What the Right Gets Right About What's Gone Wrong with Public Education

We need a vision for schools that goes beyond job training

If you’ve been following my work for a while then you know that I’ve long made a point of seeking out people with whom I disagree. As a humorous blogger poking fun at the excesses of education reform, I traveled all over the country in order to meet up in person with my online adversaries—charter school advocates, school choice superfans, conservative school fixers. I learned a lot and struck up some genuine friendships along the way.

That now feels like a long time ago. As our political climate grows more toxic, I’ve found it more and more difficult to sustain these relationships. My conservative friends aka sparring partners now number in the low single digits. Which is why when a prominent conservative influencer asked me to come on to his podcast recently I leaped at the opportunity.

Jeremy Wayne Tate, as you are perhaps aware, created something called the Classical Learning Test, an alternative to the ACT and the SAT which Tate and his ilk view as corporatized, politicize pablum. An empassioned booster of the conservative cause du jour, classical education, Tate also hosts the Anchored podcast, the episodes of which typically contain the word ‘classical.’

Now, Tate and I do not have much in common. He’s prone to bold declarations like “I think CS Lewis and GK Chesterton were right about everything,” “I think Western civilization is awesome,” and “I don’t think men can have babies.”
My previous appearance on his pod to discuss A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, the book I wrote with education historian Jack Schneider, was mostly a sparring match. This time was different, because we were discussing a topic we’re both passionate about: the liberal arts, specifically the liberal arts in prison education. As you can hear for yourself, there is a remarkable absence of enmity in our conversation. Tate was eager to know about what it’s like to teach in a prison, I was eager to share the stories of my incarcerated students whose lives have been transformed, even saved by what Tate et al would refer to as the ‘great books.’

What’s the point?

At one point during our discussion, Tate made a reference to what’s gone wrong with public education in this country. If you’re guessing that he called out teachers unions, or ‘wokeness,’ or too little school choice you’d be incorrect. Tate argues that the purpose of education has been reduced to workforce preparation and little else—a view I happen to share.

I spent several weeks this summer at work on an essay for the Baffler, elaborating on a development on the right that has gone relatively unnoticed. While public school defenders have been focused on school vouchers and book bans, a growing, and influential chorus of conservatives has been making the case against what we might call ‘education by corporation’—the whole idea that the main purpose of education is to prepare kids for jobs. They’ve soured on STEM and think standardized tests measure the wrong thing. “What if you are creating workers who don’t love their country for a future economy that doesn’t exist?” asked Pete Hegseth, who, before he was leaking war plans in group chats wrote a book urging parents to flee the public schools in favor of classical Christian education.

Much about what these guys (and it always seems to be guys) are arguing is contradictory, even bonkers. In his recent book Dawn’s Early Light, Heritage honcho Kevin Roberts accuses public schools of churning out students who manage to be both corporate drones AND Marxist revolutionaries, “ideal cogs in a globalist, Uniparty economic system,” as he puts it. Yet however nonsensical such claims may be, the critique of schools as overly focused on job training is worth reckoning with.

In a sharp piece this spring, writer and teacher Annie Abrahms bemoaned the fact that the the strongest push for K–12 curricula that get kids into serious literature is coming from the right. Reading in too many public schools has been reduced to decontexulized passages, noted Abrahms. And for all the talk of Common Core being no more (or of our schools being run by Marxist lunatics), the corporate view of education that the standards embody entirely shapes public education. In her survey of state standards, Abrahms turned up one dreary example after another. In Pennsylvania, starting next year, kindergarteners will be learning about the importance of having entrepreneurial traits, while middle schoolers will be schooled on how to market themselves as job candidates. In New York, elementary school kids are encouraged to make dioramas showing a person on the job. Their older counterparts will be preparing to re-market themselves in the event that they lose the jobs they’re training for.

Where’s the vision?

My Baffler essay ends on what counts as a hopeful note these days — that with AI expected to wipe out of the jobs, we may have no choice but to replace ‘learning for earning’ with learning for learning’s sake. I was joking, sort of, but I was also expressing exasperation with the absence of any vision at all from the Democratic Party regarding the purpose of public schools beyond the training and testing rhetoric that we’ve been sold for three decades now. As I was preparing to write this piece, an old friend called to share with me a story. He works for an organization that advocates for public schools and had recently been part of a discussion with a candidate who was seeking an endorsement. The conversation turned, inevitably, to why public schools matter. The candidate’s response was, essentially, ‘it’s the economy, stupid.’

“Neoliberal Education Reform Paved the Way for Right-Wing ‘Classical Education’” argued writer Nora De La Cour in a 2023 that I’ve returned to again and again. She was making the same case I am, that the right is offering a vision of education that is explicitly positioned as an alternative to soulless workforce development. We may be uncomfortable with the focus on patriotism, western civilization, or outright religiousity in classical education, but what’s key here is that the goals—of cultivating wonder in children, encouraging students to get lost in the magic of storytelling and to wrestle with profound questions—are compelling to all kinds of parents, not just those on the right.

“The Left should articulate our own robust narrative about schools that do more than train future workers,” concludes De La Cour. “We need schools that honor and nourish our shared humanity.”

Agreed.