Rumor has it that President Trump plans to sign an executive order on March 20, 2025, dismantling the U.S. Department of Education (ED).
“Formally closing the department requires an act of Congress,” NBC News reports. “But even without formally shutting it down, the Trump administration could effectively make it nearly impossible for employees to carry out their work, as it has done with the U.S. Agency for International Development.”
Such news is rather unbelievable, both for those who don’t want to see ED close and those who do. Indeed, it sounds like something straight out of the mind of John Taylor Gatto, a former New York Teacher of the Year, who, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, publicly raged against the traditional systems of schooling in the United States and their soul-crushing effects on our children.
“It’s time to discard the people who hold the business of schooling tight against their chests,” Gatto once wrote, “time to discount the advice of those who make a good living out of the current system, time to jettison the true believers.”
Given that statement, it seems Gatto would likely be thrilled to see the move towards ED’s closure.
But any closure naturally leaves a void that can be filled by either good ideas or bad. If the Department of Education does indeed shut down, or at least becomes a useless, defunded branch of the federal government, then what’s going to fill that void? What ideas can we put forth to ensure that ED’s closure results in good educational outcomes for our students rather than bad?
Gatto had a suggestion for that: advance a “curriculum of family.”
“Family is the main engine of education,” Gatto wrote in an essay entitled “Why Schools Don’t Educate.” “If we use schooling to break children away from parents … we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now,” he continued.
The curriculum of family is at the heart of any good life, we’ve gotten away from that curriculum, time to return to it. The way to sanity in education is for our schools to take the lead in releasing the stranglehold of institutions on family life, to promote during school time confluences of parent and child that will strengthen family bonds.
Gatto fleshed out what this curriculum of family would entail in another of his works, “A Different Kind of Teacher.” This curriculum would only confine students to the classroom a few days a week. The rest of their time would be spent in 1) independent study – with parents collaborating with teachers to help students do things such as “explore a trade, read a book, make a dress,” or do other hands-on learning experiences; 2) community service – with students helping in venues such as elderly care facilities or local parks; 3) field curriculum – with students and teachers doing real-life research projects in the community.
But such a massive educational shift can’t happen without the family, Gatto explains.
Independent study, community service, and a field curriculum can’t happen without permission from parents and shouldn’t continue without parents being involved as partners. One way schools can promote this involvement is by asking employers to let kids visit and study their parents’ workplace. They should also ask employers to free parents from their work occasionally so they can bring their experience and talent into the classroom.
Such a curriculum seems impossible given conventional wisdom. After all, the thinking goes, families can’t survive on one income – both parents must be in the workforce, making it more difficult for parents to be involved in the education of their children. Furthermore, we’re often told that parents aren’t education experts. How can we dare to think that they can effectively help to educate their children?
But in thinking this way, we forget that the family is the most basic institution of society. Without it, well-functioning society ceases to exist, which, given the push for chaos and governmental control in recent years, may actually be a goal of the powers-that-be.
G. K. Chesterton said it best when he noted the following in “The Superstition of Divorce”:
The masters of modern plutocracy know what they are about. … A very profound and precise instinct has led them to single out the human household as the chief obstacle to their inhuman progress. Without the family we are helpless before the State, which in our modern case is the Servile State.
In essence, if we want to avoid the grasping clutches of government control, then maybe it’s time we do everything possible to advance the family – including its role in the education of children. If so, then downsizing the Department of Education and reducing our dependence on “the advice of those who make a good living out of the current system” might just be the first step toward that goal.
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