Remaking Education for Indoctrination & Ignorance

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and the distinction between true and false…no longer exist.

— Hannah Arendt, *The Origins of Totalitarianism

7.1 Introduction: The Last and Longest War

The attack on American education is not a sudden, unforeseen eruption but the culmination of a war as old as the republic itself, a war waged over who is licensed to tell the story of America, who is permitted to belong within the democratic body politic, the corridors of power, and on what terms. An autocracy cannot take root in a citizenry educated to think critically, to question authority, to tolerate dissent, and to value pluralism.¹ A population conditioned for self-governance is anathema to a regime that requires submission. Project 2025’s plan for the Department of Education is, therefore, not merely a mundane policy proposal, it is a mission of unapologetic demolition. Its stated goal, the complete elimination of the department ("[T]he…Department of Education should be eliminated." P2025, p. 319), is the capstone of a far more sinister project, to dismantle the nation’s civic immune system, purge public life of inconvenient knowledge, and convert a public trust into a conduit for private plunder and ideological indoctrination.

P2025’s public-facing rhetoric of “local control,” “parental rights,” and “education freedom” (P2025, p. 319) is part of its continuous through-line of cynical misdirection and inversion of language (see §1.3), which cloaks a two-pronged strategy of capture and control. The first prong is the immediate weaponization of the very federal powers its authors claim to abhor. Before the Department of Education is abolished, its machinery will be turned against ideological enemies with annihilating force. Its funding streams will become instruments of coercion, its civil rights enforcement arms will be repurposed to punish diversity, and its data-gathering functions will be systematically blinded. The second prong is the endgame: the creation of a permanent intellectual vacuum. Once federal guardrails are obliterated, the public education system (starved, demonized, and delegitimized) will be replaced by a balkanized network of publicly funded, privately operated schools. This is not a project of good-faith decentralization, but of deregulation designed explicitly to foster an unaccountable system ripe for graft, segregation, and indoctrination, serving the commingled functional interests of Christian Nationalists, techno-libertarians, and a burgeoning cryptoplutocratic oligarchy, all funded by taxpayers.

At the core of P2025’s educational project lies something chilling in its simplicity: to make dissent not simply hazardous but unthinkable. It is absolutely essential to understand that this is not a mere “culture war” or a battle over the contents of textbooks; it is a systematic campaign to foreclose the possibility that coming generations will possess the critical faculties or civic habits necessary for future resistance. This transformation is a coalescence of ideological zeal and opportunistic design, drawing from the old American toolkit of privatization, white supremacy, moral panic, and elite extraction. The objective is as clear as it is devastating; education may persist as form, but emptied of the substance of citizenship, inquiry, and solidarity.

The war on education serves as the critical nexus for the cryptoplutocratic coalition, a project where the otherwise divergent agendas of its core factions find perfect, ruinous alignment. For Christian Nationalists, it is the ultimate prize: a chance to defund secular public life and redirect state resources into a nationwide network of sectarian indoctrination centers. For techno-libertarians, it represents the disruption of a quintessential state monopoly, creating a vast new marketplace for ed-tech, charter chains, and privatized “solutions.” And for the plutocratic elite, it achieves three essential goals: it shatters the power of teachers’ unions, one of the last bastions of organized labor; it creates an engine for asset-stripping public infrastructure; and it cultivates a future workforce trained for compliance rather than critical citizenship. The demolition of public education is not a byproduct of their alliance; it is the central pillar holding it together.

This chapter deconstructs that architecture of ruin. It reveals how the promise of shrinking government is a pretext for wielding it as a cudgel, and how the promise of “choice” is a blueprint for state-sanctioned ignorance and corruption. This is the drift-design feedback loop in its purest form: the manufactured chaos of the culture war, endlessly amplified by the right-wing media apparatus, creates the political, grassroots demand for the authoritarian design of P2025. The goal is not to improve education but to lobotomize it, and in its place, to forge a new American mind that is more uniform, more compliant, and ultimately, more ignorant and therefore more controllable; a mind no longer capable of apprehending, much less understanding or resisting, the nature of its subjugation to the authoritarian state.

