On a January webinar for Chalkbeat, Lindsey Burke, a senior education official in the Trump administration, faced an audience question about the administration’s rationale for moving K-12 programs to the Department of Labor — part of its ongoing effort to dismantle the Education Department.

“Arguably schools have broader purposes — civic, moral, and social — rather than just preparation for employment,” read Chalkbeat national editor Erica Meltzer. “Can you speak to some of these broader purposes of education and how they might be safeguarded?”

“You know, I actually couldn’t agree with that more,” Burke, who authored Project 2025’s education section, replied with a smiling glance at the ceiling. “Education really is about forming human souls, right? And about preparing individuals to inherit the blessings and liberties of a free society.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find a Democratic analog to this exalted vision for K-12 schooling. Liberal education punditry is instead relentlessly negative, painting a grim picture of deluded parents who refuse to admit that our dumb kids can’t read or do math. Coddled by “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), the chorus of columnists laments, American students are hopelessly unprepared for today’s job market. Their solution? A full return to the punishing high stakes of No Child Left Behind — the apparent raison d’être of Rahm Emanuel’s 2028 presidential flirtations.

The idea that school should mainly aim to boost human capital (by raising test scores) dominated bipartisan education reform efforts from Ronald Reagan through Barack Obama. Those days of neoliberal bipartisanship feel like a distant daydream now, but the centrist intelligentsia is increasingly eager to reimpose that version of accountability on our public schools, perhaps forgetting the profound, bipartisan unpopularity of standardized curriculum and test-obsessed schooling.

Meanwhile, the Right has graduated from highlighting skills gaps and industry demands to openly pursuing the demolition of universal, secular public education. Since Donald Trump’s first election, we’ve seen a phenomenal expansion of statewide (and now federal) voucher programs, which divert taxpayer money from traditional public schools and funnel it into unaccountable, often religious and discriminatory, private options.

Along the way, MAGA intellectuals have been arguing that schools should aim for something much loftier than job training. Here’s Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn, of 1776 Commission fame, describing his institution’s brand of conservative classical education (coming soon to a Christian-flavored charter school near you):

Students need to understand the fundamentals of the natural world as well as have a wonder-filled grasp of its complexity, detail, and exuberant variety. The humanities, too, are neither superfluous nor decorative. They are the stuff whereby we become most fully human, whereby we “stretch out” toward ourselves at our best and truest.

In today’s distracting world of cheap content and screen-driven meaninglessness, it’s not hard to grasp the appeal of a pedagogy that transcends market forces, nurturing our human quest for truth. The MAGA-powered right’s previous iteration of K-12 messaging — à la Moms for Liberty and Libs of TikTok — largely ran out of steam and turned its cultural battalions toward higher ed, finding the parent masses vexingly skeptical that our kids’ guidance counselors were coaching them to use cat litter. But this talk of classrooms brimming with wonder and purpose seems perfectly pitched to attract families disenchanted with an education system that’s been yoked to bloodless industry standards.

For those of us who wish to protect our public schools from the existential threats posed by people like Lindsey Burke, it’s worth asking: What’s our countervision? Can we articulate our own expansive philosophy of K-12 learning that makes us more fully human? Are we interested in forming souls or merely forming STEM-steeped résumés? If we’re serious about the future of public education and democracy, we can’t afford to continue neglecting these questions.

The Classical Revival

Conservative classical academies have proliferated in the MAGA era, with at least 264 new charter and private schools branded as “classical” opening between 2019 and 2023, per one sector analysis. These schools herald the so-called transcendentals of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, with a heavy emphasis on virtue. Their websites and promotional materials describe students and teachers “drinking deeply” from time-honored texts that usher them into conversation with the greatest thinkers of Western civilization. Syllabi revolve around ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, biblical and early Christian writing, and US founding documents, which are treated with a religious reverence. That’s no coincidence, as many of the right-wing strategists pushing the expansion of classical alternatives to public school subscribe to the view that the United States was founded on Christian principles, and that only scriptural morality can reverse civilizational decline.

The largest of the classical charter chains, Great Hearts Academies, claims approximately 30,000 students in public charter schools across Arizona, Texas, and Louisiana (as well as explicitly biblical private schools that direct parents to apply for public funding through one of Arizona’s generous voucher programs). Great Hearts promises, on its website, to cultivate wisdom through “shared inquiry and honest discussion.”

“We don’t want [students] to be merely chasing a carrot or running from a metaphorical stick,” explains Brandon Crowe, superintendent of Great Hearts Arizona. He continues:

We want them to live a full life, where they want to understand the human condition and all that the world has to offer — not just, what’s the grade on the next test, or how do I get into that college or that job?

Great Hearts mathematics instructor Clifton Keiser goes on to explain, in the same Phoenix local news segment, that teaching isn’t merely about transmitting discrete, testable skills. For Keiser, it’s a matter of sharing his deep and abiding love of math.

Sometimes I feel like these bright-eyed classical ed evangelists are reading my mind. I became a public-school English teacher because I wanted to share my deep love of stories. A teacher’s passion is infectious, and I found that when I was able to convey mine to my students, they were inspired — even if the material was hard. I was excited by the challenge of luring a group of checked-out seniors into boisterous debate over Aaron’s role in Titus Andronicus, or making room for the fraught loyalties in Octavia Butler’s Kindred to coax self-conscious ninth-graders out of their shells. I taught in underresourced districts where students faced significant poverty-related barriers to academic learning. But the juicy human questions framed by great literature held just as much power for them as they do for me, regardless of their abysmal standardized test scores.

