Recently on twitter a video went viral of president-elect Donald Trump talking about his plans for the education system. Given the amount of chatter, I thought this was a post-election video he uploaded for some reason, but, no of course not. It’s the internet so why would people make this campaign video from 2023 go viral before the 2024 election was over? It’s whatever. The video actually comes from his Agenda 47 campaign site which was his version of a policy plan. But I guess there’s no need to begrudge people figuring out how dumb him and his policies are now if they’re willing to oppose and fight them so… Let’s talk about Trump’s Education plan.
Failure One: Parental Rights
As Trump puts it in his little video in his stupid little voice, “We will respect the right of parents to control the education of their children.” Cool, that’s not a right. It doesn’t exist. So you’re going to respect something nonexistent. That sounds pretty in character for Trump and the GOP.
In the website’s expansion on this, because Trump is incapable of discussing policy at length in a comprehensive and comprehensible way, almost like he’s not mentally fit to be President, what it really comes down to is that they hate trans people. They hate gay people. They love sexism. That’s really it which is more honest at least than most people who pretend to be “pro-parental rights” are. It wants to promote the nuclear family and stress the importance of mothers and fathers, so, you know, talking about how evil single moms are and how gay parents aren’t ideal despite the fact that the data does not support the conclusion that homosexual and heterosexual households lead to differences in outcomes for children. They want to push biological essentialism in regards to men and women because conservatives love to be sexist but they have to frame their sexism as “celebrating difference” because otherwise too many people would catch on to their bullshit. But when your daughter comes home saying something like she’s best suited for raising children instead of being a lawyer because women are naturally more nurturing, it’ll be because of this.
For some reason in this section we’re talking about genital surgery on minors. Has that ever happened in a school? Nope. Oh well. Will this ban include cosmetic genital surgeries on cis children? So then would non-religious circumcision become a crime? How about cosmetical genital surgery that is often done on intersex infants and is considered inhumane by the UN and human rights organizations? When they outlawed surgeries for trans kids here in Georgia, the state GOP made sure to carve out an exemption for cosmetic genital surgeries on intersex children. For some reason, I doubt this restriction will apply to cis or intersex infants.
There are conserva-gays out there who insist that Donald Trump is good on gay rights and loves gay people and they roll their eyes at anyone who points out the harms his last administration had. Hi there, Log Cabin. This education video everyone is talking about was published on a campaign page by Trump which implies that gay families are worse than straight ones. I think maybe perhaps you know the Republicans are homophobic, and you’ve just closed your eyes and insisted otherwise because it would be shameful to admit that you were voting for people who hate you. And they do. They hate you. Trump, too.
But let’s talk about Parental Rights as a concept beyond this stupid page. Parental rights are a major talking point amongst conservatives when it comes to education. It has been for a long time, too. They wanted the right, for instance, to make science classes unable to teach evolution or to have to teach creationism alongside it because they want their religious mumbojumbo to be presented as science. Because they don’t want facts. They want religious indoctrination. Oops.
To copy and paste what I’ve said about the parental rights movement before:
An opinion article in the Washington Post points out, “Courts have found that parents have great authority when it comes to deciding how to raise and educate their children. This right, however, does not mean that public schools must cater to parents’ individual ideas about education.”
Suzanne Nossel rights in Time, “A movement that for years … sought to prevent the government from controlling how they educated their own children now seeks to decree what entire student bodies and school districts can and cannot learn and read. The rhetoric of parents’ rights has morphed from a movement aimed at constraining the power of government over education to one that is mobilizing politicians and legislatures to extend the heavy hand of the government into the classroom.” A small section of extremist conservative evangelicals continue to aim to control the rest of the population while decrying that anyone else existing and having rights beyond their desires is government overreach. Those are also the people who have taken over the GOP.
So no. This is not about improving education. It’s about allowing conservative parents to throw hissy fits and be such empowered toddlers that each fit gets them exactly what they want: control over every students’ education, not simply their own children’s. They want to restrict parental rights because they don’t care about them as a concept. They care about them as a weapon to make sure that they are the only people who are ever listened to.
Failure Two: Workforce
Trump’s second point is about educational workers, specifically teachers and principals. He says, “The ones whose performance is unsatisfactory they will be fired. Like on The Apprentice, you're fired.” He has to plug his show so people will go watch and him money of course.
As part of this, the campaign page suggests making principal an elected position with recall power for parents. Interesting that it doesn’t specify guardians here. Guess if you are the guardian of a student but not their parent, you don’t get a say. Is that pedantic on my part? Sure is. Does Trump know what the word pedantic means? Well, he’s probably familiar with the first three letters given his close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. So we’re going to have PTA meetings with potential principals culture warring and trying to out “hard discipline” each other into hitting the idiot populists who thrill at the idea of hating people. So we’ll get administrators who are unqualified, unnecessarily cruel toward students, ineffective, and uncaring for education. Great. And we’ll have parents organizing recalls and firings over events that principals have no control over. A girl was allowed to take her yearbook photo in a suit? A boy was allowed to wear makeup? They did Romeo and Juliet and someone finally picked up on all the dick jokes? Bam. Fired due to how much conservative parents hate art, gender non-conforming people, trans people, and gay people and trying to enforce their personal morals on every member of the student body through electing and firing principals. Is this an incredibly stupid idea? Yes.
Mostly, though, they want to get rid of tenure. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about tenure. Some people think it means you can’t be fired but that’s not true. Tenure protects you from being fired without cause. If you have cause, you can still fire a tenured teacher. It just might mean more paperwork. Say that a biology teacher teaches evolution without any of the wishywashy “some people don’t believe in it, there’s also creationism, but we’re going to learn about evolution” bullshit. A bunch of religious idiots get upset that science is being taught instead of religion and they raise a fit. The teacher cannot be fired for this. The parents just kind of have to fuck off because yeah they should.
Tenure also makes it so you can’t fire a teacher because it would be cheaper to hire a newer, less experienced teacher. Otherwise teachers would be rushing toward the bottom with their pay and taking exploitative cuts to pay. There’d be no job security. Decisions would not be about who is the best teacher, as people pretend they would be, but over who makes the most financial sense.
But let’s cut through the bullshit. The real goal is gutting the teachers unions. Conservatives as a whole do not like them. Ultimately, this is because they do not like any public sector unions which, yes, does mean that deep down they are opposed to the police unions. The groups behind Project 2025 are a bit more explicit about this. They think if you work for the government, you should be open to being exploited, you should not be able to bargain, you should have less protections than private sector employees, and you shouldn’t be allowed to strike under any circumstances. The goal is to stomp on the workforce and beat them into submission. Because conservative politics, at the end of the day, is a BDSM kink. They want wear big black leather boots and stick a leash on everyone else. They want to press their boots to our faces, have us stick out our tongues, and say, “Thank you daddy.” It’s a kink. That’s all.
Failure Three: Don’t Say Gay
or race or gender or history.
Trump’s version is making sure that classrooms are free of “political indoctrination” and instead will focus on “useful subjects.” We’ll get to the horrible misunderstanding of what education is in a bit.
The article’s expansion on this point is primarily complaining about school closures during Covid because conservatives will forever be upset about being asked to care about other people during the coronavirus pandemic.
They specifically want to be rid of “critical race theory, transgender ideology, and left-wing indoctrination.” It’s fun because we have a boogeyman of the right that they refuse to define, the transformation of a group of people into an idea that can be banished, and a vague statement that can mean whatever the hell you want it to based on where you stand relative to the political spectrum.
Critical race theory is a version of critical theory that examines institutions, media, and law for racism and how it might be systematic rather than the problem of a few bad apples. For instance, let’s say a company uses an AI to sort through resumes and job applications. The AI ends up following old practices of rejecting people with more “ethnic” names. No human person involved in the hiring process is actively engaging in personal prejudice. But the algorithm built into the AI was, intentionally or not, racist in outcome. This is an area of potential systemic racism. Black people in the United States are still discriminated against for having cultural names and their natural hair. Sometimes that is because of individual racists. Othertimes, it’s because a Black person’s natural hair has been determined to be “unprofessional.” That standard of “professionalism” which determines natural hair to be bad is… systemic racism. Conservatives don’t want us to talk about any of that. If you aren’t allowed to talk about how racism intersects with systems rather than just individual bigots, how do you teach about Jim Crow or the Civil Rights movement? Are we meant to believe that anti-Black racists in the first half of the 20th Century were naturally occurring or can we acknowledge that bigotry is taught? They were socialized into bigotry and chose to accept that as the natural way of the world. Ask a conservative what they mean by CRT and keep drilling down. Give them examples of racism and ask if teaching about that should be allowed.
What is meant by “transgender ideology?” Well, combined with the push for cishet sexism talked about in the parental rights section, it’s clear that this is a call for a Don’t Say Gay bill. They want trans people to not exist. That’s the goal here, it’s the elimination of trans people, because these people are hardcore transphobes who are afraid that they might date a trans girl with a penis and find out they love the mouthfeel. They don’t want kids to learn about trans people in any way shape or form. Yes, this will involve censoring art and history and current events. It will involve tying teachers’ hands when it comes to bullying because remember, this is all a kink for conservatives. It means ignoring and twisting Bostock because they don’t care about precedent or sex discrimination. It means banning trans people from being teachers, administrators, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, or janitors. It means forcing trans children into the closet and punishing them for expressing themselves. It means forcibly outing trans students. But. I’d reckon it goes beyond that. Let’s combine this with their talk about celebrating the differences between men and women, talking about how heterosexuality is better for families, it seems like “transgender ideology” might become a catch-all for any behavior or expression that goes beyond traditional gender roles. Mulan will be banned. A girl wearing a suit will be bad. Girls playing football? Banned again. Boys in colorguard? Banned. Boys wearing makeup? Banned. We’ll get gendered clothes and gendered sexuality. It won’t be long before gay people are forced into the closet. And here’s the kicker: we already know this doesn’t work. England’s Section 28 didn’t work. It didn’t get rid of gay or trans people. Censorship didn’t stop us. They know this is bad policy that has no chance of succeeding. But they don’t care about facts. They don’t care about people. They care about control and performing hatred. So they need groups of people to performatively hate. If trans people stopped existing, conservatives would be sad because they would lose people they view as their forced submissives.
What does leftwing indoctrination mean? What are we considering left-wing? The Democrats? DSA? PSL? Normie liberals or LARPy communists who pretend a revolution is coming? What do you mean? They’re never going to tell you. But I have some guesses.
Cultural issues. “Gay people exist. They do not choose to be gay. It is okay to be gay. Gay intercourse, like intercourse, will be part of sexual education program.” That’s probably considered left-wing indoctrination. Framing the gay rights movement as a human rights or civil rights movement would likely be labeled the same. What about the history of vaccines? Is teaching about their invention and use as a public health good considered leftwing indoctrination since Trump is considering giving power to anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist RFK Jr?
Welcome to the world of censorship everybody. And this does merely have the goal of censorship and not the removal of politics from education because his very next idea is…
Failure Four: Indoctrination
“We will teach students to love their country, not to hate their country, just like how when you love a woman or you vaguely know her, if you have money, you’re allowed to grab her by the country and talk about world domination.”
One of Trump’s big things is forcing a “patriotic” education. Conservatives are upset about history courses that teach about the evils our country has committed. To teach that America was founded upon and built on the back of slavery is too cruel. You’ll make everyone hate America! Instead, we must force patriotism upon them! Yes, patriotism is a form of nationalism and is a political ideology. Yes, that does mean after going on about how we shouldn’t indoctrinate students and only things like math, he immediately went, “But it’s okay when I do it,” because that’s the entire conservative ethos. They do not have principles.
When expanding upon this, they really bristle at the idea of “vilifying” the Founding Fathers. Really, that’s probably talking about how they were racists and sexists who abused women and had slaves. They do not want to teach history. They want to teach an American mythology. It’s more comfortable.
I don’t actually mind the idea of highlighting the good things we’ve done as a country for our citizens and for the world. I think it’s actually rather important to make sure students can find bright spots throughout the darkness that is history. Otherwise, it gets hard to be hopeful about things and hope is really important. But “our heroes are perfect and our Founders had no flaws” is something different.
They specifically talk about the racist 1776 Commission which was a disaster and whose report was a bit gross to read. Hm. Almost like he’s a racist whose last administration was racist and is a member of a racist political coalition.
We want to “credentialize” patriotic teachers which sounds a lot like forcing teachers to sign a political loyalty pledge. Wow. Sounds like viewpoint discrimination, a thing conservatives have pretended to care about for years. For all their talk about how they hate artists, conservatives love theatre. It’s their whole thing.
Failure Five: Prayer
“We will support bringing prayer back to our schools.” Prayer never left the schools. Students have always been able to pray outside of instruction time. This has never have been an actual issue. When this is brought up, conservatives tend to mean they want public prayer. They want prayer at school events. They want prayer in the classrooms. They want to force schools to put up the Ten Commandments and pretend like Christian mythology is the same as science and history. What they would really like to do is get rid of the separation of Chuch and State. Does Trump want that? He doesn’t give a shit about Christianity and anyone with half a brain cell knows that.
Should students be asked to pray by teachers? No, never. Should administrators lead prayers? No, never. Should prayers be part of school events that are not explicitly religious like a student Bible group? No, of course not. Those would all be violations of the First Amendment. But Republicans do not care about the First Amendment. If they did, they would embrace the separation of church and state. They would push back against all attempts at anti-LGBT censorship. But they don’t care about free speech or freedom of religion. They care, as with every issue, about forcing the rest of us to be them. To surrender to them. Because if we break and bow down, they’ll have an orgasm.
Failure Six: Safety
I was very upset by the GOP platform’s section on school safety because it didn’t dare to mention gun violence. Trump’s education plan does. As I knew it would when I went over the GOP platform, this annoyed me. It’s wrong, it’s stupid, it’s fearmongering and will lead to students getting killed and harmed. But he does at least mention it.
Trump would like for teachers to have guns. Not onlt that, he would like schools to have armed guards. Have you ever seen the videos of school resource officers beating a child when the situation clearly did not call for such an escalation? Trump’s plan calls for retired veterans, retired officers, and random other gun owners to have guns in our schools. Are these people going to be forced to go through extensive de-escalation training? Will they go through extreme vetting to pass psych evals? Police have a habit of shooting unarmed Black people. What are the chances these armed guards will have a habit of shooting unarmed Black students? How quickly do you think they’re going to go from guarding against shootings to being called in to threaten students with disciplinary problems? In my high school, a history teacher was a veteran with extreme anger issues. He should not have been a teacher. He should have been fired. He wasn’t. Technically, as a veteran, he was a good candidate to be armed teacher. He would have shot a child for pissing him off. This policy will kill children.
Trump suggests that trans people existing might be to blame for school shootings. Is there any evidence of this? No. Has a significant plurality of school shooters even been trans? No. The evidence does not support this but again, Trump doesn’t give a shit about reality. He cares about scaremongering. This rhetoric will lead to trans people being scapegoated, being bullied, being beaten, being killed. Blood will be on his hands. I guess he’s used to that.
You know what else he blames school shootings on? Psychiatric medication. He’s on the same page as RFK Jr there. Kennedy specifically calls out Prozac. You know what this will do? It’ll stigmatize mental illness. It will make it harder to access medication. It’ll stigmatize taking medication. It will lead then to unmedicated, untreated, bullied students killing themselves. Great job, Donald.
Failure Seven: School Choice
Of course he pushes school choice scam because he loves for profit scam schools that fail their students. Hi Trump University. He doesn’t flat out say he wants federal dollars to pay for people to send their children to private or charter schools, but that is what conservatives often mean. They would like public money to go to private entities that are not bound to the same rules. When I went over Project 2025, I talked about how some charter schools in voucher programs have forced disabled students to waive their rights under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Charter schools often do wrong by our disabled youth and do not face penalties for it. It’s disgusting. It points to a clear lack of care about our children and their futures.
But speaking of Project 2025, guess who Trump cites in this little section? The organization behind Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation. It’s almost like Trump and the conservative movement hold Heritage in high regard. It’s almost like Project 2025 is a real threat we should have banded together against and now will have to spend the next four years vigorously fighting so that we don’t turn into a Christian nationalist hellscape.
Failure Eight: Work
“Getting a great job best suited to your God-given talents should be a primary goal of education.” Uh, no. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of education that desires to make everyone’s worlds smaller. This misunderstanding is constant across the political spectrum. Conservatives, liberals, nazis, communists, and the politically unengaged and illiterate all have this idea of education as needing to be focused on employment. All of them are incorrect. Education is not about work. It cannot be about work if you want an educated populace. Education is not about securing you a paycheck. High schools should not be focused on giving you a career. Career paths in high school, chosen by 13-year-olds, are stupid. 13-year-olds do not know who they want to be or what they want to do and they should not be making that decision. They should be getting an education.
Education is about learning. That is the goal. The is to learn. It is to expand your ways of thinking so that you have many tools to engage with the world however you so choose. We don’t learn language so that we can understand the orders our bosses give us. We learn language so we can communicate. We can understand and express the human condition. So we can interact with the past and the future. We don’t learn math so we can better enter numbers in a spreadsheet. We don’t learn science because every job requires you to know about the mitochondria being the powerhouse of the cell. We do not learn history so we can better drive heavy machinery. We learn so that we learn. So that we understand more of life. So that we can discover the things we are passionate about. So we can have the muscles to learn whatever we want, to be whatever we want.
An education focused on employment will be a worse education. It will be one where children take less math classes. They’ll take less history and science depending on what career they’ve chosen as teenagers. We’ll stop teaching classic literature and poetry and theatre and instead read instruction manuals and legal documents. We will be a dumber and poorer and sadder country. We will lose colors.
Let’s go back to the “useful subjects” comment. Who determines that? What’s considered useful? Is it only that which leads to employment? You can get employed in any subject. No, what it means is the courses conservatives like. They’ll gut the arts even though the arts generate billions of dollars every year. It isn’t about education or usefulness. It’s about enforced ignorance. They want a dumber populace because a dumber populace is easier to control. They want to make the worlds of the next generation smaller because those who can only imagine small worlds will never break out of them and discover new galaxies. And conservatives are terrified of someone moving beyond them.
Failure Nine: Education
But none of this really matters because he wants to get rid of the Department of Education. He wants to send it back to the states. So. We will have no more federal funding of education. No more federal students loans or subsidies. No more federal assistance for targeted educational programs. No more federal standards. He brags on this page about increasing Pell Grants but who will oversee those if the DoE is dead? Commerce? No one?
What’s going to happen when states are suddenly forced to fund all of their schools by themselves? The obvious is going to happen: schools will receive less funding. Budgets will be slashed. Class sizes will increases while the amount of teachers will decrease. Modernization, internet access, and technology access will all falter. Infrastructure updates will stall and die. Schools will not be able to afford as many sporting events or even to keep the lights on as long for after school activities. The prices of student meals will go up. Safety standards will go down.
If the Department of Education is killed, who is going to oversee and enforce IDEA? Who will make sure disabled students receive a proper education? IDEA’s current enforcement is mostly through penalties via federal funding. Will this move to the Department of Justice? Will violation of the IDEA become criminal in nature including fines and jail time or will we simply let our federal standards slip away and allow a disabled child’s education to hinge on what state they live in? What will we do if a state chooses to allow disabled students to be thrown to the wayside?
Schools are going to close. Between this, the idea that principals should be politically elected, attacks on teaching unions, restrictions on queer students, increased danger via adding guns to our schools and scapegoating queer students and mentally ill students, attempting to force religion on public schools, pretending that the point of education is for work, and the push for school choice, it becomes quite obvious what the real goal here is: the abolishment of public education.
But hey, at least if the next few generations are uneducated morons, they might think Trump was an intelligent and a coherent speaker. Maybe that’s the real goal.
Sources
“Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t.” - Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire | The Washington Post
“Parents Should Have a Voice in Their Kids’ Education But We’ve Gone Too Far” - Suzanne Nossel | Time
“Agenda47: President Trump’s Ten Principles For Great Schools Leading To Great Jobs” | Trump Campaign
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