The Myopia of Knee-Jerk Conservative Opposition to the US Department of Education

A meme I hear a lot on the budget-slashing bandwagon of the conservative Tea Party express is the push simply to cut the entire U.S. Department of Education. Just obliterate it without a second thought. When I hear conservatives jump on this "cut-the-entire-Department-of-Education" bandwagon, I know that these folks have really no clue about the U.S. Department of Education and its various programs. It leads me to think that such bombast is nothing but an ill-considered visceral opposition to what is perceived as an agency of worthless liberal brainwashing programs. The ignorance that envelops this radical position is so very clear to those who have even a cursory knowledge of what the U.S. Department of Education really does. Conservatives who claim that the federal government has a constitutional obligation to protect the security of the United States fail to even look at how the U.S. Department of Education has been vital to that critical constitutional function over the years. When I hear such blathering conservative antipathy to the U.S. Department of Education, I ask those holding such positions if they have ever considered the national security ramifications that such a position entails. And I'm often met with a blank, open-mouthed stare. I see it in their eyes and I know what they are thinking. They're thinking: What could the U.S. Department of Education possibly have to do with national security?

And so I always lay out for them just one example of many that I know very well about: the Title VI program that provides federal funding for global area studies and foreign languages instruction. Without this federally funded program, and given this country's linguistic and cultural ethnocentrism, we'd have very few people who would be able to speak Chinese, Arabic, Farsi, Swahili, Tamil, Quechua, Guarani, or any of the other dialects that we really need to have some competency in to protect our national security. If left to the states, do you really think that the individual states would think about national security concerns enough to fund the study of Arabic in their state universities? Come on! Get real! Most states would think that teaching "ethnic studies" and those "terrorist" languages are just un-American! And yet the security of the country so desperately depends upon developing knowledge of global cultures and foreign languages. Additionally, without Title VI funding from the U.S. Department of Education, we'd have even fewer people in our country, in an already dismally ignorant environment when it comes to understanding the world (see Sarah Palin as exemplary display number 1 on this front), who could identify where Libya is on the map, much less understand what the different tribal groups are in that country's sociopolitical makeup. [Aside: Do you really think conservative patriots who can sing the Marines' Hymn can even identify what countries the "halls of Montezuma" or the "shores of Tripoli" refer to, much less the historical moments they address?]

And I haven't even mentioned U.S. Department of Education programs like the Fulbright/Fulbright-Hayes program, or the myriad other international research and cultural exchange programs that the U.S. Department of Education funds, or the collaborative role that the U.S. Department of Education plays in providing resources that make the Foreign Area Officers program of the U.S. Defense Department successful. So, if you ever hear any conservatives argue for the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education, don't take them seriously, especially if they fashion themselves as supporters of the constitutional mandate for the federal government to protect the national security. They're just probably swept up by a visceral hatred of state-led education initiatives as nothing more than a vehicle for liberal brainwashing, an attitude propagated by the likes of David Horowitz. They haven't studied what the U.S. Department of Education is actually doing. Not one iota. They represent nothing more than the thoughtless ravings of anti-state-originating education troglodytes. A real national security, constitutionalist conservative would at least look at what programs the U.S. Department of Education has in the service of national security interests -- programs that wouldn't likely be done well by any other agency -- before calling for the entire agency's head on the chopping block.