Targeting the Department of Education:
An Arguably Necessary But Insufficient Measure That Will Not Solve Deep-Seated Societal Problems
Author’s Note: aside from a few small revisions, this essay was completed a few weeks ago, but certain complications prevented its completion and publication in a more timely matter. The battle for and against the Department of Education has only just begun, so the matter remains relevant, for reasons set forth in this essay, among others.
President Trump is slashing the Department of Education, ostensibly with an eye to eradicate the department. Abolishing the department will be nigh impossible without an act of Congress, and the Republicans do not have a majority to get past the Filibuster in the Senate. Even so, half of Department of Education employees are expected to be terminated or laid off, although even that will be obstructed by litigation and activist judges. This effort stems from two different policy considerations. The first concerns fiscal responsibility, specifically Trump and Elon Musk’s D.O.G.E. initiative to eliminate government waste and fraud, with an eye to try and do something about the 34 trillion-dollar deficit, even though that problem has likely gone well beyond the point of no return. Trump even mentioned a desire to balance the budget in his joint address to Congress earlier this month. In addition to such fiscal considerations, however, Trump and other Republicans have suggested that the Department of Education has exacerbated substandard education in this country. Trump has explicitly stated since the department was established, the United States ranking in academic performance has fallen to about 40—38 in this ranking. Indeed, Donald Trump made this statement during his conversation with Elon Musk, explicitly stating the Department of Education is the cause of meddling American academic performance:
“The Department of Education has been a disaster for this country. We’re spending more money per pupil than anybody else and we’re getting terrible results—number 40 in the world or worse. It’s because of that department. I’m going to shut it down and give it back to the states, and you’ll see education improve fast.” (emphasis added)
That may be true to some limited extent. But as will be demonstrated, the problems concerning student performance in our education system—and a myriad of other societal problems as well—stem from two seemingly intractable problems with American society, problems that encompass so many other problems that plague modern society; those problems, at the most abstract level, concern matters of race and culture, neither one of which mainstream conservatism or Trump’s brand of civic nationalist, populist takeover of the GOP have proven able to contend with or even discern in any meaningful way.
First and foremost, mainstream Republican talking points are nothing other than wishful thinking as they ignore realities about race, realities that are both taboo but undeniable. These talking points recount a familiar yarn—that big government (irrespective of the sort of government involved) is necessarily the problem, and eliminating “big government” will summon some mysterious invisible hand, either by way of free-market capitalism, local government, or some other buzzword, as that invisible hand will ameliorate all of these problems. This is wishful thinking at its worst. While certainly exacerbated by entities like the Department of Education, given institutional capture at the hands of the march through the institutions that happened over half a century ago, this alone cannot solve larger problems that are deeply ingrained in the fabric of American society and its education system.
A juxtaposition of the top ten and bottom nations in the world education rankings. Certain truths about race are suggested if not revealed outright. Not pictured are China and Singapore, ranking 11 and 12 respectively.
Poor academic performance has famously plagued the black population in particular for decades, as such problems have also plagued mestizo populations to some lesser extent. Billions if not trillions of expenditures have had little to no effect to ameliorate this problem. Any internet search will reveal pages and pages of results related to this problem. The vast majority of these results exhibit a most desperate search for answers other than racial differences rooted in biology and evolutionary psychology—a search that has been undertaken for decades with no real progress. No solution to these problems is found precisely because esteemed institutions and received orthodoxies search so desperately for any answer at all, including systemic racism, white privilege, conscious and unconscious bias—anything and everything but genetic and racial differences1 that are largely impervious to the adjustment of external variables like culture, lavish expenditures in school budgets at all levels, and so on.