7.2 The American Pattern: Engineering Educational Erosion

To map the P2025 assault on education is first to see it as the culmination and intensification of deep, historical, recursive currents in American life. In the brief, radical dawn of Reconstruction, public schooling was reimagined as a universal and multiracial project, a vision cut short by the iron snap of Jim Crow, white supremacist terror, and the deliberate deprivation of Black children’s learning. “Public education,” in the language of the 19th-century Southern legislator, was always to be a battleground over inclusion, hierarchy, and the possibility of self-government.

By the 20th century, every effort to expand and democratize education was paired with new architectures of division: immigrant children tracked for labor or language assimilation; Black children left in condemned buildings or denied entry altogether. Brown v. Board became less a turning point than a line in the sand: “massive resistance” in the form of white flight, privatized segregation academies, and the newly rebranded language of “freedom of choice.” The attack lines only proliferated as time went on: in the 1970s and 80s, the anti-tax revolt and “A Nation at Risk” propaganda reframed public schools as failed markets and teachers’ unions as public enemy number one. Privatization was sold as “innovation” but designed to fracture the public and enable resources to flow upward and outward, away from democratic accountability.

By the 2010s, the logic of fracturing and extraction was complete: charter expansion, voucher schemes, school ratings, and high-stakes testing all conspired to narrow the curriculum, drive out educators, and siphon public money into private hands. When the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the regime seized the crisis: DEI was denounced as “radical,” history itself became a battleground, books banned and teachers surveilled, while school boards became theaters of intimidation and manufactured outrage.

What is critical to grasp is that each prior wave of attack (starve, delegitimize, fracture, subsume, systematically exclude) was not an accident or failing of the American project but a feature. Every cycle prepared the ground for the present assault, lowering the threshold for what could be imagined, institutionalized, and enforced.

7.3 The False Promise of “Local Control”: Weaponizing the Central State

It is in this context that P2025’s astonishing ambitions become not a break, but the logical result of erosion-by-design. Where earlier generations whittled away at the public edifice, P2025 proposes to finish the job. The first move is abolition: the federal Department of Education, once the last bulwark of equity and civil rights enforcement, is to be dismantled outright (P2025, p. 319). Not as rhetorical flourish, but as active executive policy, backed by Executive Order 14242, instructing the Secretary to “facilitate the closure of the Department,” with all educational authority and compliance functions returned to the states and “local communities.”²

Yet, even before Congress can act, the federal footprint is systematically shrunk: mass layoffs, the elimination of key offices, grant funding and civil rights enforcement gutted. The original function of the department (guaranteeing equal protection and access, especially for Black students, English learners, students with disabilities, and those in poverty) becomes a faded memory. In its place is a system of “redistribution” to other agencies, or, put more precisely, to bureaucratic limbo and abandonment.

The central paradox of P2025’s education agenda is its initial strategy, to achieve the supposed goal of federalism through an unprecedented exercise of centralized, authoritarian power. The plan does not begin with a gentle devolution of authority to states and local districts. It begins with a hostile takeover, transforming the Department of Education and its sister agencies into instruments of ideological warfare before they are scuttled. The promise of liberty is preceded by a campaign of coercion.

The playbook for this campaign is already written, tested in the first Trump term and refined in the interim. It relies on converting federal funding from a tool of programmatic support into a weapon of political punishment. Reporting from 2025 already illuminates this tactic with chilling clarity. The Department of Education’s threat to pull all federal funding from Denver Public Schools over its policies accommodating transgender students was not an act of a shrinking state. It was a raw display of coercive power, using funds intended for low-income students and children with disabilities as leverage to enforce a specific, reactionary social doctrine.³ This is constitutional hardball played with the lives of children. The message to every school board in America is unequivocal: conform to our ideology, or we will defund your neediest students.

This weaponization extends far beyond K-12 schools and into the heart of American higher education, which the architects of this project view as a primary node of liberal resistance. The Trump administration’s shakedown of the University of California (UC) system is a case study in this punitive model.

