Teachers as Cultural Stewards
In 1892, the National Educational Association (NEA) convened a working group of 10 school leaders and college presidents to assess the haphazard state of American schooling and make recommendations for greater rigor and coherence. They debated the classes students should take, at what age students should study various topics and for how long, the best methods for instruction, and other basic academic questions.
To modern readers, the prescriptions in their final report are familiar: eight years of elementary school and four years of high school; a liberal-arts curriculum that includes Latin, Greek, mathematics, literature, civics, and the sciences; and better training for prospective teachers. The influence of the Committee of Ten, as it was called, was profound. Twelve years after its publication, a retrospective deemed it the "sine qua non" of education discussions at the time and the first American document of educational standardization; the committee in many ways formed our modern schooling system. But the specifics of the group's proposals are less important than their overall tenor: They were distinctly focused on basic questions of schooling and instruction.
Compare that to the latest NEA annual conference in 2025. The association's business items included resolutions to refer to President Trump as a fascist, oppose states' rights, and create school-board policies that protect teachers who favor LGBT materials in their classrooms. Conspicuously absent were debates about concrete aspects of schooling: what the curriculum should be, the strengths of phonics versus whole-language instruction in reading, whether schools should start earlier or later, etc.
Stories of what actually happens in schools are more galling: Kindergarteners learning about transgenderism in a New York City school, San Francisco high schoolers walking out of class with Palestinian flags and demanding an end to U.S. aid to Israel, and a Washington state school district renting out an elementary school for a drag-queen event. The grandmotherly figure as the prototypical teacher, holding a copy of Charlotte's Web or handing out a Band-Aid as the situation demands, has been replaced with a political activist, lecturing students about gender identity and the ills of capitalism and traditional religion.
This change, in which educators focus more on social and political activism than methods of instruction, did not happen by accident. It was the result of an intentional shift in the way that teachers perceive their role in society — from stewards of our cultural inheritance to campaigners for its dismantling. The philosophy driving this shift, known as "critical pedagogy," has become endemic across our educational institutions. Conservative policymakers must respond by reviving the classical model of education, where teachers, entrusted with real authority, pass down the West's accumulated knowledge and wisdom to the next generation. Educators should once again preserve and transmit, not subvert, our culture.
TEACHING AS SUBVERSION
One of the most famous works of pedagogy, the 1969 book Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and his co-author Charles Weingartner, is a self-contradictory mess, but its title is revealing nonetheless — encapsulating how many teachers-turned-activists view their role in the classroom. Postman believed that "the essential function of the schools in today's world" is to develop in students a "crap detector." The ideal education leads young minds to question everything; whether such questioning leads to answers is unimportant. That we make skeptics — not wise, virtuous men and women — is the goal.
Postman's understanding of skepticism overlooks the simple fact that genuine critical examination requires formal education and knowledge. For example, teenagers do not need much encouragement to question their parents' religion. Indeed, rebelliousness is natural to the adolescent mind. But a genuine criticism necessitates deep knowledge of the Abrahamic faiths, their creeds and scriptures, proofs for and against the existence of God, debates around the problem of evil, and plenty more. Without knowledge, such criticism is mere cynicism.
Postman's book reflected a canon of educational thought that came to be known as "critical pedagogy." The intellectual primogenitor of the broader theory was a Brazilian Marxist by the name of Paulo Freire, whom David Corey has written about in these pages. His influence has been monumental: His 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed is one of the most assigned books to prospective teachers in university schools of education and the third-most cited work in all of the social sciences.
The fundamental premise of critical pedagogy is that schools exist to overthrow the West's oppressive, capitalist structure. Freire mapped the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy of Marxism onto the teacher-student relationship. He denigrated traditional instruction as "banking education." He spelled out the supposed deficiencies of banking education: The teacher teaches, and the students are taught; the teacher talks, and the students listen; the teacher chooses the program content, and the students adapt to it.
As for what his disruptive pedagogy would mean in practice, Freire mostly remained mute. At his most practical, he recommended that teachers in agrarian towns inform students of their poverty by discussing pictures of peasants working the fields in order to foster revolutionary sentiments. He credited the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara as an example of a loving teacher and the Maoist Cultural Revolution as his philosophy put into action.
Freire inspired a cavalcade of disciples, prime among them the late feminist writer Gloria Watkins (pen name, bell hooks), whose books still crack the New York Times' bestseller list decades after their publication. Like Postman, the title of one of her most influential books, Teaching to Transgress, captured her ideal educational regime: Teachers ought to encourage the transgression of all oppressive barriers — family structures, gender norms, and classroom expectations. She saw "learning as revolution." Education must primarily foster criticism and subsequent deconstruction of societal structures.
