Unschooled

Illustration by Michael DiMilo

By Geoff Carter

I was a public-school teacher for over thirty years. I mainly taught high school English, but because I was at one point assigned to the Home and Hospital Program, which serviced students at home who were too sick to go to school, I had occasion to teach all the subjects, including Civics and History.

My district’s curriculum was determined by our school board and superintendent, following guidelines set forth by the Wisconsin Department of Instruction. While curriculum in American History had more emphasis on marginalized populations like Native Americans and African Americans than when I attended high school, Civics, the study of the rights, duties, and obligations of citizens, in this case, the American citizen, had not changed all that much.

I taught my students the importance of voting, community involvement, and a clear understanding of how our government works. While teaching American History, we studied the American Revolution, the Civil War, the end of slavery, and how America’s involvement in World War II helped end the fascist regimes of the Axis Powers. We also taught about the dark side of American History: manifest destiny, the Gilded Age, slavery, the Tulsa massacre, and the internment of Japanese American citizens during the Second World War. It’s all part of who we are. 

We taught fact-based history. We did not teach theories, dogma, or lies. We did not gloss over the fact that Thomas Jefferson was a slave-owner or that manifest destiny resulted in the deaths of entire cultures and peoples. 

Rather, our mission was to create well-informed citizens who were able to evaluate data and make up their own minds logically. This is part of what is known as a liberal arts education which, as described in the article Liberal Education in Wisconsin: Death by a Thousand Cuts, is, regrettably, in the process of being phased out of the American educational system. The liberal arts has been targeted for years, and the battles for the heart and soul of public education continue today, having most recently been extended to attacks on our universities and other institutions of higher learning.

In the past few months—his first one hundred and some days, President Trump has issued a series of executive orders threatening federal funding for universities if they failed to accede to the administration’s demands. Claims of antisemitism, liberal indoctrination of students, affirmative-action programs, and DEI programs on campuses have fueled Trump’s punitive measures. 

Some universities, like Columbia, have caved to his demands. Others, like Harvard, refused to compromise their intellectual independence for a mandate of far-right curriculum and policy. Realizing they might be next, Big Ten schools, anticipating continued attacks on public universities, united to form a mutual defense pact which would allow members to share legal resources and financial funds to fight possible future executive orders. (Axios)

These latest skirmishes are only the tip of the iceberg. The attacks on public education started a long time ago. As pointed out by Heather Cox Richardson in her May24, 2025 post,  “the anti-intellectual impulse behind Trump’s attacks on higher education has a long history in the United States,” an enmity which can be traced back to frontiersmen’s distrust of Eastern intellectualism and leadership. A good part of this animus toward education was rooted in a rejection of well-educated Eastern ministers in favor of uneducated pastors who “claimed their lack of formal education enabled them to speak directly from God’s inspiration (Cox Richardson)”, a conflict which later came into sharp focus during the Scopes Trial, in which a teacher was tried for teaching evolution in his classroom.

In the last few decades, voucher programs for privatized, or charter schools, have been legalized by a growing number of states. Public education funds have been diverted from public schools and channeled into privately-owned charter schools. In some cases, like Wisconsin’s private school vouchers, these funds can go directly to religious schools. It gets worse. In Florida, charter schools are not required to follow local school board standards. “Charter schools are not required to comply with the local school board’s policies, and these schools are exempt from many of the state statutes that traditional schools are required to follow.” (LeonCountySchools)

Despite the explicit Constitutional requirement that calls for “the wall of separation” between church and state, recent legislation has mandated that Bibles be included in every classroom in Oklahoma (ABCNews). In Louisiana, a new law mandates that the Ten Commandments be openly displayed in every classroom—another clear violation of the separation between church and state. 

The Trump Administration’s attacks on institutions of higher learning, science and medicine (see Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s brain worm), the dismantling of hundreds of research programs, and his attempt to destroy the Department of Education should come as no surprise. It’s part of a pro-right, Christian Nationalist tradition that seeks, according to Project 2025, to totally remake American public education. 

According to The Guardian, Oklahoma Superintendent of Education Ryan Walters, with the help of Project 2025 co-author and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, revised the educational standards for social studies. Instructors will now be required to teach that the unfounded conspiracy theory that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Superintendent Walters also quashed a proposal to teach lessons about the George Floyd murder and Black Lives Matter—which falls under the administration’s desire to destroy anything DEI. Walter’s curricular changes also include teaching the controversial assertion that the COVID-19 pandemic was the result of a laboratory leak. 

In defending these changes, Walters said, “these reforms will reset our classrooms back to educating our children without liberal indoctrination,” (USA Today) If “liberal indoctrination” means fact-based curriculum based on empirical evidence and logic, I guess Walters has achieved his aims. Superintendent Walters goes on to say, “We will continue to stand up for honest, pro-America education in every classroom.”

Apparently, not everyone believes that Wolter’s vision of “honest pro-American education” is all that honest. Former Oklahoma Republican Attorney General Mike Hunter has filed a lawsuit on behalf of students, teachers, and parents, maintaining that the new curriculum “directly harms” students because the standards don’t align with accepted standards. 

Superintendent Wolters, Kevin Roberts, and others who would seek to teach debunked conspiracy theories as historical fact to further an authoritarian Christian nationalist agenda—as well as their own political ambitions—are about as far from being “pro-American” as you can get. 

An understanding of American history—the good and the bad—based on fact-based sources is at the heart of democracy. To deliberately distort the facts of our history is to attack that democracy. If we allow these men to continue to feed our children half-truths and lies in our public schools in furtherance of an authoritarian kleptocracy, then we will lose that history, and our identity as Americans, a people who fought for and won our independence against the mightiest military force in the world, a people who values truth, and a people who stand for fairness and justice, will be lost forever.

Notes

1. https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/may-24-2025?r=6zbyw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
2. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/legislators-lean-religion-public-education-supreme-court-leans/story?id=111639298#:~:text=In%20Louisiana%2C%20a%20new%20law,the%20new%20law%20in%20court.
3. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/17/oklahoma-high-schools-election-conspiracy-theories
4. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/05/22/oklahoma-schools-teach-2020-election-big-lie-trump/83731606007/
5. https://www.nytimes.com/article/trump-university-college.html
6. https://www.axios.com/2025/04/24/big-ten-joint-pact-trump-administration-universities
7. https://www.leonschools.net/Charterschools#calendar113187/20250527/month
8. https://www.texastribune.org/2024/11/18/texas-curriculum-history-social-studies-slavery-racism/#:~:text=That%20includes%20teaching%20that%20many,according%20to%20Learning%20for%20Justice.