A contemptible, vulgar, thug subculture in the black “community” that ridicules and ostracizes black outliers for “acting white” for simply bucking the trend of abysmal academic performance (and other sociological pathologies) certainly exacerbate matters, but the evidence that the genetic die has been cast is undeniable to any person capable of piercing through the civil rights era propaganda and the indoctrination of received orthodoxy. A few certain silver linings suggest otherwise, such as the documentary Waiting for Superman. which recounts efforts by men like Geoffrey Canada among others. Canada is “a credit to his race,” as they used to say back in the day, and his efforts are a benefit to his race and therefore American society for as long as it continues to entertain, and is compelled to entertain, the mad delusion that multiculturalism can ever work, or that there can ever be (or should be) reconciliation between blacks and whites at a collective, societal scale. This preamble notwithstanding, charter schools like those led by figures like Canada cherry pick a mere fraction of the black student population. The performance of those outliers is then pitted against the entirety of suburban, largely white student bodies. While suburban schools with predominantly white and Asian student bodies are far better than their crime ridden and black and mestizo ridden counterparts, the American education system suffers from many deficiencies which remove it from the sort of discipline, structure, and academic rigor that typifies many of these charter schools. And both suburban schools and charter schools alike pale in comparison to the education systems that characterize those countries that do excel at these international rankings of academic performance. The American high school is nothing like the German gymnasium system for example. This raises the question of what the white counterparts to Geoffrey Canada’s handpicked, outlier students would accomplish if they were similarly subject to a rigorous academic environment. Before questions concerning deeper systemic and cultural phenomenon that inform greater insight into lackluster American academic performance are examined, a recent observation by Gregory Hood aka James Kirkpatrick is noteworthy.
The implication of matters of race is obvious although unstated. He is correct to point out that this precipitous “decline in the ability to read, reason, focus, and learn new things” is correlated in lock step fashion with onerous demographic trends related to the Great Replacement and incursion of black and brown people who have no right to set foot on European soil at all, but have been allowed to reverse colonize the sacred continent without firing a shot, just as they are making similar if not greater incursions in the Anglosphere worldwide. Correlation does not necessarily mean causation, and while this is doubtlessly a notable causal factor, the dissolution of the nuclear family, increasing prevalence of broken or dysfunctional families, as well as the rise of smartphones and certain platforms that beget abject stupidity are doubtlessly causal factors as well. These and other factors combined with disconcerting demographic trends together inform why the simple abolition of Department of Education will not fix these and other problems. Contrary to simplistic “Conservative Inc” platitudes, poor academic performance in America is tied to deep societal and cultural problems that have been allowed to fester for decades.
Among these cultural and societal problems so deeply engrained in the very fabric of our society is the state of education in the broadest sense—a problem that was abetted and catalyzed by mainstream conservatism’s disdain and loathing for matters of culture, a fundamental weakness that has plagued establishment conservatism for decades. This is apparent upon even the most cursory survey of the state of not just most educators in this country and the Occident more generally, but the march through the institutions that occurred in the 60s, most especially the subversion and capture of higher education.2 This subversion and capture of higher education by Cultural Marxism does not only pertain to the coarsening and subversion of culture and society. This subversion and capture has created generations of educators in our primary school system who are not only to a large degree objectively substandard, but has created generations of teachers who are zealous adherents to various causes that fall under an umbrella of far-left ideology. As expounded in “Descriptivism Defied” and its separate addendum, “Race Matters in the Language Wars,” the degradation of academic and more particularly literary standards in English language arts has been unremittent for decades. David Foster Wallace avers that anyone who was taught after about the time I was born will never learn English grammar the way it used to be taught (Wallace 81). And the tiresome objections of descriptivist3 cretins notwithstanding, there has been a precipitous decline in the verbal and writing abilities of the public at large with this trend, as well as the ubiquity of American Unkultur in television in particular. Most mainstream publishers and editors alike adhere to a “standard” that keeps writing at about an 8th grade reading level.
