In the autumn of 2016, the Washington Post published this article about the possible outcomes of a Betsy DeVos appointment to head the the Department of Education. It’s worth reading again now, with the benefit of hindsight. This quote, from a statement released by Kary Moss (ACLU-MI), jumped out at me because it cuts straight to the heart of the danger:
“We strongly urge Congress to scrutinize the record of Betsy DeVos, who has been a staunch proponent of school vouchers, a misguided idea that diverts taxpayer dollars into private and parochial schools and perverts the bedrock American value of separation of church and state.” Kary Moss, American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, November 23, 2016.
In that one sentence, Moss connected the dots between the centuries-long conservative Christian war on public education and the most recent strategy by which they mean to achieve that goal. Betsy DeVos is a conservative Evangelical Christian, a dominionist who believes in a movement whose explicit agenda is to smash the wall of separation between church and state, take control of the pillars of society and government and ultimately, literally rule the world. Seriously.
A Little History...
"I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised, for the preservation of freedom and happiness...Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish & improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils [tyranny, oppression, etc.] and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance." Thomas Jefferson (letter to George Wythe, August 13, 1786).
Thomas Jefferson's lifelong belief in the importance of public education as the bedrock of a free Republic was shared by many of the founding fathers. A major reason why most of humanity has lived in actual or near enslavement for most of history is that the common people have been historically excluded from access to formal education. That was strictly reserved for the wealthy and priestly classes. In many parts of the world, they made sure that it was actually illegal to educate the common people. As students of the Enlightenment, the framers of the U.S. Constitution understood from reading history - and through personal experience and observation - that the elusive key to greater liberty, equality and justice for all has always been education.
scientia potentia est
If knowledge is power then public education is the great equalizer. The founders knew that high-quality, free public education was vital to a productive, free society because it could enable the dissemination of the power of knowledge and help create a population of equals. They believed that an educated citizenry was one of the foundational common causes behind which all citizens ought to throw their full support for their own sakes, for the good of the new nation and for the betterment of humankind.
Our public education system would become the backbone of a more just and free American society — the first nation of its kind in human history — and the founding fathers knew that it must be protected from ideological influences and agendas. Those who hold power never give any of it up without a fight, as the fathers of our revolution had learned through bitter experience. The founding fathers had also witnessed firsthand the oppression and tyranny that results when religious ideology is imposed upon a people, and they tried - via the Establishment Clause in the Constitution - to strike a balance between protection of an individual's religious liberty and the protection of the general population from any religious group which might seek to impose its religious ideology on the entire people.
Potentia To The People!
"Kings, priests and nobles" - and their modern-day equivalent: megachurch leaders, pastors and conservative religious hierarchies - fear an educated population more than anything. Elites do not want social equality. More social equality is seen by the powerful as a zero sum game: more power and wealth for the general population means less power and wealth for them.
Wealthy, religious elites suck the wealth out of the communities of people over whom they have religious power and they maintain that power by promoting unquestioning belief. They recognize that they cannot exploit the people if the people know history, are scientifically literate and have developed critical thinking skills. Religious elites know that permitting an educated populace will inevitably lead to the disruption of their traditional power structures, which is why education has historically been kept the ruthlessly guarded privilege of those elites. Educated people have access to the knowledge once exclusively owned by religious elites, and can separate facts from fiction. Educated people develop confidence, independence and aspirations. Educated people fight back against exploitation. When public education is legally mandated (as it is in the United States), it makes sense that the religious elites would do their utmost to undermine and impoverish it.
"Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to ; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty." Thomas Jefferson, 3rd US President (letter to James Madison, 4th US President, December 20, 1787).
Jefferson's insight no doubt informed religious conservatives in their strategy to undermine the Republic and reduce the United States to an authoritarian theocracy. They recognized that education really is the single most important factor enabling millions of people to rise above the poverty and powerlessness which has been the fate of "common people" everywhere for nearly all of human history. And it was education of the people that was helping millions of Americans enjoy a better standard of living - earned through their own well-educated efforts. This proud self-sufficiency was something that had been impossible when the people were an uneducated peasantry whose life circumstances and well-being were entirely at the mercy of a culture which allowed all power and wealth to be concentrated into the hands of a very few, usually religious, elite groups. Strong liberal education empowered Americans and allowed them to enjoy the fruits of their own labors and to compete with elites for a slice of the American pie.