The legal architecture for this assault has been meticulously constructed, most notably in the form of the July 2025 Justice Department memorandum issued by Attorney General Pamela Bondi (see §1.3). This document is a foundational text for the legalistic autocracy they intend to build. It systematically inverts the purpose of federal civil rights law, transforming a shield for the vulnerable into a sword against efforts to promote equity.

The final element of this coercive strategy is the use of manufactured information demands as a pretext for punishment. The executive order compelling universities to report granular data on the race, test scores, and grades of all applicants, under threat of losing access to all federal student financial aid under Title IV, is a tool designed for precisely this purpose.⁶ The stated goal is to expose “discrimination” against white and Asian applicants, but the true purpose is to create a perpetual threat. The profound cynicism of this maneuver is revealed by a concurrent action: the systematic gutting of the federal government’s own data-gathering capacity.

7.4 The Architecture of Demolition: Privatization and Extraction

P2025’s education plan is a twofold act of demolition and capture. The first is the abolition of the federal Department of Education, the only bulwark against the spread of local authoritarianism and the last defender of federal civil rights in American schools. The motive is not efficiency but removal of the last safeguard against the weaponization of education for exclusion. The executive orders of 2025 are not empty threats, they are followed by mass layoffs, closing down of key offices, and a transfer of remaining administrative functions to other agencies where educational mission is an afterthought and equity an unspoken word.

Simultaneously, P2025 engineers a redirection of billions in public funds into private, for-profit, and religious schools through “universal school choice,” the proliferation of vouchers, tax credits, education savings accounts. These are not policies for innovation by any empirical measure, but for evasion: by design, these mechanisms strip recipients of nearly all public oversight, transparency, or civil rights obligations. Privatization becomes not the byproduct but the goal, an engine for transferring resources from the many to the few, from the public to networks aligned with the regime, with little or no fiscal or civil rights oversight.

The mythical “free market” is not a safeguard. Parents, as the featureless “consumers” of reform rhetoric, are denied the information or leverage to ensure equity, let alone excellence. The real logic is one of asset stripping: public goods repurposed for private gain, shielded from view, the proceeds recycled into patronage and ideological consolidation. Privatization thus functions both as economic extraction and as the critical armature for regime maintenance, a field where exclusion, discrimination, and sectarian indoctrination are no longer defects but built-in features.

7.5 The Abolition Decree: Constitutional Hardball as the Final Act

The weaponization of existing federal power is merely the prelude. The ultimate goal, long a fever dream of the hard right, was made explicit on March 20, 2025, when President Trump signed Executive Order 14242, “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities.”⁹ Staged with the unsubtle symbolism of schoolchildren seated at desks in the East Room, the President declared his intent to dismantle the Department of Education “once and for all.”¹⁰ Beyond a simple policy shift, this act is a declaration of war on the constitutional order and the culmination of the entire P2025 education agenda.

The order is autocratic legalism in its highest form. It directs the Secretary of Education to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education” while, in the same breath, mandating rigorous compliance with federal law.¹¹ This is not a logical contradiction, it is a deliberate constitutional provocation. The President cannot unilaterally abolish a cabinet department created by an act of Congress; that power resides exclusively with the legislative branch under Article I of the Constitution.¹² The order is, therefore, an open invitation to defy the law in the name of executing the President’s will. It places the Secretary in the untenable position of being ordered to both uphold federal education statutes and dismantle the very agency charged with upholding them. This is the essence of the unitary executive theory in practice, an assertion that the President’s policy priorities supersede the laws passed by Congress, daring the other branches of government to respond.

This is the operationalization of the preceding months of institutional decay. The order was signed only after the administration had already slashed the Department’s workforce by more than half and illegally withheld billions in congressionally appropriated funds.¹³ The executive order is the formal decree that ratifies this lawless behavior and commands its acceleration.

The White House’s justification, that this will “return our students to the states,” is a transparent fiction. The order itself makes clear that “useful functions” like federal student aid, funding for special education, and civil rights enforcement will be “preserved in full” and merely “redistributed to various other agencies.”¹⁴ This is not about returning power to states, it is about breaking up a consolidated source of potential opposition and institutional knowledge, scattering its functions across the government where they can be more easily controlled, starved, or politicized. It seeks to destroy the Department as a symbol and a coherent entity, ensuring no single agency retains the focus, expertise, and statutory authority to serve as a meaningful check on the regime’s ambitions.

The order is a profound stress test for American democracy. It forces a constitutional confrontation, daring the courts to intervene and challenging congressional Republicans to choose between their fidelity to the Constitution and their fealty to a leader who demands total and public submission. The immediate pledge by Senator Bill Cassidy to introduce legislation to ratify the President’s command demonstrates the power of this loyalty test.¹⁵ The fight over the Department of Education’s existence will not be a sterile policy debate, it will be a battle over the separation of powers and the fundamental principle that the President must “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

7.6 The Architecture of Ignorance: Dismantling the Machinery of Knowledge

The abolition decree goes far beyond an administrative reorganization or a budget-cutting measure. It is an act of epistemic sabotage. The goal is to destroy the federal government’s capacity to produce, analyze, and disseminate objective knowledge about the state of American education and, by extension, American society. An authoritarian project cannot tolerate independent sources of fact that might contradict its ideological narratives. Therefore, the institutions that produce those facts must be neutralized or destroyed. This is a tactic with a dark global pedigree, from Soviet officials falsifying economic data to Turkey’s autocrat firing his government’s statistics chief after a report documented soaring inflation.¹⁶

The attack on the National Center for Education Statistics is the canary in the coal mine. The NCES is responsible for vital, non-partisan data collection like the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called “The Nation’s Report Card.” The NAEP provides longitudinal data on student achievement, revealing troubling trends and persistent inequities. For a regime that wishes to declare its policies an unmitigated success, or to blame public schools for all societal ills, such objective data is a threat. By firing the statisticians, researchers, and civil servants w ho conduct this work, the regime achieves three goals: it cripples the government’s ability to see itself clearly, eliminates the possibility of public accountability, and it sends a powerful message to all other fact-gathering agencies across the government.

Abolishing the Department of Education is the logical conclusion of this war on knowledge. The Department is not just a grant-making entity; it houses the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which funds rigorous, peer-reviewed research on educational effectiveness. It houses the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which collects vast amounts of data on discrimination, disparities in discipline, and access to resources. It houses the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA), which tracks student debt, default rates, and the financial health of thousands of postsecondary institutions. To the architects of P2025, these functions are not assets; they are liabilities. IES research might prove that voucher programs are ineffective. OCR data exposes the reality of systemic inequality. FSA data reveals the predatory nature of for-profit colleges, which are often key allies of the conservative movement. The Department, for all its bureaucratic flaws, represents a repository of institutional knowledge and a potential check on power.

Its elimination is therefore a prerequisite for the new order, creating a landscape of profound and deliberate ignorance where the regime’s claims can circulate without the threat of empirical contradiction. An un-examined system, after all, is a system ripe for plunder.

7.7 From Public Trust to Private Plunder: The “School Choice” Deception

Once the public system has been ideologically purged and epistemically blinded, P2025 introduces its ultimate solution: a radical restructuring of education funding designed to channel public money into private hands with minimal oversight. The proposal to convert federal funding streams like Title I (for low-income students) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) into block grants to states, coupled with a fervent promotion of Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) and vouchers, is presented as the pinnacle of “education freedom” (P2025, pp. 321-322, 349-350). In reality, it is a blueprint for the systematic defunding of public schools and the creation of a shadow education system accountable not to the public, but to market forces and private operators.

This is the plan’s cryptoplutocratic core. It is not about empowering parents; it is about creating new markets for an array of private and religious education providers, many of whom are poised to profit from the influx of taxpayer dollars. The investigative reporting by ProPublica into Texas’s burgeoning private school sector provides a terrifying preview of this future. The investigation uncovered a landscape rife with self-dealing, nepotism, and conflicts of interest that would be illegal in the public system. Private schools awarded multimillion-dollar contracts to their own board members, issued personal loans to school leaders with hidden terms, and were governed by interlocking family members.²⁰ This is the world that P2025 seeks to make national policy.

The most recent comprehensive research on the new wave of universal voucher programs confirms that this model is not an accidental byproduct, but the intended design.

The abolition of the Department of Education is the critical enabling condition for this scheme to succeed on a national scale. Without the federal Office for Civil Rights, there is no backstop to prevent these new, publicly funded private schools from discriminating. A religious school could refuse to admit LGBTQ students or children of same-sex parents; another could subtly screen out students with disabilities who are more expensive to educate; yet another could engage in racial discrimination, all while cashing government checks. The federal guardrails that have, however imperfectly, protected the civil rights of American students for over half a century would be gone.

Furthermore, without federal oversight from an agency like the Office of Federal Student Aid or a robust Department of Education inspector general, financial accountability would evaporate. The process of turning federal education funding into block grants “without strings” is a deliberate invitation to corruption (P2025, p. 320). It allows state-level political actors to redirect funds toward favored constituencies and politically connected school operators. The result will be a two-tiered system: a hollowed-out, under-resourced public system for the students left behind, and a chaotic, unaccountable private market for those with the means and savvy to navigate it, subsidized by the public purse. This is not reform. It is the dissolution of a public good and its replacement with a mechanism for private enrichment and social sorting.

7.8 The Weaponization of “Parental Rights” and the Manufacture of Minoritarian Rule

Of all the regime’s rhetorical reversals, none is more potent than the rebranding of “parental rights.” Once the language of collaborative engagement, it is now wielded as an instrument of minoritarian veto, empowering a small cadre of radicalized activists to dictate policy for entire communities and states. A single parent, or more often a national organization acting in the name of parents, can trigger a censorship regime in which a handful of complaints suffice to remove books, rewrite curricula, and drive teachers from their posts.

The legal architecture is designed for maximal chilling effect. School districts, facing lawsuits and the threat of funding loss, opt for caution, removing entire swaths of curriculum, canceling diversity initiatives, and silencing any challenge to the dominant narrative. The result is a steady shrinkage of the permissible, a constriction not grounded in public deliberation but in the amplification of grievance, the proliferation of threat.

The effect is not empowerment but abdication. The democratic promise of public education gives way to a regime of veto and fear. This is the architecture as experienced on the ground: the award-winning history teacher self-censoring lessons on Reconstruction for fear of a lawsuit from a nationally-funded activist group; the school librarian, facing death threats, quietly removing a classic novel from the shelves; the transgender student whose existence has been rendered a subject of perpetual, hostile debate by the very adults charged with their protection. The “chilling effect” is not a metaphor; it is the daily, lived reality of intellectual and emotional siege, a state of precarity engineered to drive dedicated professionals from the field and replace civic courage with fearful silence.

7.9 Comparative Authoritarian Lessons: Hungary, Turkey, and the American Import

This machinery is neither accidental nor uniquely American. The playbook is imported, studied, and refined. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán seized control of curricula, shuttered independent universities, and made state funding contingent on ideological compliance. History was rewritten, research on gender and migration banned, and education restructured as an instrument of national myth and loyalty. In Turkey, Erdoğan’s regime Islamized curricula, closed or seized universities, and criminalized dissent among students and professors alike.

Today, under P2025, the American educational sphere is remade in the image of these autocratic laboratories. The same instruments—centralization of curriculum, ideological litmus tests, funding as discipline, and the criminalization of pluralist inquiry—are deployed with mounting precision and scope. The result is the mass production of a future citizenry for whom critical thought and democratic contestation are not simply discouraged but rendered inexpressible.