Time and again, though, my desire to share my love with my students was frustrated by the technocratic constraints imposed by education reform. We rarely had time to immerse ourselves in whole works of fiction, due to state standards’ emphasis on “informational texts” and scripted curriculum’s tendency to serve up literary classics as decontextualized excerpts. I remember feeling crushed one day after helping my tenth-graders prepare for our state’s standardized English language arts exam. They’d gotten hung up on a practice question involving a passage from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — a thrilling page-turner that’s well-suited for tenth-graders, who, in my experience, are fighting to defend the romantic idealism of early adolescence from the encroachment of cynical adulthood. But in their test prep packet, Shelley’s awesome monster novel appeared as a dull, sterile fragment, seemingly selected to alienate them with its abstruseness.

“We teach the standards, not the books,” I was told on another occasion, when I protested having to move on to the next unit before my students had completed their riveting journey through the darkness of Macbeth. They hadn’t believed they could read a Shakespeare play, and yet in spite of everything they were up against, it had captivated them. Whose fault was this tragedy, and how could the witches’ impossible prophecy be realized? They desperately wanted to understand, and now I was forced to tell them that that didn’t matter. Moving on to RL.9–10.10 was more important.

Claiming the Canon

The ethnonationalist right doesn’t own the concept of classical education, despite energetically claiming its mantle, and it’s worth stressing that not all classical schools affirm right-wing values. Indeed, there are compelling leftist cases for the Socratic study of time-honored texts. The great books of the Western canon — always a politically contested terrain — offer as good an entry point as any into conversations that disrupt the powers that constrain and divide us. And allowing young people to engage in shared inquiry about what it means to be human can go a long way toward supporting democracy in a time of civic crisis. Using this mode of study to promote a right-wing agenda is more the exception than the rule in the postsecondary great books world, even among conservative scholars.

Still, it makes sense that the veneration of old books and ancient wisdom can be put in service of reactionary projects. Hillsdale, Great Hearts, and other classical charter chains maintain cozy relationships with Republican lawmakers and routinely weigh in on right-wing legal causes even as they profess to keep politics out of the classroom. And while these kinds of schools may claim to welcome everyone, they’re free to make choices, like not offering free lunch or English learner programs, that have the effect of weeding out marginalized students. In any case, it’s hard to say how you can be value-neutral about the sanctity of Western heritage at a time when our leaders are working out a genetic definition of Americanness and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are violently detaining nonwhite US citizens.

Notwithstanding these concerns about the illiberal, or postliberal, uses of classical schooling, I can’t deny that these guys make a powerful pitch. The belief that old writing contains esoteric keys to unlock soul treasures is certainly exciting — which is more than you can say for reading to “find the main idea and three supporting details.” Ironically, the extractive form of reading that counts in the wasteland of perpetual test prep is precisely the kind of reading that LLMs are rendering obsolete. But LLMs don’t have a consciousness that can be altered by timeless prose.

For many students today, reading means staring at dry passages in order to answer formulaic questions, to pass the test, to get the credential, to (hopefully) get a job, where they can spend their days waiting to clock out. Small wonder that adolescents are struggling with nihilism and despair, when we’ve taught them that nothing they do during their six-hour school day can matter for its own sake.

In response to declining test scores and rising absenteeism, Democratic voices are calling for “common sense” solutions like holding back poor readers and threatening parents of truant children with jail time. But what are we doing to make school a humane and nourishing place where young people actually want to be?

Public Education Renewal

We’re living through a period of acute instability. The neoliberal bipartisanship that powered education reform through the early 2000s has all but vanished, and populist and authoritarian approaches are vying to take its place. Trump’s underwater poll numbers suggest that Americans are not prepared to give up on the common good just yet or abandon pluralistic democracy, messy though it can be. As various thinkers have pointed out, this transition period offers an opportunity for us to advance a more robust, sustainable vision for public education.

The intense backlash to vouchers in states like Texas shows that the GOP’s school choice platform is a particular weakness, capable of pushing voters across party lines. Although traditional public schools have been battered by defunding and punitive reforms, they remain near and dear to the communities they serve. They’re arguably the only institutions that still bring us together across our differences, making it possible for us to see ourselves as part of a common enterprise — “We the People” — with common understandings about the world. At a time when basic facts are contested and polarization has fractured our body politic, this collaborative endeavor represents our clearest hope. But it won’t work if we pay families to opt out and pursue boutique private ideological and religious alternatives. And it also won’t work if we embrace accountability systems that revolve around standardized tests, which, by definition, only value the things that students can do in isolation.

What might a lofty and inclusive vision for K-12 look like? It would make sense to start by asking what matters to students, who are feeling less and less motivated to come to school at all. Those who have spent time with today’s young people know that they are much more than the illiterate cell-phone addicts we see caricatured in media portrayals. They deserve to reach for something more rousing than standardized definitions of “proficiency,” which have been forced on them with little regard for their agency or interiority. They deserve to read a gripping novel in its entirety, not because it will help them get into college but because their time on earth is precious and good stories can spark joy.

They deserve to come together for rich dialogue and deep deliberation simply because they are human beings, with beating hearts, and searching minds, and yes, souls that long for meaning.