Attacks on Public Education are Attacks on the People’s Rights with a Strategic Right-wing Perspective

Note: This editorial was originally released in print-only last month. Minor edits have been made for online publication.

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Editorial Board

The increased attacks on public education by the right-wing extremist administration in power represent attacks on the people’s rights, this much is obvious. However, the strategic maneuvers being used to drag the country further right are less obvious and require some examination.

Last month’s announcement by Trump’s Secretary of Education appointee Linda McMahon to slash public education by gutting the Department of Education and eliminating federal oversight marks a significant step toward selling off education to private business interests, churches, and non-governmental organizations. Texas’s embattled “School Voucher Program,” recently passed in Senate Bill 2, foreshadows what can be expected across the country, not unlike the recent near-eradication of reproductive rights. Senate Bill 2 seeks to divert tax money from public schools into private schools. At the same time, a bipartisan bill, intended to combat the Palestine Solidarity Movement, H.R. 9495, the “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act,” has sweeping implications.

H.R. 9495 ushers in an era of revoking the tax status of organizations the ruling class deems too sympathetic to anti-imperialist causes. The bill uses nebulous definitions of terrorism to justify expanding state surveillance and repression. The recent attacks on students and intellectuals demonstrate how this bill can be used to shut down any private entities which do not tout the politics of the right-wing extremists. Such laws will likely be expanded to shore up right-wing extremism in education by eliminating the tax status of private entities which teach accurate history and social science. By labeling activists like Mahmoud Khalil as “supporters of Hamas” for supporting a free Palestine, we see exactly how such labels can be applied to education efforts as well.

The privatization of public education further indicates the rightward trend of the country—its ideological, moral, political, and economic degeneration all culminating in attacks on science. This broad shift toward philosophical idealism and increased reaction has been promoted and cultivated by both imperialist political parties, and both are complicit. The only defense is organization and mass protest, oriented toward combating and resisting attacks on the people’s rights.

What are the Reactionaries Doing?

The Trump administration recently cut $106 million from 22 public schools in Massachusetts. In Ohio, public schools require about $800 million to be fully funded this year, but are threatened by a proposal to provide less than $300 million. Schools in New Jersey are slated to lose $58 million in previously promised federal funds. These are just a few examples of the nationwide attacks on public education. Among these massive cuts, teaching and support positions will be cut, class sizes increased, materials will not be provided, and essential school infrastructure projects will be halted.

The defunding frenzy combined with other measures which force public schools into a dysfunctional state are preparations to portray public education in the worst possible way. This is part and parcel of the plan to privatize education, placing it into the hands of right-wing corporations that operate without public oversight. While attacks on public education are attacks on the people, they hit the working class the hardest.

Capitalism requires only the minimum education for the children of the working class in order to reproduce workers. This is usually little more than basic reading and skills to operate machines needed to work in low paying jobs. Privatization of public education further restricts the quality of education available to children of the working class. This dispels the myth of the “American dream,” in which any worker can transcend class through learning and hard work, further exposing how fixed and polarized class really is in the United States. These attacks on the working class have the further effect of accumulating poverty among the broad masses, increasing competition for jobs, increasing unemployment, and driving down wages, a response to the general economic crisis of imperialism.

The further effect of attacks on education is an increase in crime. The cost of already privatized childcare is prohibitive to low-income workers, and has a particularly oppressive impact on working mothers. As a result, many youths are cast to the streets, unable to find work in large numbers, turning some to crimes of economic desperation. This will inevitably be used, as it already has been by both Democratic and Republican mafias, to call for inflated police budgets, further militarization of the police, and increased terror against the poorest in society.

Combat and Resist the Attacks on the People

The people require organizations which are free to operate outside of the decomposing old-state. Everywhere, democratic rights have been restricted and eradicated, the old way of organizing attached to the tail end of the Democratic Party mafia has been utterly ineffective. The ruling class stands to benefit directly from the contradictions among the people. These must be overcome with new forms of combined effort of teachers, students, and parents, who through all means of struggle take up more vigorous campaigns to defend public education from right-wing onslaught.

The battle to be fought against the way capitalism educates at home must be conducted on the basis of class consciousness, confronting the false narratives that education is neutral and that schools are not a site of living class struggles.

The realization that the problems facing public education are nothing short of engineered according to the reactionaries’ plan does not do away with the question of education reform. Education reform is necessary, the question is: reform by who? This is a question of class struggle, and ultimately one of revolution in education, a question of which class has political power.

At the current phase of class struggle in education, good teachers, those who organize the development of knowledge as defenders of the truth of science, must develop into militant teachers contributing to the class consciousness of their students, becoming an example of the correct expression of rebellion. They must learn from the students in order to give impulse to the sometimes-latent yearning for a better society which already exists among the youth. This means consciously overcoming conceit and defensiveness with the understanding that the assaults on education are intended to crush the working class, and that the teachers and students are intended victims of this. The teacher becomes the representative of the new ideas and new values against the old ones.

Education is not neutral, it is a weapon used on the intellectual, economic, and political battlefields. Who uses it and against whom it is used will reveal the truth of the situation. The future of public education, the quality of education, and the quality of life of the student depends on understanding this principle. Are we in need of an education that trains, according to the needs of this economic system, the new rulers and administrators on the one hand, and the minimum technique of low-wage workers on the other? Or do the people need educators who prepare them to defend their rights, to snatch conquests piece by piece, and strive ardently to put an end to the system of toil, inequality and poverty? The battles to defend the people’s right to public education are poised to begin demarcating between those who serve the people, those who fall in line, and those who serve the increasingly reviled people’s enemies.

Photo: Texas Governor Greg Abbott signs Senate Bill 2.

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