Her critique expanded beyond Freire's distaste for capitalism. She lamented the oppression inherent in colonialism, imperialism, the gender dichotomy, and even the family unit, asserting that the valorization of the family is a "conservative myth." Indeed, the family, in her words, is not a "'safe' space."
Like Freire, Watkins's practical applications were minimal. When discussing pragmatic solutions for the classroom, she encouraged teachers to elevate student voices as equal to the instructor. To impose knowledge is oppressive, so she advised against formal instruction. Instead, the classroom should revolve around community circles, wherein teachers and students alike divulge "confessional narratives."
Undoubtedly, critical pedagogues never can reach concrete applications of their thoughts. It's like asking a fish to fly. With deconstruction as their only tool and critique as their only aim, they offer no formative telos — no positive vision — that can replace what they tear down. If the past has nothing to teach us, knowledge has no value, and the teacher has no authority, then what are students to do but sit around and talk about whatever happens to be on their mind?
When the educational Marxists have razed everything traditional to the ground, there will be no knowledge, skill, or vision left to build something in its stead. Their promotion of "critical thinking" places "critical" in bold and minimizes "thinking." If our schools have strayed from their primary duty of transmitting knowledge to students, it is because the activist leaders of American education have deliberately distorted the role of our teachers.
IDEOLOGICAL CAPTURE
From its origins as a Marxist thought experiment, critical pedagogy has come to dominate what revered emeritus professor of education E. D. Hirsch calls the educational "thought-world": the primary beliefs of the sector that manifest in curricula and book lists, passing slogans and platitudes, assumed wisdom, and unquestionable dogmas. It's the air that educators breathe.
The pervasiveness of critical pedagogy begins in schools of education and teacher-prep programs across the country. Instead of practical training manuals or works of classical philosophy, prospective teachers discuss Freire and anti-racist activist Ibram Kendi in seminars. Harvard's Graduate School of Education offers courses on "Queering Education" for aspiring educators to interrogate heterosexuality and the gender binary. Even public universities in conservative states such as the University of Utah offer courses on critical pedagogy.
Despite states such as Texas loosening credentialing and licensing laws, the National Center for Education Statistics reports that almost 80% of teachers still attend preparation programs at universities. Like a catechism class in Catholic schools, aspiring teachers read from the Book of Freire, recite the shibboleths, and adopt this radical philosophy that casts the educator as a revolutionary.
This is not to say that every kindergarten teacher pulls Das Kapital from her shelf to read to her pupils, sitting cross-legged on the carpet. But educators need not explicitly teach a specific work for its influence to be felt. Christian tradition still shapes our culture even if fewer people crack open the Bible. John Dewey's thought has profound effects even if no students read his tome, Democracy and Education. Students co-creating rules or selecting their own topics for study, completing "action civics" projects, reading books through particular lenses in literature, discussing power relations in history class, or being guided by teachers who view letter grades and traditional modes of learning as anachronistic — these are all manifestations of critical pedagogy. Teachers needn't profess their love of Freire for his influence to affect schools.
In reality, critical theory now permeates every mediating institution surrounding education. Take, for example, the National Council of Teachers of English, which boasts 25,000 paying members and wields an enormous influence over education policy and state standards. In 2022, this professional association declared that English classrooms should "decenter book reading and essay writing." The council also released a report imploring its members to apply critical theory in their literary analysis. More specifically, English teachers were encouraged to "model and instruct students on how to read through a critical lens across a range of literary theories (e.g., postcolonial criticism, Black feminist criticism, Chicana feminist criticism)...." According to this approach to literary analysis, students do not read books to discover the themes within them but instead treat them as archeological artifacts to learn of discrimination based on gender, race, or other identities in the societies from which they come.
Even the research organizations from which teachers take their cues as to what is "best practice" are captured. As the American Enterprise Institute's Rick Hess has continually noted, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) — the largest and most prestigious consortium of education researchers in the country — operates mostly as a purveyor of progressive agitprop. Its annual conference regularly features pioneering critical-race theorists such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Gloria Ladson-Billings, as well as workshops on topics such as "critical race feminist praxis." It releases position statements in support of "anti-racist education" and hosts conference symposiums with titles such as "Intifada Isn't a Metaphor." And after the University of Michigan shuttered its much-maligned diversity, equity, and inclusion office, AERA scooped the office's leader for its own executive director.
