Why They're Really Gonna Kill the Department of Education

The real battle isn't about saving money, it's about saving America

Trump Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon pretends to fight in the ring the way she’ll pretend to fight for kids. (Screengrab / Undated WWE video via ABCNews video.)

Republicans have said a lot about why RePresident-elect Donald Trump wants to eliminate the Department of Education, which he failed to do during the same four years he couldn’t finish his homework on the southern border.

But what they say they want isn’t all they want. To really get at why the department is so offensive to the right, we have to look at its roots. Why was it created?

You may have seen mentions of Pres. Jimmy Carter creating the department, first overseen, ironically, by the education-unfriendly President Ronald Reagan. Not exactly.

The Education Department’s story actually begins a century beforehand. It’s a shit-ton wilder. And it reveals what’s really going on. (Spoiler: It involves Satan).

Project 2025 — the depends-who-you-believe blueprint for the Donald Trump2.0 administration — says flat-out, “...the Department of Education should be eliminated.” It’s in Chapter 11, because it’s morally bankrupt.

Now, the Trump campaign denied it was following Project 2025’s marching orders. So let’s see what the campaign had to say: 

We are going to close the Department of Education in Washington, D.C.¹ and send it back to the States, where it belongs, and let the States run our educational system as it should be run.

Sounds like they’re on the same page, specifically, 2,025. 

And although Trump can’t unilaterally shutter a federal agency, he can do it with Congress. So, yes, literally we might be just a few months away from debate, a vote, and presidential signature destroying the Department of Education.

Before we enter that battle, let’s arm ourselves with some info. First of all, the left’s first response is going to be already that Trump wants to defund schools. That’s a trap.

Look at the rest of the Trump platform. “...and send it back to the States, where it belongs…”

That’s the name of the game. The funding argument is dead on arrival. This is about control.

And Democrats are at a disadvantage because they’ve played the Republican game ever since Bill Clinton took his win-as-a-Republican Arkansas strategy national.

All the time, you hear Democrats parrot Republican talking points about big government, federal bureaucrats, out-of-touch politicians, and, on the flip side, the holy infallibility of local government and parents and blah blah.

Which is going to make it a lot harder for today’s Democrats to argue that local governments shouldn’t have free rein to run schools however Mayor Fuckoff von Didgeridoo and his compromised school board and bought-off PTA want to.

So let’s look at how we got the Education Department in the first place, and what education has been for at different times in American history.

We first got education because religion. Public education at the time wasn’t really a thing, so it didn’t come over with the colonizers.²

Before America was a country — even before right-wingers subordinated it as “under God” in the 1950s — religious leaders wanted American kids to read The Bible.

The Protestantism of the time held that worshipers didn’t need The Church as intercessors. They could connect with Jesus themselves, through His word (as written by drug-addled authors and edited by squabbling political factions three centuries later and then translated to give it extra polish, etc., etc.)

(Today, education, including reading The Bible — or anything — isn’t a religious issue because the predominant right-wing religiosity in this country has fuck-all to do with reading; it’s moved on from Bible-based Protestantism to Do As Thou Wilt Protestantism. Who needs books, even if they are The Good?)

As Politico reported one of the previous times the Christian right put the Education Department in their cross…hairs, a 1642 Massachusetts law said:

...every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased them to 50 households, shall forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read, whose wages shall be paid either by the parents or masters of such children, or by the inhabitants in general.

The name of this law? The Old Deluder Satan Act. 

Its purpose: To equip the citizenry against the old deluder. At the time, that was Satan. Can anyone think of an old deluder now, class? Show of hands?

So how did the federal government get involved in the War Against Old Deluders? 

Just prior to the Civil War, taxpayer-funded compulsory schools were promulgated throughout the North. Why? Fuckin’ immigrants. Fuckin’ Catholic immigrants.

That’s right, those states built the basis of our modern education system “to mold social conformity and instill ‘proper’ respect for authority among Catholic immigrants and other ethnic outsiders,” Jeffrey Rogers Hummel writes.

Discriminatory as fuck, it was at least a step ahead of ensuring that every child could read Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather. Brrr.

The goal was a functioning society…just, y’know, by eradicating other cultures.

