Dismantling Washington’s Education Department Will Not Stop the Indoctrination of Students

Commentary

Steps toward dismantling the Department of Education are greeted enthusiastically by Americans who believe that federal bureaucracies are the primary drivers of ideological indoctrination in schools. The argument is simple: Eliminate the department, return authority to states and local counties, and the problem will resolve itself.

Unfortunately, this diagnosis mistakes a bureaucratic symptom for the underlying disease. Even if the Department of Education were abolished tomorrow, the ideological orientation of American schooling would remain intact. The real engines of indoctrination lie within the institutions that train teachers and define the philosophy of education itself.

The Department of Education was created in 1979. It consolidated federal education functions into a Cabinet-level agency. Its original mission was limited to supporting equal access, administering federal aid, enforcing civil rights statutes, and collecting data. Despite its prominence in political rhetoric, the department has not designed curricula, hired teachers, or controlled classroom instruction. These responsibilities rest overwhelmingly with states, local school districts, and—most crucially—teacher training institutions. The department’s budget is substantial, but largely because it functions as a conduit for grants and student aid rather than as a centralized authority shaping pedagogy.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s intention to dramatically reduce the department’s role reflects peoples’ long-standing concerns about federal overreach. Her stated rationale—return education to the states, eliminate bureaucratic waste, and curb ideological activism—has considerable merit. But structural reform at the federal level is unlikely to alter the deeper source of mass ideological conformity in American education.

The existing conformity originates not in Washington itself but in the intellectual tradition of progressive education, whose modern influence began with John Dewey and the Teachers College at Columbia University. Dewey was not a Marxist in the orthodox revolutionary sense, but neither was he a benign reformer. His philosophy marked a decisive break from classical liberal education traditions. He rejected the transmission of inherited knowledge, the authority of the canon, and the idea that education should be oriented toward objective standards of scholarship. Instead, he reimagined schools as instruments of social transformation.

Dewey’s insistence that schools exist primarily to reshape society rather than to cultivate individual intellect laid the critical groundwork for later ideological developments. By subordinating truth to experience, knowledge to social function, and academic discipline to political activism, progressive education created a framework highly compatible with collectivist visions. Dewey’s progressive rhetoric and assumptions cleared the path for Marxist concepts to enter education under the guise of social justice, equity, and emancipation.

By the mid-to-late 20th century, Dewey’s influence was increasingly supplemented by the work of Paulo Freire. Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” became canonical in Western faculties of education, not as a marginal critique but as a foundational text. Unlike Dewey, Freire was explicitly Marxist. He viewed education as a site of political struggle between oppressors and oppressed, rejected the notion of unbiased knowledge, and argued that teaching should function as a form of revolutionary consciousness-raising.

Freirean pedagogy reframed the classroom as an arena of power rather than learning. He cast teachers as political actors and students as subjects to be “liberated” from inherited cultural norms. This approach, now branded as “critical pedagogy,” dominates almost all teacher training programs. Its language is cleverly deceptive, but its assumptions are clear: Western traditions are suspect, knowledge is socially constructed, and education must be subordinated to political ends.

These ideas are not imposed by the Department of Education. They are disseminated through schools of education, which certify nearly every public school teacher in North America. Regardless of geography or governance, aspiring teachers are exposed to remarkably uniform ideological content. Courses emphasize systems of oppression, identity-based analysis, and activism over mastery of subject matter. Teachers emerge from these programs not merely trained in methods, but indoctrinated into a shared worldview.

In 2018, this reality was clearly explained in an essay titled “How Ed Schools Became a Menace” by American scholar Lyell Asher. He argued that schools of education had evolved into ideological and bureaucratic hubs that undermine academic standards across the country. Rather than cultivating scholarship and graduating skilled instructors, they produce policymakers, administrators, and compliance officers trained to expand their own influence. The result is an educational system that rewards ideological conformity and administrative growth while marginalizing intellectual rigor.

Asher’s critique explains why repeated structural reforms fail to produce meaningful improvement. Changing funding formulas, governance arrangements, or federal oversight is not sufficient to alter the ideological formation of teachers. The academic institutions that train educators and shape their cultural assumptions also validate their partisan commitments and guide their practices. Classrooms are likely to remain strikingly similar whether authority resides in Washington, state capitals, or local school boards.

The effects of this are impossible to ignore. Academic performance stagnates or declines, basic literacy suffers, and schools devote increasing attention to political and social themes unrelated to core educational goals. Parents sense that something has gone wrong, but are often misdirected into focusing on bureaucratic targets rather than philosophical roots.

Dismantling the Department of Education may provide some political satisfaction, but it offers little prospect for substantive change. The real problem is not federal management but ideological capture. From teacher training onward, education is no longer about the transmission of knowledge and cultivation of judgment. It has become an instrument of social engineering.

Until the institutions that train teachers are compelled to abandon this mission, nothing fundamental is likely to change. Schools will continue to indoctrinate children and fail society, regardless of who signs the checks or manages the bureaucracy.

What matters is not the level of government involved, but the ideas that influence those entrusted with educating the next generation. If those ideas remain unchanged, so will the results.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.