7.10 The Consequences: The Engineering of Political Impotence

The endpoint of this campaign is not simply the privatization of learning, but the transformation of education into a closed loop—a lockbox designed to neutralize the possibility of democratic dissent. An educational system constructed to produce ignorance and fear will yield not citizens but subjects; not pluralists but partisans; not questioners but relayers of a sanctioned narrative, susceptible to each new cycle of panic and scapegoat.

The regime’s design runs deeper still. As the infrastructure of public education is eroded, an “irreversible information gap” is manufactured. The data that is not collected—on inequality, segregation, social mobility—will never be recovered. Teachers who depart will not easily be replaced. The intellectual capital of a generation is deliberately burned, salting the ground against any future renaissance.

The result is not only a compliant population but a structurally demobilized one—a citizenry deprived of the language, memory, and institutional scaffolding required to reclaim democracy from managed decline.

7.11 Conclusion: An Existential Battle for the Democratic Mind

Ultimately, the war on the Department of Education is a proxy war for control over the American mind. The battle is not just over budgets, bureaucracy, or the structure of schooling. It is an existential battle over the qualities of citizenship that a democratic republic requires to survive. As research from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce demonstrates, higher education is one of the most powerful bulwarks against authoritarian attitudes. It correlates strongly with increased tolerance, a greater appreciation for diversity, a higher capacity for critical thought, and a reduced inclination to submit to unchecked authority.²² A liberal arts education, in particular, cultivates the habits of mind (empathy, intellectual humility, comfort with ambiguity, and evidence-based reasoning) that are antithetical to the rigid, dogmatic, and fear-based worldview of authoritarianism.²³

P2025’s education agenda is a systematic assault on every one of these democratic virtues. The war on DEI is a war on the very idea that diversity is a strength. The attack on “woke ‘‘diversicrats’” and critical race theory is an attack on the teaching of an honest, complex, and often painful national history (P2025, pp. 320, 342). The denigration of liberal arts in favor of a narrow focus on “workforce skills” is an attempt to produce more efficient economic units rather than more capable citizens. The relentless campaign against universities as sites of “anti-American ideology” is a campaign against free inquiry itself.

The goal is to re-engineer American education to produce a different kind of person. The ideal citizen of the P2025 world is not inquisitive but obedient; not empathetic but suspicious of the “other”; not a critical thinker but a passive consumer of official narratives. They seek to cultivate a populace that is less comfortable with pluralism, more susceptible to nationalist myths, and more willing to trade liberty for the promise of order.

This is why the abolition of the Department of Education is such a crucial objective for the authoritarian project. It is the symbolic and practical centerpiece of a campaign to sever the connection between education and democracy. By dismantling the federal commitment to equity, civil rights, and objective knowledge, they seek to clear the ground for a new educational paradigm, one based on indoctrination, segregation, and private profit. They are not just closing an agency, they are attempting to close the American mind.

The fight to defend public education, therefore, is inseparable from the fight to defend the republic itself. The strategy evidenced in P2025 is a pincer movement against American democracy, targeting both its institutional guardrails and the intellectual character of its people. First, they will use the state to crush dissent and enforce ideological conformity. Second, they will dismantle the state’s capacity for self-awareness and objective analysis, inducing a state of epistemic collapse. Finally, they will redirect the flow of public resources away from the common good and toward a network of private allies, solidifying a permanent client class for the regime. This is the path to a nation undone, a society of civic illiterates, stripped of the tools of critical inquiry and steeped in official dogma, a nation rendered incapable of self-government. The schoolhouse door is the front line in this battle for America’s future.

As this manuscript turns to Cluster D (Reconfiguring Society and Global Standing for Autocratic Ends) it becomes clear that education capture is not the culmination but the foundation, the substratum on which further social and economic reengineering will rest. The next chapter reveals how the very logic explored here (privatization, extraction, and loyalty as the new “merit”) takes new and even more devastating form in the weaponization of the American economy for political control and oligarchic enrichment. In the end, the struggle for pluralism in the classroom and the struggle against oligarchy in the marketplace are inseparable. Every act of educational erasure is also a prescription for the society that follows: ignorant, hierarchical, closed, and designed to endure.