That was the North. Not so much in the South, as Nikole Hannah-Jones observed in The 1619 Project:

Public education effectively did not exist in the South before Reconstruction. The white elite sent their children to private schools, while poor white children went without an education.

University of Mississippi Visiting Assistant Prof. Andrew Donnelly writes, “After the U.S. Civil War, Black citizens demanded the expansion of public education.”

Reconstruction Republicans saw it “as the means of empowering freedpeople as citizens.”

So did Black people. Here’s Hannah-Jones again:

...newly freed black people, who had been prohibited from learning to read and write during slavery, were desperate for an education. So black legislators successfully pushed for a universal, state-funded system of schools — not just for their own children but for white children, too. Black legislators also helped pass the first compulsory education laws in the region. Southern children, black and white, were now required to attend schools like their Northern counterparts.

Everyone got that? Pre-Civil War: Tame the Catholics and get this ship in order. Post-Civil War: Teaching everyone to empower them.

In theory, education could have become a federal function right then and there. Why didn’t it?

Because the stupid Constitution gave powers not designated to Washington to the stupid states. It’s just one more example of why having states is stupid. But it’s also a constitutional limitation that America has ignored a jillion times. Especially when no one wants the stupid states to be in charge of shit when they can barely manage their own shit.

But it wasn’t just the Constitution. It was the Confederacy. As Donnelly puts it, “white supremacist opposition.” That’s right, those racist fucking losers who keep fucking us beyond their dishonorable graves have been fucking our schools since the day(s) they did in ignominy fighting for Old Deluded Satan.

So the Republicans compromised. They sought to craft the new educational efforts as a tool to “encourage states’ action.” How? By collecting facts.

The original intent of the original Department of Education was to shame states by revealing how shittily they were educating their children. The flawed premise, of course, was that the shitty leaders of these shitty states understood shame.

Donnelly points out that Trump1.0 Education Secretary Betsy DeVos tried to reduce the shame by minimizing the facts, “with reductions to the collection of education statistics by race.”

Nevertheless, when the Education Department was launched in 1867, the entire agency diligently set about their mission. All four of them.

The secretary. And three clerks.

That was the federal team trying to gather information from however-the-fuck-many states there were. At a time when internet access was terrible.

The secretary was America’s most famous educational reformer (thanks to Horace Mann conveniently dying). Henry Barnard became our first secretary of education, once President Andrew “I’m no fuckin’ Lincoln” Johnson signed the legislation. “Reluctantly,” Politico wrote.

Johnson generally put his thumb on the scale to fuck up Reconstruction. Education was no exception. Politico again:

Federal education policy also was a proxy for race politics, which added further fuel. Rep. Garfield and other ardent abolitionists had fought for the department. The Freedmen’s Bureau (established in 1865) had paid northern, Christian missionaries to start schools for blacks in the South. Confederate states, as a condition of readmission to the Union, had to rewrite their constitutions to provide schooling for children, both white and black.

Barnard was ambitious, and in 1868 asked Congress for more money, to increase his staff by 33%, or one more person. And he wanted to publish state education data. Cuz, y’know, shame.

So Congress effectively killed it, when it was one year old, not even old enough to go to school.

Barnard’s salary was cut by 25%, Politico wrote. “He got no protection from Johnson, who was generally unsupportive of Reconstruction.”

New legislation relegated education to the Interior Department, the federal equivalent of sending it to shop class where it basically sat in the back not paying attention for the next hundred years.

While the feds were slumbering, the Confederate traitors were using their reclaimed local control to rewrite history with them as heroes. Unleashing a plague that remains unstamped-out to this day.

And as soon as Carter put Education back on the federal map, yet again, the newly promoted, cabinet-level Department of Education got an assassination attempt for its first birthday. Reagan said he wanted to throttle it in its crib.

It survived thanks to the Soviets. Fear of falling behind the Soviet Union motivated public support for the Department of Education and it got to grow up and rock a mustache and everything.

But notice that it only survived because it had a political purpose: To beat the Russkies. So much for the original goal of the federal agency, the one pushed by Black activists and lawmakers and white allies: “[E]mpowering freedpeople as citizens.”