Beyond that, a seemingly overwhelming number of educators embrace hard-core leftist beliefs as they pertain to a vast array of societal and political issues. This is exemplified by so-called English teachers such as Marta Shaffer, who made headlines for teaching her students that proper grammar as well as baseline standards in writing and composition are nothing other than “white supremacy.” Beyond that, various twitter accounts, obviously including LibsofTikTok but also smaller accounts like Eye Inside the Classroom among many others have documented how many thousands—if not tens of thousands— of teachers indoctrinate their students with various slogans and battle cries of the far left, from jargon associated with the transgender and gender ideology menace, to Black Lives Matter, to various accoutrements of the anti-white, pro “diversity” worldview that predominates far too many educators. Such accounts happen on a daily if not hourly basis and are so pervasive, it would be folly to even attempt to produce even a small sample of these anecdotes. Hostile readers and ideological enemies of this author and publication are directed to simply peruse twitter and the internet for a few brief moments to find ample sources—SOURCE?!!!—for these claims.
How will slashing the budget of the Department of Education or even its abolition solve this problem and other related problems? It took decades for the march through the institutions to consummate, and that is with the feeble, ineffective “resistance” feigned by mainstream conservatism, not the modern left which actually cares about culture; the left, unlike mainstream conservatism, actually understands how culture is an expression of power, just as the left understands the dynamics of power more generally. What will slashing the Department of Education do about the appalling state of American Unkultur, formerly defined by idiotic sitcoms and gameshows, but is now dumbed down by even greater idiocy exhibited on modern social media platforms like TikTok? What will these efforts do about a large contingent of parents who think it is appropriate to give their children—not even adolescents in high school but elementary school aged children—smartphones? As alluded to earlier, there are other deep-seated problems including the state of American high school as it has existed since at least the 50s. Most “decent” suburban high schools are not much more than a government funded baby-sitting service that encourages students to “major” in the team’s football and basketball teams, keggers, and promiscuous sex, as portrayed in a veritable genre of teen films since the 1980s and after.4 Compare and contrast what is seen in films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Mean Girls—and more importantly the real life phenomena that these films and even some books fairly accurately portray—with the German gymnasium even today (or more preferably in the 30s and 40s and to an even greater extent during the Second Empire before the outbreak of World War I), or for that matter the education system in Japan, Korea, or Singapore, or Geoffrey Canada’s rigorous academic demands made on his cherry picked outliers.
The American University is fraught with similar problems. Driven by the absurd notion that everyone should go to college, the currency of an undergraduate degree has been degraded by the simple law of supply and demand; churning out double or triple the number of college graduates while continuously lowering standards floods the supply side, diminishing demand. That guiding principle however, along ideological undercurrents that have infected American universities and now universities throughout Europe and The West, has watered down academic standards since baby boomers attended college. This is exacerbated by certain, peculiar cultural phenomena whereby American colleges and universities prostitute themselves out as the minor leagues of the National Football League and National Basketball Association, which contaminates the academic environment in many ways, from fostering focus and attention on these bread and circus spectacles by both student and alumni, to perpetrating academic fraud to allow so-called student athletes to remain enrolled despite being utterly unable to meet the very minimum collegiate standards.5[4]
Slashing or even eliminating the Department of Education is doubtlessly sound fiscal policy, and the degree to which academic performance has floundered since Jimmy Carter established the department does demonstrate it is ineffectual, but these measures alone (slashing the budget of the Department of Education, or even its abolition were that possible) could never solve all the underlying problems that cause this academic malaise, despite what less than impressive voices in mainstream conservatism suggest or even insist. Many of the countries that top this list strongly suggest the causal factors identified in this essay. Nations like Korea, Denmark, and Japan are more or less homogenous, and consist of high IQ peoples. The Great Replacement is eroding that homogeneous demographic quality in the European countries topping the word rankings list, which also include Ireland, Germany, and Norway, but for the time being the student population has