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter as an example) and been a central actor in using the coercive power of federal funding to pliance around a set of cultural markers and expectations. It has certainly not been immune from using its influence to advance a progressive agenda and identity politics. One would expect parents to push back against this.

Secretary DeVos’ tenure was not without controversy, but also not without significant successes, even if eliminating the department wasn’t one of them. Rolling back the open attacks on due process on our college campuses was a significant albeit short-lived achievement. And I’d be remiss not to mention my favorite moment of her administration: threatening to withhold federal funds from Princeton University after the school issued an opportunistic and disingenuous admission of systemic racism. Just slowing down the progressive agenda was no mean feat.

And while I can’t speak for Secretary DeVos, my guess is that she rightly divines that such successes will last only as long as conservatives hold some kind of power; and that, furthermore, the internal logic of centralized bureaucratic enterprises will always be progressive, in no small part because the roughly 4,400 employees of that department are overwhelmingly progressive in their views. But even if they weren’t, the animating principle of the enterprise is to replace parents with teachers, experience with expertise, and local control with national objectives. These national objectives, in turn, are often contrary to the interests and well-being of munities, particularly when those objectives have an economic or military hue. It may be in the interest of the state to sacrifice citizens in war, but it’s never in the interest of the parent, and that’s true whether it’s a war of a military or a cultural variety.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Let’s Change Hearts and Minds (and Laws, Too)
Few clichés are so widespread within the evangelical subculture, says Matthew Lee Anderson, as the notion that our witness must be one of “changing hearts and minds.” In careful hands, the idea is at best ambiguous. At worst it reinforces the sort of interior-oriented individualism that allows for and perpetuates a blissful naivete about how institutions and structures shape our dispositions and thoughts. In less than careful hands, the phrase drives a wedge between law and culture by attempting to...
How to Steal a Bike in New York City
Edmund Burke didn’t really say it, but it still rings true: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. In a test of this maxim, filmmaker Casey Neistat tries to steal his own bike in several locations around New York City and finds that most people do nothing about it—even when it’s done right in front of a police station. I recently spent a couple of days conducting a bike theft experiment, which...
Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Threat to Freedom
Over at the Liberty Law Blog, there is an excellent post titled “Ronald Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Dialogue of Liberty” by Alan Snyder. Snyder delves into the influence Chambers had on Reagan and how their worldviews differed as well. Many conservatives and scholars felt Chambers’ prediction that the West was on the losing side of history in the battle against Marxism collapsed after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union. For many, the ideas of Chambers...
Is Work a Curse?
Is work a curse, a result of mankind’s fall from grace? Not according to the Book of Genesis. As Hugh Whelchel, Executive Director of the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, explains, what Adam was called to do in the garden is what we are still called to do in our work today: Humanity was created by God to cultivate and keep God’s creation, which included developing it and protecting it. You see, we were created to be stewards of...
How to Love Liberty More Than a Libertarian Economist
I have a deep and abiding love for liberty—which is why I find myself so often in disagreement with libertarians. Libertarians love liberty too, of course, but they tend to love liberty a bit differently. I love liberty in an earthy, elemental way. I love liberty because I need it—like I need air and food—for human flourishing. In contrast, the libertarians I’ve encountered tend to love liberty primarily as an abstraction. Indeed, the most ideologically consistent libertarians I know seem...
Obamacare’s Religious Rubes
The White House has a plan to mobilize prayer vigils in front of the Supreme Court in defense of Obamacare. It was reported that the administration met with leaders at non-profit organizations and religious officials who support the new health care law. The court takes up the constitutional test of the health care mandate in a couple of weeks. The mandate has now been challenged in 26 states. Cue the same stale big government religious prophets who confuse statism and...
Italy’s Tax Man Takes Aim at the Vatican
Kishore Jayabalan, the Acton Institute’s Rome office director, was interviewed by the Zenit news agency in an article titled, “Is Taxing the Church a Real Solution for Italy?” In the article, Jayabalan discusses the history of the Italian state and its imposition of property taxes on the Roman Catholic Church’s land holdings, residences and non-profit businesses. Sometimes in the past, particularly under Napoleonic rule and before the Lateran Pacts, the institution of property tax was often a subject of state...
Constitutional Cases and the Four Cardinal Virtues
Should virtue be a consideration in judicial decisionmaking? Indiana Law Professor R. George Wright makes an intriguing argument for why the four cardinal virtues could be useful in interpreting constitutional cases: Judges typically decide constitutional cases by referring to one or more legal precedents, rules, tests, principles, doctrines, or policies. This Article mends supplementing this standard approach with fully legitimate and appropriate attention to what many cultures have long recognized as the four basic cardinal virtues of practical wisdom or...
Lord Acton and the Power of the Historian
Looking through my back stacks of periodicals the other day I ran across a review in Books & Culture by David Bebbington, “Macaulay in the Dock,” of a recent biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay. The essay takes its point of departure in Lord Acton’s characterization of Macaulay as “one of the greatest of all writers and masters, although I think him utterly base, contemptible and odious.” As Bebbington writes, “Acton, a towering intellectual of the later 19th century, was at...
Integral Human Development
The Journal of Markets & Morality is planning a theme issue for the Spring of 2013: “Integral Human Development,” i.e. the synthesis of human freedom and responsibility necessary for the material and spiritual enrichment of human life. According to Pope Benedict XVI, Integral human development presupposes the responsible freedom of the individual and of peoples: no structure can guarantee this development over and above human responsibility. (Caritas in Veritate 17) There is a delicate balance between the material and the...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved