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Amid the hue and cry over the Trump administration’s long-overdue efforts to shrink, pare back, and, with luck, decommission the Department of Education, I spent some time reflecting on the essential irrelevance of this federal bureaucracy in the academic careers of nearly everyone in my family.

By my reckoning, my parents were born at least two generations before the department’s founding in 1980—my father in 1937, my mother in 1944. Both received what can only be regarded as first-class public school educations—my mother learned French, and my father participated in Youth in Government—that would have been unlikely to have been improved upon had they benefited from the interventions of the Carter administration. 

Meanwhile, my grandmother—my mother’s mother—was, by her account, educated in a country schoolhouse in Allen, Nebraska (present population: 355). It is impossible to say what, if any, governmental body oversaw this schoolhouse during my grandmother’s schooling in the 1910s. But I can say, with certainty, that my grandmother spoke with impeccable grammar and diction, wrote in immaculate cursive, had an impressive command of U.S. and world history, and was so devoted to following current events that she often lamented to me that she wished she had been a newspaperwoman—like Dorothy Kilgallen, whom she watched on the game show What’s My Line?. Since she never went to college (though she did go to secretarial school), I can only surmise that my grandmother owed much of her smarts to whatever she was taught in that country schoolhouse—which, somehow, managed to function without the Department of Education, thank you very much.

In my case, I concede that I was schooled during the era of the Department of Education, though after the second grade, when my parents decided to homeschool me and my brother, federal involvement in what or how I learned seemed quite remote. In fact, I would characterize my parents as my own personal Department of Education—the authority figures who, with infinite patience, exceeding thoughtfulness, and a fair amount of good humor, oversaw my studies.

Such was their interest in tailoring my education to my needs and interests that my parents had attempted to intervene in my schooling even when I had, for several years, attended a small private school. My mother insisted that I read and master grade-appropriate McGuffey Readers, and my father attempted to implement the advice in various books by Cultural Literacy author E.D. Hirsch, such as What Your First Grader Needs to Know and subsequent volumes. These at-home efforts were concurrent with their paying my private school tuition. 

It is not a surprise to me, then, that my parents had the confidence to proceed with homeschooling. Although our curriculum and grading were provided through the distance-learning program of a private school in Baltimore, the day-to-day responsibility of teaching the material fell to my parents. They divided the curriculum according to their respective personalities and strengths: With her gift for language and artistic bent, my mother oversaw Greek mythology, English literature, and, hopelessly in my case, French—the last, I suspect, because she wanted to brush up on her own command of the language. Meanwhile, my rational, logical father presided over instruction in math, science, and other similarly dull subjects. 

Did I learn more at home than if I had continued at my private school? Maybe. Looking back on it now, though, the most important lesson I learned is that parents are not just caregivers and providers but teachers, too. If more parents accepted that this role was essential to their vocation, we would regard the Department of Education as being as superfluous as, say, the Department of Making Dinner or the Department of Taking the Kids to Church. In other words, these things—preparing dinner, going to church, teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic—are properly the provenance of Mother and Father, not Uncle Sam.

Of course, the defenders of the Department of Education admit no such thing. By their lights, education is not a function of parenting but a specialized skill. When I hear people snicker at Secretary of Education Linda McMahon for her peculiar qualifications for the job—she is the spouse of wrestling impresario Vince McMahon—I am reminded of the resistance my parents faced when they told some friends and family of their choice to homeschool my brother and me. Once, not long after our homeschooling adventure began, one relative asked my mother, sarcastically, “So you’re the teacher, huh?” With her great reserves of dignity, my mother would have shrugged off such a jab, but the assumption that she was somehow not up to teaching her sons must have pained her; I know the comment stayed with her.

This week, as I celebrate the diminishment of the federal government’s Department of Education, I honor the good works done by my own Department of Education—my mom and dad.