Right-wing Opposition To Education Is Nothing New— It’s Been Conservative Policy Long Before MAGA

Dumbing Down The Voters

An uneducated working class—a conservative goal from time immemorial— has been pushed in this country by the Republican Party and today is being pushed with the anti-woke rubric advanced on a daily level by Trump, DeSantis, Fox News hosts and virtually every Republican candidate for Congress, legislature and… board of education! For centuries, conservative thinkers in England (Edmund Burke and James Fitzjames Stephen) France (Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald and Charles Maurras) and Germany (particularly Heinrich von Treitschke) wrote that it would be harder to maintains societal order and protect traditional values while preserving established social hierarchies if the masses were educated for the masses. They viewed universal eduction as disruptive of their values and advocated limiting access to education to the elites.

The conservative Swiss political philosopher Karl Ludwig von Haller was outspoken in his opposition to widespread education for the masses in his influential work Restoration of the State (1816). Haller used it to outline his reactionary ideas, advocating for the preservation of traditional institutions and social order, and emphasizing the importance of maintaining social hierarchy. His argument was that by providing extensive education to the lower classes, instead of limiting it to the elites, social disruptions and the erosion of established social structures would ensue.

On Friday, writing for the L.A. Progressive, Stan Cox noted that “In recent years, almost half of US state legislatures have passed laws that directly undermine local communities’ efforts to curb climate change. More prominent in the headlines, though, have been bills targeting public education and violating a host of constitutional rights, many of them now signed into law. These ‘culture war’ laws don’t directly address climate. But unless they are struck down, they could permanently limit society’s ability to deal with the climate emergency.

In June, 16 young, environmentally conscious plaintiffs asked a Montana judge to strike down a law of the first type, one that bars state agencies from taking greenhouse-gas emissions into account when considering whether to issue permits for fossil fuel–related projects. They alleged that because their quality of life was being degraded by climate change, the law in question violates a sentence in Article IX of the state constitution: “The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.”

Unfortunately, surging attempts to MAGAfy red-state education systems could lead future cohorts of young people to become less eager than the Montana 16 to challenge the fossil-fuel juggernaut. Anya Kamenetz recently reported for Grist on an especially egregious effort now underway: a campaign to completely purge the subject of climate change from public school curricula. The story focused on a May 3 school board hearing in New Jersey at which activists raised a ruckus over a board policy (of a kind adopted in various forms by 20 states) to encourage teaching of climate in public schools. The arguments they put forward were very much in the vein of those against, for example, teaching the truth about US racial history: climate education, the activists argued, constitutes “indoctrination,” is too “divisive,” and scares children.

Among the objectors were groups with histories of opposition to abortion, interracial marriage, and the teaching of critical race theory (though it is not even taught in public schools). Now those groups had climate in their crosshairs as well. The effort to purge climate education from the classroom isn’t likely to succeed in New Jersey, but it continues to come under threat in red states. For instance, legislation proposed or passed in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Texas, and South Dakota requires that “both sides” of the assertion that humans cause climate change must be taught (though there is no valid “other side”).

These stories highlight two complications in the struggle to finally push national climate policy across the starting line. First, red-state governments across the country are hitting us with a hailstorm of laws and regulations to boost fossil fuels and suppress climate action. Second, right-wing politicians and lobbying groups are pushing for legislation that will tighten state governments’ control over education, the media, local governments, and other institutions. The word “climate” may not show up in these latter measures, but they can nonetheless erode US society’s ability to deal with ecological breakdown in the decades ahead.

…As of this spring, more than half of US state legislatures were weighing restrictive education laws. There’s been ample discussion about state laws and rules that seek to purge from K–12 education anything that would not have been taught in the 1950s.

