Trump opens up a new war on public schools

It's not a coincidence that Donald Trump's nominee for Education Secretary, Linda McMahon, is the defendant in a lawsuit alleging that she ignored widespread sexual abuse of minors at World Wrestling Entertainment when she was CEO. Abandoning children to predatory forces who wish to dominate and exploit them seems to be a requisite of the job under the incoming Trump administration. In his first term, Trump picked Amway heiress Betsy DeVos to run the Education Department because of her long history of anti-public school activism. This time, he simply needs someone who will stand aside as an army of far-right Christians, emboldened by the rise of groups like Moms for Liberty, take the lead in attacking the very foundations of free, secular education.

Christian nationalists aren't even waiting for Trump to be sworn in for a second time before they make their move. Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host who Trump tapped to be Defense Secretary, was on a Christian nationalist podcast last week that described the vision. "I think we need to be thinking in terms of these classical Christian schools are boot camps for winning back America," explained the host, who is closely linked with Douglas Wilson, a far-right pastor who advocates for theocracy. Hegseth, who is facing scrutiny after it was revealed he settled out of court with a woman who accused him of rape in 2017, concurred. He called for an "educational insurgency" where "you build your army underground" of children, so they can grow up to be the next generation of fundamentalist culture warriors.

Oklahoma's state superintendent, Ryan Walters, wasted no time in harnessing the taxpayer-funded school system to push the Christian nationalist agenda. Mere days after Trump's election, Walters announced a new public department with an Orwellian name: "Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism." Unsurprisingly, the goal is to attack religious liberty, by forcing his brand of Christianity on students. Walters then mandated all schools show kids a video where he lambasted the "radical left" and the "woke teachers unions." He also attempted to lead a prayer, saying, "I pray in particular for Donald Trump." Trump probably cares less about the prayers and more that Walters lines his pockets. The superintendent has used the public education budget to purchase Trump-branded Bibles for Oklahoma classrooms.

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So far, this flagrant violation of the Constitution hasn't worked. The state attorney general stepped in and declared that Walters cannot mandate the viewing of his propaganda. Some school districts refused, though it's quite possible others gave in out of an unwillingness to fight with Walters to defend their students. More importantly, this is just an escalation of an all-out effort by Walters to turn Oklahoma's public schools into exactly the "boot camps" building up the "army" of Christian nationalists that Hegseth and his cronies imagine.

Walters is the biggest showboat, but there are already signs that Christian nationalists are ramping up this "educational insurgency" across the country. Last week, the Texas state school board voted to replace traditional reading materials for elementary kids with Bible study. This is not hyperbole. The Dallas Morning News ran excerpts from the curriculum, which includes lessons on the Sermon on the Mount, the "prodigal son" Bible story, and explicitly teaches that "Jesus rose from the dead," treating the myth of the resurrection as historical fact. Lest there be any doubt this is about anything but using schools to proselytize, the school board meeting was crushed with evangelicals praying for this opportunity to push their faith on the captive audience of school children.

The school board justified this decision by making the curriculum "optional," but that's misleading. For one thing, it's only "optional" for school districts. If those are the books a district chooses, then that's what students and teachers must live with. Worse, the state is bribing districts who pick it up by paying them $40 a student if they adopt the curriculum. For poorer, often rural districts, that money can be hard to pass up. "The board’s vote represents a troubling attempt to turn public schools into Sunday schools," Carisa Lopez, Texas Freedom Network Deputy Director, said in a statement. And even though the GOP talks a big game about "parents' rights," she pointed out this undermines "the freedom of families to direct the religious education of their own children."

In Arizona, the Christian nationalist war on education has grown so aggressive that it's threatening to tank the state's budget. As Politico reported Sunday, a government program that was originally "created for students with disabilities who needed services they could not get at their neighborhood public schools" has become "a budget-busting free-for-all used by more than 50,000 students." That's because anti-public education Christian organizers have been encouraging people to abuse the program to lavishly fund religious schools or even homeschooling. "Families, mostly from high-income zip codes, have applied the taxpayer funds for everything from ski lift passes to visits to trampoline parks, a $4,000 grand piano, more than a million dollars in Legos, online ballet lessons, horse therapy and cookie-baking kits."

The goal appears to be to suck so much money out of public school systems that they collapse. As Kathryn Joyce revealed in an investigative report at Salon, the masterminds behind this scheme envision religious schools and Christian homeschooling as a replacement — which implies, though they will rarely admit it, no school at all for people who don't want or can't afford those options. It's a different strategy than those in Oklahoma and Texas pushing Bible study directly into public classrooms. They're all working towards the same goal, however: Making sure that most, if not all American students are taught that the only "real" Americans are fundamentalist Christians.

It's also an assault on one of the most crucial aspects of a real education: critical thinking skills.

Authoritarians are notoriously hostile to teaching kids intellectual autonomy, preferring children to exhibit mindless obedience. Southern Methodist University religious studies professor Mark Chancey, who has been speaking out against the Texas curriculum, worries that "when the lesson has a teacher read that Jesus was resurrected from the dead," students "are going to hear their teacher promoting that as a factual claim." That is, of course, very much the point. Trump's election showed that the MAGA right's power depends largely on supporters who can't separate fact from fiction, mythology from science, or conspiracy theory from truth. That's why Hegseth wants to reimagine schools as "boot camps": not places where children learn to think for themselves, but where they are unquestioning right-wing soldiers, following MAGA orders.