Submitted by Greg Alderete.
While many Americans are debating whether the Department of Education should even exist, I’m less concerned with its dismantling than I am with the fact that — long before this moment — it wasn’t doing its job.
If the Department disappears, what replaces it must be stronger, not weaker. We must require that every public school, and any private school receiving federal funds, teach two subjects — thoroughly and without distortion:
First:
Every student must be required to learn what it means to be an American citizen. They must study the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights — not as slogans or cherry-picked soundbites, but as the living framework of their freedoms and responsibilities.
Too many graduates today can’t name their own rights. They don’t know what due process is, what free speech really protects, or why the separation of powers matters.
A free society cannot survive when its citizens don’t understand the very system that grants them liberty.
Second:
Every student must be required to study, in full, the origins of the American Civil War.
They must understand that slavery was not just a Southern institution, but a global, cash-driven enterprise — propped up by British and foreign wealth — that exploited 4.2 million enslaved Americans to produce tobacco, cotton, rice, and sugar cane.
They must learn how Southern economic dependence on human labor collided with the North’s imposition of harsh tariffs, how the North’s blockade of Southern ports brought the plantation economy to collapse, and how the country teetered on the edge of a massive humanitarian disaster before plunging into a war that killed nearly 850,000 Americans.
Students must understand that the Civil War was not abstract; it was the violent result of real greed, injustice, and political failure.
Teach whatever else you want after that.
Debate policies, theories, innovations — but if young Americans are not grounded first in their constitutional rights and the brutal history that tested those principles, the future will continue to decay.
Civic ignorance and historical amnesia have done more damage to this country than any foreign power ever could.
If we must rebuild American education from the ground up, let’s at least get the foundation right.
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