For example, we’ve seen:

• “Don’t Say Gay” bills, most infamously in Florida, that ban talk about sexuality and gender;

• Prohibit teaching of anything that, according to the Georgia General Assembly, could make a student feel “anguish, guilt, or any form of psychological distress” because of their race or gender;

• Punish schools that, in the Arizona legislature’s disingenuous opinion, “usurp the fundamental right of parents to direct the upbringing, education, health care, and mental health of their children”

And Florida (again) in 2022 banned more than 40% of math textbooks that publishers had submitted for approval. Math books? Really? Governor DeSantis explained, surreally, “They took the ‘woke’ out and sent us back normal math books.”

Meanwhile, the American Library Association reports that—as in fascist or totalitarian societies and dystopian fiction—2022 saw the largest number of attempted book bans since they started tracking in 2001. The book-banning frenzy is having destructive consequences for libraries:

• Staff resignations

• Board meetings collapsing under the weight of book-banners’ rage

• Deep cuts in funding

• Outright closures

For fear of being caught distributing prohibited books, some county governments in Tennessee, Texas, and yes, Florida have taken the drastic step of cutting off online access to their libraries’ entire digital collections.

Many of these laws will deprive students of an effective, well-rounded education, circumscribing what can be taught or even discussed in public schools. The goal is to render future electorates incapable of seeing through rightist propaganda—a kind of thought control meant to impose ideological limits on society as a whole.

If MAGA state governments manage to discourage critical thinking and wall off an entire generation (or two) from vast areas of knowledge in history and science, large segments of the US population will be ill equipped to even understand climate change, much less to support action that could prevent ecological meltdown.

For Big Brother–style control of public colleges and universities, Florida is the “canary in the coal mine,” as the American Association of University Professors wrote this May in a blistering report. A 2022 law dubbed by DeSantis the “Stop WOKE Act,” which is currently blocked and under appeal in federal court, would, among other things, bar from the college classroom any subject matter that might make students “feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress because of actions . . . committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin or sex.”

…Florida’s campaign to focus higher education on moneymaking at the expense of actual education is increasingly echoed in the broader MAGA world. Some are outright claiming that too many people are getting too much education. The 29-year-old right-wing extremist and popular talk-show host Charlie Kirk has written a book called The College Scam. In it, he urges high school graduates to go to a trade school or enlist in the military rather than go to college. And on air, he has said, “Sending your child to four-year college is a big risk. You’re going to play Russian roulette with their values.” Now, Kirk need no longer worry about kids who attend college in some states, where they’ll be shielded from having to learn about the real world or develop critical thinking skills.

Jake Johnson also looked at right-wing attacks on education yesterday. He reported that “House Democrats warned that hundreds of thousands of teachers could lose their jobs if legislation advanced Friday by a Republican-controlled appropriations subcommittee becomes law. The panel's draft Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies funding bill for the coming fiscal year calls for nearly $64 billion in total cuts, a proposal that Democrats said ‘decimates support for children in K-12 elementary schools and early childhood education’ and ‘abandons college students and low-income workers trying to improve their lives through higher education or job training.’ The nonprofit Committee for Education Funding noted that the Republican proposal would impact ‘virtually all’ education programs, hitting teacher funding, student aid, and more. The bill, one of a dozen appropriations measures that Congress is looking to pass by the end of September, would bring Department of Education funding to below the 2006 level, according to the group.”

The Republicans are attempting to “slash slash Title I grants to local educational agencies that serve children from low-income families by nearly $15 billion compared to fiscal year 2023 levels. Appropriations Committee Democrats said the massive cut ‘could force a nationwide reduction of 220,000 teachers from classrooms serving low-income students’ amid a teacher shortage.

The Republicans on the subcommittee pushing this are extremely conservative: chairman Robert Aderholt (AL),Mike Simpson (ID), Andy Harris (MD), Chuck Fleischmann (TN), John Moolenaar (MI), Julia Letlow (LA), Andrew Clyde (GA), Jake LaTurner (KS), Jake Ellzey (TX) and Juan Ciscomani (AZ) and mostly in gerrymandered district where they don’t have to worry about being challenged for this kind of extremism.