So fast-forward forty-whatever years and what are Trump’s goals for education? They’re three-fold.

One is capitalist. To “prepare students for successful lives and well-paying jobs,” his platform says.

What about being citizens? Sorry. Trump’s platform says “Republicans will … veto efforts to nationalize Civics Education.”

It’s about training a compliant labor force with no awareness of what governments can and should do.

Another goal is racist. As we’ve established, the war over education was a textbook (ha) example of the policy wars between the states.

Southern states wanted local control so they could deprive outsiders of education. We know they’re not interested in what Black people want out of an education because they say so.

“Knowledge and Skills, Not CRT [Critical Race Theory] and Gender Indoctrination,” Trump’s platform promises. “We will defund schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination of our children using Federal Taxpayer Dollars.”

Literally the next line promises political indoctrination: “Promote Love of Country with Authentic Civics Education – Republicans will reinstate the 1776 Commission, promote Fair and Patriotic Civics Education.”

The left’s academic content propaganda [sic] bad, the right’s [overt] propaganda good.

The third goal is Christianity. This is the one the media will ignore because they’re too scared of Trump and literally don’t understand religious issues.

Religion was the first principle of American education. We successfully shed it, but now we’re heading back to it.

As Trump’s platform says: “Republicans will champion the First Amendment Right to Pray and Read the Bible in school, and stand up to those who violate the Religious Freedoms of American students.”

Again — can’t stress this enough — Democrats and the country can’t stand up to this if they won’t name it. And if they won’t say why it’s bad. Which it is.

The other reason the media don’t talk about it is because there’s no conflict to cover. Democrats are silent, so what’s there for TV faces to flap their faces about?

In fairness, Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) and a handful of Dems are making a go of secular resistance. The new Freethought Caucus is championing secular values. But they need other Democrats on board to achieve critical mass.

But at the moment, there’s zero sign the party writ large is prepared for this battle. We know because the other side has already fired the first, second, and third shots and all Democrats do is wave the white flag or defect.

“Religious Freedom,” for instance, is right-wing code for the freedom to discriminate. But it was Democrats who enshrined it into law in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of the 1990s. And just recodified it with the Respect for Marriage Act.

Largely — can’t stress this enough — without even knowing what they were doing.

The Bible in schools? Already happening. Oklahoma’s gotcha covered.

Chaplains — not even trained chaplains — let loose to forage among your kids? Welcome to Florida.

These ideas were considered abominations by both parties for decades. And there’s no magical force guaranteed to intervene and restore the course. There’s no justice, there’s just us.

So where are Democrats? They don’t even have the language to fight against this shit anymore.

How could they when President Joe Biden lets Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) twist his arm to address a National Prayer Breakfast that’s not only sacrilegiously held inside the U.S. Capitol for the first time ever thanks to Christian nationalist Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) but part of a whole week of Christian nationalist theocratic events?

Incoming Senate Maj. Leader John Thune (R-SD) is a part of that theocratic network. He says proudly on his website, “Education decisions are best left to those who know students the best.” Y’know, Mayor von Didgeridoo.

Democrats are silent where Republicans are loud.

This is about transgender people, yes. And LGBTQ+. And people of color. And girls. But also boys. And also non-Christians. But also Christians whose beliefs include faith in the America the founding fathers founded. This is about preserving the engine of democracy: An educated populace.

Yes, TFN lapses on occasion and traffics in petty bullshit about Trump nominees. But the real battle right now isn’t the nominees, it’s about making people aware of what any nominee will be doing. The attack on our social pillars and the future that rests on them.

It’s about a coordinated, multi-decade attack on secular society and social justice. And the fight for it isn’t merely playing defense against Christian, theocratic, right-wing Republicans. It’s also about steeling the spines of Democrats in the trenches and the organizations that push back against the Christian front line.

And where the media repeatedly fail to cover this war, let alone see it, TFN will be hollering unholy Hell. For Old Deluded Satan.

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1. No comma, because experts in education can’t be bothered with your woke “grammar,” man.

2. There’s a great section of The Dawn of Everything about how native Americans were much better educated than their supposedly civilized new visitors despite their lack of “formal” education.