Public Education: Public Enemy #1
It was this fact — that free public education gives power to the people instead of religious elites — that put the American public school system at the top of religious conservatives' hit list. The primary method for concentrating power into the hands of the priestly classes had been keeping the vast majority of people fearful, ignorant and acquiescent because of the threat of eternal divine punishment by filtering information through their own self-interested Biblical lens. By giving people access to the knowledge that once was the secret possession of the clergy, and the critical thinking skills with which to assess the claims and threats of religion, public education shook the foundation of the theological house of cards upon which church authority rests, breaking its stranglehold over the public psyche.
Millions of educated people who are capable of understanding the motivations and questioning the actions of powerful groups in their midst become far more difficult to control and exploit. Millions of educated people, who have been taught history and critical thinking skills, are able to recognize when a religious doctrine is actually immoral, self-interested power-mongering. Evangelical elites needed to regain control over the people. Therefore, it became the first priority of the modern religious right to undermine and discredit the secular public education system while simultaneously spearheading a parallel assortment of pseudo-educational systems with which to replace it. The Christian homeschooling movement is not, and never was, a grassroots phenomenon. Likewise, the private Christian schools and college campuses mushrooming up all over the country are a targeted investment in this strategy.
(By the way, it’s a bit of a mystery where all the money to build these schools, colleges and megachurches came from. Even though churches suck most of the money out of every community they set up shop in, there is only so much wealth they can drain from people who have been increasingly impoverished by the very policies of the Republicans those same churches urge their congregations to vote for. It will be interesting to see if the warm relationship between Evangelical megachurches and Russia may one day reveal some financial connections).
How They Did It
Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight and ... know nothing but the word of God. Martin Luther (1483-1546)
Evangelical dominionists insinuated themselves into school boards across the country by misleadingly running as “fiscal conservatives” to win election only to turn around and concentrate on their religious agenda once in power. Many of these Christian conservatives are Bible-believers who immediately began a determined campaign to inject religious mythology into public school classrooms, inventing fake "controversies" over established scientific theories which conflicted with Christian beliefs, and often succeeding in forcing grossly misleading "information" into school curriculums. The ongoing effort of Christian conservatives to force the teaching of Biblical creationism in science classrooms, falsely presenting religious belief as a scientific theory to school children is a chilling example of this dishonesty.
In addition to these determined efforts to force schools to teach a generation of American children that lies and mythology are "historical facts" and "scientific theory" (which may potentially disadvantage the children for life), conservative school board members in key districts have also moved to prevent children from learning vital critical thinking skills. The reason why the religious right wants to reduce or eliminate higher order thinking skills in the general population is pretty obvious: as mentioned above, properly educated people are equipped to see through the religious right's agenda. One unintended consequence, though, may very possibly be a population rendered incapable of meeting the demands of a competitive global race for technological and scientific innovation due to huge gaps in their education. On the other hand, a religious elite conspiring to regain full control over a large population might very well find it useful to render the people devoid of employable skills, poverty-stricken and forced to accept whatever work at whatever wage that the elite sees fit. That could possibly be manual labor, low-paying service jobs or coerced military service.
Consider this plank in the Texas Republican party platform:
Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority. (from a position statement in the 2012 Texas Republican Party Platform).
The Texas Republican Party openly called for a ban on the teaching of vital critical thinking skills! They are not shy about saying this — it is right there in their published platform statement — and, thanks to the current climate of authoritarian anti-intellectualism, they are not shy about saying why they want to deprive Texas students (and ultimately all students) of the right to a full education, including the development of the ability to think for themselves.
The End Game
They intend to gradually change Texas law so that religious belief will replace scientifically verifiable knowledge. They intend to enshrine into law that children cannot learn anything in school which will conflict with Christian teachings. The reference to "behavior modification" is a dog whistle thrown in to arouse right wing paranoia. HOTS have nothing to do with "behavior modification"; that sentence makes no sense whatsoever to anybody who actually understands educational theory, but pseudo-intellectual sounding claptrap is the stock in trade of Christian conservatives justifying their rejection of any secular initiative. Likewise, the jarringly inappropriate reference to "parental authority" and "fixed beliefs" makes no sense, unless the crux of the position is that schools will be prohibited from teaching pupils anything at all other than what parents and churches have already told them is all they need to know. That would, of course, make public schools unnecessary and redundant.
