Writing for The Hill, Justin Hawkins notes, “The Trump administration is reportedly preparing an executive order that could eliminate or roll back significant parts of the Department of Education, a move that has already received significant criticism from Trump’s political opponents.”
Hawkins also says, “Regardless of whether you support such programs, the Constitution does not allow for the vast majority of what the Education Department does today.”
The White House declares: “President Trump’s Department of Education canceled $881 million in unnecessary contracts that were not benefiting students, including a $4.6 million contract just to coordinate Zoom and in-person meetings.”
I interviewed Dr. Paul Kengor on a radio segment and asked him about the president’s plan to abolish the Department of Education. Kengor is a bestselling author on American politics and history, as well as a professor of history and political science at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.
Kengor reminded our listeners that the Department of Education is a relative Johnny Come Lately. It was only established by President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s: “Americans think it was created not in 1978, but 1778---as if the founders were talking about it in the Federalist Papers.”
Kengor, added, “When Ronald Reagan, just months after that, talked about eliminating it, they treated Reagan as if he was some sort of domestic terrorist. Somebody who was out of his mind. ‘Eliminate the Department of Education? That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.’” Kengor has called the department “a menace” and “a force of destruction.”
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Kengor answers the common question, “What will happen if this federal agency were to be abolished?” He observes, “People will fund education the way they’ve always done—at the local level, at the state level.”
The Constitution does not mention education per se. In my Foundation of American Liberty series of documentaries on our nation’s Judeo-Christian roots, the late Dr. Walter Williams of George Mason University made an interesting observation.
Williams, a syndicated columnist, stated, “The founders thought that education was very, very important, but they gave the federal government no authority to deal with education---that is, education was mostly a state function. And if you look at James Madison and others who wrote in the Federalist Papers, trying to get the colonies to ratify the United States Constitution, James Madison and other founders had a very limited view of the federal government. In fact, in Federalist Paper 45, James Madison, who was trying to explain what’s in the Constitution, said that the powers that we left to the federal government are few and defined, and mostly restricted to external affairs.”
In 1789, America’s founders passed the Northwest Ordinance, so that as new territories became new states, they would follow a common template.
In Article III, they mentioned education. America’s founding fathers wrote, “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” They didn’t intend to banish Christianity in the schools but to encourage it. And these schools were voluntary.
In fact, most of the education at that time was conducted by churches or in home settings. The Bible was the chief textbook in one way or another. And back then, society was much more literate than we are today.
Reagan warned about education that removed God. Dr. Kengor wrote an article about the 40th president and some remarks he made about education at Georgetown in 1988 at its 200th anniversary. Said Reagan, “At its full flowering, freedom is the first principle of …Western society…. And yet freedom cannot exist alone. And that’s why the theme for your bicentennial is so very apt: learning, faith, and freedom. Each reinforces the others, each makes the others possible. For what are they without each other?”
Reagan went on to say, “Learning is a good thing, but unless it’s tempered by faith and a love of freedom, it can be very dangerous indeed. The names of many intellectuals are recorded on the rolls of infamy, from Robespierre to Lenin to Ho Chi Minh to Pol Pot.”
He went on to say that the “twin beacons of faith and freedom” have “brightened the American sky.”
Why is modern education so vacuous for so many? I believe for too long we have forgotten the Biblical counsel that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”
President Trump points out that we pay more for education for each pupil than do other industrialized nations. We are first in spending, but far down the list in results. No wonder people could well ask: Is the Department of Education a part of the solution or a part of the problem?