not yet succumbed to these incursions; time is running out, however. Nations like China and Singapore do not exactly adhere to the “small government is better, no government is best” creed as espoused by Thomas Massie and other figures of the libertarian sort. Big government is not really the problem—it is the type of government that counts. Many of the deep, underlying problems, such as several generations of teachers beholden to subversive, left-wing ideology bear no prospect of being solved by free-market solutions, the invisible hand that mainstream conservatism so foolishly places so much faith in, or for that matter the democratic form of government or liberal democracy itself. Setting aside more radical propositions, have any figures in mainstream conservatism enunciated a willingness or plan to purge the ranks of bad teachers —purge by way of termination of employment, revocation of license and the like, or, were it possible, far more drastic measures. The bulk of teachers are just terrible for two different reasons, because they are incompetent and do not exhibit objective mastery of the subjects and disciplines they purport to teach and bad because they are beholden to insidious, far-left ideas and ideologies that simply must not be tolerated. If these and other drastic measures were implemented, how would the nations be schooled with competent suitable teachers in a short period of time, particularly given the state of the American university? While the defunding or even the abolition of the Department of Education will stunt the growth and proliferation of these nefarious elements, such measures alone cannot ameliorate these deep-seated problems that have been allowed to fester for decades under the auspices of cultural Marxism and an utterly ineffectual mainstream conservatism that bears no fitness for the purposes it professes to serve. Solutions to those and other problems require something far more drastic and radical.
PLEASE NOTE: Readers who appreciate the insight and perspective set forth in this essay are urged to consider offering a paid subscription or even a founding member subscription, provided such expenditures are not unduly burdensome. Readers who enjoyed this article and found it informative and insightful are also encouraged to signify their favor for this and other writings by clicking on the “like emoji,” as well as sharing this and other articles to those who would find this and other essays and articles interesting, insightful, or provocative. The like emoji or lack thereof is a greater factor than it should be that readers unfamiliar with an author or publication use to decide whether to read any particular piece or not.
This essay is a newly formed section called “Beyond Conservatism.” Readers will find in this section several essays critical of mainstream conservatism.
Follow Richard Parker on twitter (or X if one prefers) under the handle (@)astheravencalls. Delete the parentheses, which were added to prevent interference with Substack’s own internal handle system.
NOTES
For those uninitiated, Jared Taylor’s presentation “Common Sense Science and Scientific Theory About Racial Differences in IQ and General Intelligence” is probably the single greatest introduction to this issue. Raymond Wolter’s presentation ”Why Do So Many Blacks Get Slow Scores on Tests” is recommended See also F Roger Devlin’s essay “Recent Research on Race Relations.”
See generally Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique. Robert Bork also discusses this at length through much of Slouching Towards Gomorrah.
Of course, descriptivism and prescriptivism are not mutually exclusive to one another in an absolute sense. A dictionary should accurately describe the meaning of a word and how it is used, provided that the meaning and usage are long-standing, widely accepted, and, put bluntly, correct. As argued in “Descriptivism Defied,’ just because a word is often misspelled or used incorrectly does not mean such errors should be sanctioned in authoritative dictionaries. To do so erodes the clarity and precision of our language and interferes with our collective ability to speak and write clearly and eloquently.
Some conservative and right-wing reactionary and right-wing populist voices advocate for home-schooling. This is acceptable as a short-term, stop gap measure, but is unacceptable as a long-term strategy as it cedes matter of culture on a macro scale to insidious, hostile forces. There is also the problem of how a parent could teach a wide array of subjects, from biology to a foreign language, to calculus or trigonometry, some of which is addressed not in home schooling but in schooling collectives described as “home schooling” where a close-knit group of parents have experts in their circle teach students on matters a given individual has expertise. These and other issues are addressed in “Parenting Alone is Not Enough.”
Tom Wolfe’s novel I am Charlotte Simmons is highly recommended for the way he exposes life at modern American universities. “Smitten With Charlotte and Cindy” offers a comparative review of this book and Can’t Buy Me Love.
What the US needs is segregated schools and a ban of all 'progressive' garbage. Abolishing the DoE will have minimal effect by itself.