Which, come to think of it, is exactly the point.
It’s Up To Us
I can’t emphasize strongly enough that preventing generations of children from receiving a proper education is precisely the goal of the religious right. For those children who have already been brought up in the Christian homeschooling movement or private Christian schools, the pseudo-education has already been well underway for more than one generation. The deeper into generations that education deprivation goes, the more intractable the problem of counteracting mythology and scientific ignorance will become. Right now, in the USA, we have an adult generation of religiously-unschooled parents raising up children in the same theologically-controlled bubble. And what’s worse is that our tax dollars are being siphoned off from public schools to pay for this anti-education with almost no public oversight to protect student’s interests.
Evangelicals have, after all these years, almost succeeded in gaining complete control over education in the USA. Yet, it is our public schools that still vex them. Public Schools continue to limp along, grievously wounded by the constant conservative attacks on the value of public education and sincerity of teachers. Conservative legislators have succeeded in bleeding Public Schools dry of resources through determined religiously-motivated legislative attacks. They have succeeded in draining away funding and student enrollments via school voucher campaigns redirecting public funds into religious schools. Our once enviable free public school system has been under constant, vicious attack from conservative Christians for at least four decades. Unless the American people wake up and put a stop to it, the religious right may succeed in completely dismantling public education. The only “choice” that will be left for children will be the deliberate miseducation of religious schooling, thus plunging the country back into a kind of dark age, with both intellectual and social liberty lost.
(Oh, another sidenote: Thomas Jefferson's recognition that a free society depended upon a freely educated population was the insight upon which the religious right based its attack upon America. Ironically, as soon as they had achieved their goal of majority influence over school boards and state legislatures, they acted to try to erase Thomas Jefferson and other progressive thinkers from the text books which American children will study, replacing them with conservative idols and religious ideology.)
Millions of publicly-educated people are the only safeguard standing between a free, democratic Republic and an authoritarian, theocratic oligarchy.
Nearly destroying the public education system in the United States was never just a mildly-regretted, unintended consequence of the conservative Christian campaign to "take back over" America. Preventing people from having access to a free and intellectually rigorous education was always their goal. Millions of publicly-educated people are the only safeguard standing between a free, democratic Republic and an authoritarian, theocratic oligarchy. The self-annointed "moral majority" understood this back in the 1970's when they launched their aggressive campaign to undermine the foundations of American society and transform it into a theocracy with themselves (naturally) in control. The first and most critical stage of that campaign strategy was to destroy public education - the greatest threat to their power - and in that quest they already have had alarming success.
Recommended Resources (Seriously, I'm begging you: watch, read and share these things!):
First, something really enjoyable for encouragement:
School: The Story of American Public Education, Films for the Humanities & Sciences, 2001. If you enjoy Ken Burns documentaries, this will delight you. It’s a documentary in a similar style, narrated by Meryl Streep, which tells the history of public education from the late 1700’s through the turn of the 21st century. It’s entertaining, engaging and educational. Well worth your time!
Fewer college students want to be teachers, and why it matters (searchable database), Nancy Derringer, The Center for Michigan, August 3, 2017.
Where have all the teachers gone?, Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post, September 18, 2017.
The Founding Fathers made our schools public. We should keep them that way., Johann N. Neem, The Washington Post, August 20, 2017.
‘Christian Supremacist’ Pence on deck, Karen Ocamb, Los Angeles Blade, October 5, 2017.
Dominionism Rising: A Theocratic Movement Hiding in Plain Sight, Frederick Clarkson, Political Research associates, August 18, 2016
7 things our founders believed about public education, David Akadjian, Daily Kos, January 27, 2015.
How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks On Us, Gail Collins, The New York Review of Books, June 21, 2012.
How Christian Were the Founders? Russell Shorto, New York Times Magazine, February 11, 2010. A thoughtful, in-depth and very readable article on the conservative Christian strategy to rewrite history, erase progressive contributions and undermine the entire foundation of American society. The NYT only allows a few articles a month out from behind the paywall, so please make this one of them.