Wherever teachers turn, they're confronted with the axioms and nostrums of critical pedagogy. The publications they read espouse the need for action civics. Evangelists of critical theory tell educators that its practice is "research based." Schools of education laud Freire and his disciples as veritable saints. Their professional organizations run conferences pushing them to progressivism — each group reciting the same chant.
Conservative lawmakers have responded by attempting to ban controversial topics such as critical race theory in classroom materials. But the intellectual flood of progressive thought continues to flow unabated throughout the education ecosystem. More is required if we are to rebuild the bridges that will connect students to the best of our civilizational inheritance.
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHIES
If we're to return to a more responsible model of the educator, it's necessary to first understand the varied roles imposed upon teachers across different theories of education. Speaking generally, there are three broad philosophies of education: classical, progressive, and the previously discussed critical. Each varies greatly in its view of the purpose of education, its understanding of human nature, and its conception of the role of an educator.
Classical (also called liberal-arts or traditional) education most directly aligns with standard conceptions of public school: Children sit in desks, pass from discrete subject to subject, take tests, and read great books. This similarity shouldn't surprise us. Classical education came first in the canon of educational theory, so it is only natural that public schools initially built themselves on its routines and principles.
Classical education grounds itself in objectivity: There are clear truths and falsehoods about reality (even if our biases demand intellectual humility), certain actions are right or wrong (even if ethically dubious situations require prudence and wisdom), and certain works of art and culture are beautiful or abhorrent (even if culture shapes our tastes). In the classical understanding, the goals of education are to align the minds of students to truth, their character to virtue, and their tastes to beauty. Plato defined it thus: "The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful." Learning draws students from a cave of shadows and half-understandings into light, beauty, and truth.
Classical education also has a clear understanding of the human condition: We are imperfect, flawed beings. Teachers can enliven their instruction and administrators can craft well-run school systems, but no matter how impressive the institution, students will act out, grow bored, and make mistakes. Therefore, they need the direct guidance of adults. Authority, order, rules, boundaries — these are not dirty words or oppressive structures, but good and necessary elements for rearing any child.
Accordingly, the roles of the teacher in the classroom are both to assert authority and to transmit knowledge. Accounting for imperfect human nature, teachers secure the learning environment through routines, boundaries, and consequences. These structures keep the classroom orderly and develop virtuous habits in students. Accounting for the objectivity of truth and beauty, classical educators impart to students what we know about science and history and expose them to our greatest artistic achievements. Phrased differently, they teach students about Western civilization's accumulated knowledge and keenest insights into the human condition.
Progressive education takes a decidedly more relativistic approach. To progressive luminary John Dewey, there's no educational content for which "inherent educational value can be attributed to it." Perhaps truth is objective, but with limited time in the school day, who's to determine which moments of history, which scientific discoveries, or which works of literature are worth learning? Student interest, said Dewey, not some preordained value, should guide curricular decisions. It hardly matters whether they read Emily Dickinson or Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Provide engaging content, and students' intrinsic motivation will foster learning as if by osmosis. As we learn to speak and move without explicit instruction, so too classroom learning will proceed.
As for human nature, progressive pedagogy takes cues from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote that the "first impulses of nature are always right; there is no original sin in the human heart...." The late Ken Robinson exemplified this view in the modern era with his TED Talk on schools and creativity (the most popular lecture in the organization's catalogue). "[W]e don't grow into creativity," he contended, "we grow out of it." More precisely, we are actively "educated out of it." Human nature is inherently good, but educational institutions, norms, and all those adult, stuffy rules corrupt.
When these views of truth and human nature reach the classroom, they raise a fundamental question: Who are adults to tell children what to do? As the popular educational adage goes, teachers are to be the "guide on the side, not the sage on the stage." Educators retrieve resources, consult with their students about how they want to behave or what they want to learn, and provide encouragement — but they should never lecture, correct a mistake, or impose a curriculum.
Finally, there is critical pedagogy. As mentioned above, it adds a sharper bite to progressivism's amoral relativism. Not only must children be kept from society's corrupting power, but teachers and students must actively seek to topple it. Not only is there no inherent worth to this or that piece of knowledge, but everything is relative; any attempt to impose objectivity is an act of oppression. Each individual must create his own truth and reality. Speaking metaphorically, if classical education dresses a child for the weather, then progressivism asks what he would like to wear, and critical pedagogy seeks to change the weather itself.
