Well before envisioning what a “school system” might look like, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and George Washington considered education essential to the budding republic if its citizens had any hope of self-governance.  

Jefferson was particularly convinced that tyranny would ensue if education were left unattended. The concern he and his fellow framers shared was not so much that young people wouldn’t be smart enough to run the country, but that they wouldn’t be virtuous enough to dedicate themselves to serving it. Above all, liberty, properly ordered, was to be cherished as both the means and the end of education.  

“If we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion,” Jefferson would later write, “the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion” (Letter to William Charles Jarvis, Sept. 28, 1820).  

It wasn’t long before Jefferson realized that determining the best means of informing the citizens’ discretion would require no less liberty than the liberty education itself was aimed at. In other words, only local communities — not the federal government — could freely and effectively deliberate about providing a proper education and determining the institutional structures to implement it.  

This is why the Northwest Ordinance (1787) employed rather reserved language in declaring that “schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” Yet the Ordinance was not without mandates.  

A portion of the proceeds from land sales was to be allotted to townships, with one section in each township set aside for public schools. This measure helped ensure that educational resources would be sufficient for growing communities. John Adams similarly secured a provision for education at public expense in his contribution to the drafting of the Massachusetts Constitution in 1780. 

Hence the young republic’s desire to generate revenue for schools is unquestionable. But foisting curricula upon those schools and engineering equal outcomes — let alone requiring them to design LGBTQ-inclusive learning modules — was the farthest thing from its mind. It took almost two centuries before the growing dismay at diminishing outcomes led to standards-based reform following the publication of “A Nation at Risk” in 1983, a report that sounded the alarm on declining educational performance in the U.S. 

The report emerged during the early battles of the culture war, and to a large degree was itself responsible for the intensity of that war. While nothing in the report was immune from intense scrutiny, less attention was paid to the more general question of whether the federal government should be involved in the first place and to what extent. 

Today, we will have a privileged opportunity to ask that very question. The Senate confirmation hearing of President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education should be less about whether Linda McMahon is fit for the job than about whether the job is fit for the nation. That is not to say that serious leadership is not needed to inspire radical change in schools and universities across the nation, but that the Department of Education (DE) is the last place we would expect to find any catalyst for such change.  

Trump’s former Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, said as much in a recent op-ed in The Free Press. “Having spent four years on the inside,” she writes, “struggling to get the department’s bureaucracy to make even the smallest changes to put the needs of students first, I can say conclusively that American students will be better off without.”  

Last week, the President gave Elon Musk the go-ahead to delve into the details of the Department of Education’s dealings to see if similar slashes can be made there as DOGE has recommended elsewhere.  

Nothing represents better the turbulent times ahead than the chaotic attempt of democratic lawmakers to enter the Department of Education building last Friday. Ideologues know well that their last grip on power is indeed the most powerful, for whoever controls the educational system controls the future of the nation.  

Jefferson, Adams and Washington knew that, but the reason they considered it important was that education was the way of instilling wise and virtuous citizenship for free, self-government. They also knew Aristotle’s teaching that the very purpose of politics is to foster virtue in its citizens. The problem is that practically no one serving in the Department of Education under the last administration believes wisdom or virtue to be the ultimate purpose of either education or politics. 

The original purpose of the Department of Education, established by President Andrew Johnson in 1867, was to disseminate sound educational information to local and state-level authorities. After being demoted from its cabinet-level stature, the late Jimmy Carter proposed its reestablishment in 1978, though his bill passed by a slim margin of 210-206 in 1979.  

President Ronald Reagan campaigned on a platform to abolish the department, but the publication of “A Nation at Risk” eventually breathed new life into it and led to an ambitious implementation of the National Education Goals. 

That leaves us in the advantageous position of seeing in hindsight that both liberal and conservative forces have failed in effecting any significant change through the department. When we study the framers’ thinking on education and their expectations of the federal government’s role in it, the ineffectiveness of relying on a cabinet-level department to increase learning outcomes is entirely obvious.  

Charter schools, voucher programs, religious institutions, the homeschooling movement and a host of other alternatives show that outcomes that truly promote liberty are best achieved only when they are freely chosen. If liberty is the end, liberty must also be the means. 

Last week's hearing offered the same cacophony of discordant voices vying for political soundbites. With some luck, we saw a few instances when the very question of how the federal government should be involved in education emerge.  

Ultimately, however, it will be up to DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) to determine which resources are being squandered. They are bound to find plenty in the Department of Education. Once those are cut, a more sober study of history and a deeper reflection on the purpose of education could yield impressive results within a short time, but only if the current leadership uses its rhetorical flair to inspire freely chosen means to ensure a genuine education for freedom. 

 

Daniel B. Gallagher is a lecturer in literature and philosophy at Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia.