Opinion: Return Education to We the People

The proper education of America’s children is a critical duty of free people, and the responsibility must be returned to those closest to the students, those who are most interested in their growth and happiness.

Responsibility for learning belongs to the student, and responsibility for education belongs to his or her family, then to the school and the local community. We have understood this Truth since the Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776. The Founding Fathers provided generously for education by granting land to be used for the local schools, with Section 16 of every Township traditionally reserved for schools. The Founding Fathers did not seek to control learning from a distant capital but instead entrusted teaching to those nearest the student. They also knew that education must be free and available to all.

DoE, created by Congress in 1867, is a repudiation of the Founding principles. After public resistance to central control of education, it was soon demoted to a bureau of the Department of the Interior. DoE was originally created to collect information and statistics about the nation’s schools and to provide advice to schools in the same way the Department of Agriculture helped farmers. President Carter promoted it to an unconstitutional Cabinet level in 1979.

In 1980, President Reagan called for its elimination, which has been continued by true constitutionally minded Republicans, due to education not being an enumerated power of Congress in the Constitution, thus not subject to its laws.

The current sprawling bureaucracy was not designed for learning but for control, enforcing ever-shifting social policies, issuing thousands of regulations that entangle every level of schooling, diminish teachers, and estrange education from the purposes it was meant to serve. Of the 11 million civil employees in public education, only 4.7 million are teachers or their assistants. The rest are administrators and regulators, consuming more than half the system’s resources but standing apart from the classroom.

American students, once the best in the world, now lag their international peers. Teachers, previously conveyors of wisdom in every community, have become compliance officers. Universities, now dependent on federal aid, serve bureaucratic imperatives rather than their students. DoE has not elevated but instead has corrupted learning.

It is long overdue for DoE to be abolished and for control of education and its finances to be returned to the students and to those who know and love them: parents, teachers, and the local community. If schools again become responsive to parents and students instead of to distant bureaucrats, a natural and paramount interest in excellence will return. We will then again be able to teach our children to be courageous, and just, to respect the Flag, and other values that we learned when we were children, without administrators secretly allowing pornography in school libraries.

Conservative-minded citizens applaud the Trump administration for moving forward to defund and close the Department of Education (DoE).