Why We Need to Abolish The Department of Education

Written by Dr. Everett Piper

We all know something is desperately wrong with our society and that the bad behavior we see in our daily news must have a cause. We understand that the juvenile antics we are watching in our nation’s capital did not just spring out of thin air. We intuitively know that the immaturity so pervasive in our communities doesn’t come from a vacuum. Millions of us understand that these childish pouts of adults who should know better have a source and that our government-run schools are the seedbed of our cultural crisis.

What else can account for the collective temper tantrum of nearly 50% of the electorate? What other explanation is there for the foolishness of 57 genders, the insanity of preferred pronouns, the misogyny of the transgender movement or the overt antisemitism that is rampant in the Ivy League? Why else would so many people think securing our nation’s borders is somehow wrong or that purging our government of trillions of dollars in bureaucratic embezzlement is a bad thing?

What we have taught in our schools now bears itself out in the behavior we see in our streets. As President Abraham Lincoln reportedly said, “The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will become the philosophy of the government in the next.” Even Adolf Hitler understood this when he argued, “Let me control the schools, and I will control the state.” What is taught in our classrooms will be practiced in our congress, colleges and courts.

Whether selfish or sacrificial, our values can nearly always be traced back to education. As King Solomon said: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart.” Ideas have great power, which can be wielded for either noble or nefarious ends.

Richard Weaver made this point in 1948 when he wrote his seminal work, “Ideas Have Consequences.” Mr. Weaver’s thesis was so simple that you hardly need to read beyond the book’s cover to understand his message. Ideas matter. They always bear fruit. There is no such thing as a neutral idea. All ideas are directional. Good ideas bear good culture, good government, good community, good church and good children, whereas bad ideas bear the opposite.

The date of Mr. Weaver’s publication is no accident. When he looked back at the world at war just a few years earlier, he saw that there was a direct line between the evil the world suffered at the hands of the Axis powers and the ideas that those regimes promulgated in their public schools. In other words, education played a direct role in the atrocities of the Ukrainian Famine, the Nazi Holocaust and the Rape of Nanjing. None of the butchery should have been a surprise. The behavior of the Third Reich and Empire of the Rising Sun was as predictable as the sunrise.

Only the morally blind can deny that American education is in crisis. Our schools today are much more interested in celebrating tolerance than pursuing truth. Censorship now stands on the grave of academic freedom. Schools and colleges seem more passionate about protecting propaganda than challenging it. We teach students about trigger warnings and microaggressions and that cultural appropriation is the most egregious sin unless, of course, it’s some delusional dude who is appropriating a woman’s sport, shower or restroom, in which case his appropriation all of a sudden becomes appropriate.

These circular arguments of the “educated class” smack of watching a dog chase its tail. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

M. Scott Peck warned of this. He called it the “People of the Lie.” The Apostle Paul called it the reprobate mind. Their message, along with that of Weaver, is the same: The longer we deceive ourselves, the more prone we become to believing our lies. The more we teach nonsense, the less ability we can make sense. When our schools teach fantasy over facts, the result is a society of perpetual children who see no need to mature, to grow up and act like adults rather than self-absorbed adolescents. Ideas have consequences.

This is why the best thing President Donald Trump can do for America is abolish the Department of Education. It is time to acknowledge that this agency’s influence on our schools is an unmitigated disaster. We need to give education back to the parents who understand that the future of their children lies in teaching them to pursue truth, that the facts don’t care about their feelings and that the only good education is one that inculcates the moral and intellectual laws that have been tested by time, defended by reason, validated by experience and endowed to us by our Creator.

This article was originally published by The Washington Times.