With anti-university rhetoric running rampant in right-wing circles alongside Trump’s latest attempts to shut down the U.S.’s Department of Education, education in the U.S. is in an increasingly threatened state.
Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump promised to get rid of the Department of Education if elected. However, the reasons for doing so seem to be tangled in fearmongering about identity politics and misunderstandings about the Department of Education’s responsibilities.
In a piece for The Conversation, Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, Alex Hinton, whose work focusses on the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement, found four reasons why Trump is attempting to close the Department of Education that are gaining the most traction with Republicans: first, it claims to rid education of a “radical woke agenda”; dovetailed with that is the fear of “Marxist indoctrination”; next is preserving parental rights in education; and finally, Republicans tend to view the department as inefficient, epitomizing in their eyes the detrimental effects of bureaucratic red tape.
Just recently, Trump has been in the midst of legislative efforts to defund schools that teach critical race theory — the academic framework that sees race as a social construct and racial discrimination as systemically reproduced — or gender-related classes, once again using the threat of “indoctrination” as justification.
However, despite the massive misunderstandings of critical race theory pushed by the right in an attempt to demonize left-wing ideologies, the real teachings in this sphere are simply not radical at all.
The very idea that racial discrimination is systemic is a logical conclusion when looking at America’s history of racial injustice and colonial violence.
To complicate the attacks on the Department of Education further, it should be noted that the department doesn’t set teaching curricula federally. Rather, individual states are responsible for developing educational standards for their own communities. The Department does distribute funds to school systems and programs yearly, but this is not actually relevant to the attacks it is facing.
So, why is the Department of Education facing such scrutiny from the right when they have little responsibility for determining what is taught in American schools?
The hate towards the Department of Education is fueled by a wider right-wing attack on so-called “radical leftist” ideologies that are allegedly seeping into educational institutions. This is evident in the long-held criticisms of the “political agendas” in higher education institutions by the right.
For the past few years, universities have faced criticism from right-wing politicians, not just in the U.S. but across the Western world, for fostering “radically leftist” views amongst students.
Take, for example, Vice President J.D. Vance’s keynote address at the 2021 National Conservatism Conference, where he declares that universities are “hostile institutions” after going on tangents about how the “red pill” metaphor from The Matrix resembles the way universities allegedly control the circulation of knowledge — while only discussing peer-reviewed papers with studies that disprove Republican beliefs.
Vance only spoke neutrally about one piece of academia — a study that said A.I. algorithms could predict the outcome of astrophysics research — so he could discuss how academics responded “crazily” to it.
He continued to defend his stance by warning that students with right-leaning views are often penalized for joking about “ridiculous progressive orthodoxies” on university campuses. This point paints the enforcement of inclusivity policies at universities as entirely more threatening than they are in reality. In this instance, Vance attempts to make the right feel oppressed with an over-exaggerated picture of any intersection between the left and educational spaces.
To fire his point home, Vance also found it notable to mention that American feminism thrives on the fundamental lie that working is “liberating” for women. Here he made an argument that women are working long hours to maintain a corporatism that ultimately does not serve them, positing that higher education is responsible for making women abandon the liberation found in attending to the needs of their family.
This argument’s subtext is a terrifying yearning to put women back in their place as domestic servants who are financially subservient to their bread-winning husbands, but Trojan Horsing this desire with a pseudo concern for women being “overworked” in today’s age of comparatively better gender parity in the workforce.
For all the reasons above, Vance said that higher education is “fundamentally corrupt” and responsible for “some of the most preposterous dishonesties in the world.”
Evidently, anti-education rhetoric is not just something that exists in radical-right spheres but has found its way into conservative conferences and the social media pages of right-wing figures, hence Trump hoping to solidify it into law.
The characterization of universities, and contemporary educational institutions at large, as responsible for “indoctrination” is just another example of right-wing politicians attempting to not only drive voters away from the left but to also discredit any academic ideas that go against the various groundless claims that build the foundations of their ideologies.
Though it is unignorable that all educational institutions are power structures which reproduce certain discourses, the hyperbole around the existential threat of these higher-ed. discourses in mainstream right-wing anti-education rhetoric cannot be understated.
Education that is critical and open to many different perspectives is instrumental to freely determining one’s political position and lays at the heart of democracy.
In attempting to restrict access to education — whether by force through legislative efforts or indirectly through fearmongering — the Trump administration and other right-wing figures are engaging in the exact censorship and control they are warning against.