This critical philosophy of education has produced the current hyper-politicization of the classroom. It's not enough that teachers train students to be future activists; to think that educators have anything to offer students is to harken back to atavistic, classical views — the instructor imposing his expertise on the student. Instead, the teacher must take cues from and foster the activism of today's students.
In a narrow sense, the critical pedagogues are correct: Education plays a broader role in society than merely the instruction of individual students. Freire and his disciples err, however, in asserting that teachers must subvert society and its institutions, when in reality they have a duty to maintain them. Exploring this obligation can help us see why.
Horace Mann, the leading light of the common-school movement, emphasized the importance of schooling to the individual child, but also stressed the effects of education on society more broadly. Schools train students into "skilled artisans and scientific farmers, into scholars and jurists, into the founders of benevolent institutions, and the great expounders of ethical and theological science." Society relies on teachers to populate our cities and towns with the competent citizenry upon which our industries, culture, and flourishing depend. Concurrently, schools maintain and uphold our common culture. In them, we develop a common language, cultural touchstones, shared knowledge, and even a sort of civic religion that prizes equality, liberty, and the rights of man.
Examining education at its most basic level — the tutor and his pupil — elucidates this point. A parent hires a tutor to teach his child a certain topic — math, science, dance, or whatever the parent ultimately decides. If the teacher misused his position to discuss the finer points of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings lore or began casting aspersions against the family, it would be an obvious breach of contract. The same dynamics apply in public and private schools. Instead of one tutor hired by a parent to teach a sole child, society has collectively paid for the teacher to impart specific content. Indeed, in theory, it is school boards, elected by community members, that determine the policies and curricula that govern a school.
In this light, it's more accurate to describe teaching as a stewarding activity, not a subversive one. Through instruction, teachers uphold, repair, and maintain this great edifice that we call Western civilization. As with any structure, American society requires constant management, and teachers are its first stewards. They are responsible for passing along the cumulative wisdom, knowledge, and virtue amassed over generations to students so that they, too, might pass it along to the next generation.
Asserting the need to maintain Western civilization would meet with incredulity and outrage in the academy. But in any other setting, such a view of education is assumed. Since the beginning of human civilization, parents, town leaders, or village elders have taught their children about the ways of their society, their founding legends, and the skills they need to preserve their society into the future.
RECOVERING CLASSICAL EDUCATION
Making teaching a stewardship activity once again will mean rejecting critical pedagogy and returning to classical education and its first principles. Even as conservative policymakers push for school choice and more public and private options for parents and students, it's imperative that they continue to advance a traditional educational ethos. For one, if school choice became universal across the nation tomorrow, all schools would still be staffed with the same personnel, have their students take the same standardized tests, use the same curricula, and exist in the same general thought world. Second, even in states with strong school-choice laws such as Florida and Arizona, more than half of students still attend public schools. To forgo the reform of public education and leave schools' governance to the left would thus be a grave mistake — simply because that's where a majority of American children still are.
To initiate this shift back toward a more traditional education, conservatives need to take pedagogical debates seriously and treat schools as the cultural institutions that they are. The left has always understood schools as cultural incubators. It's why they so vehemently contest the Western canon and display the latest flags and slogans for activist causes on school walls. Schools shape students' character and beliefs just as much as their ability to read and write. It's time conservatives devoted the same level of interest to education.
The right has begun to learn this lesson in other spheres, particularly cultural ones. While Republican administrations and lawmakers deregulated industries and cut taxes, the left captured Hollywood, academia, K-12 schools, publishing houses, and museums. They infiltrated the culture while Republicans occasionally held political power. Conservatives were preoccupied repairing the plumbing of the economy, so to speak, and when they paused to look back around, they discovered the house had a new addition, the walls were repainted, the furniture replaced, and Johnny was questioning the gender binary.
The story is similar in education. Since the George W. Bush administration, the right and left have generally set aside their cultural disputes to instead coalesce around a bipartisan education agenda centered on technocratic questions of standards, accountability, and testing. While not necessarily bad in themselves, these debates are insufficient.
Emphasizing only academic outcomes and proficiency in reading, writing, and math is politically safe, but it misunderstands a core purpose of education. We cannot have value-neutral schools any more than humans can live without oxygen. Values inform all sorts of educational questions: how American history is framed, how past figures are portrayed in all their moral complexity, what books students will read, what posters hang on the school walls, what behaviors are encouraged or punished, etc. These are consequential questions. They cannot be brushed aside as "culture war" distractions from the more important issues such as basic literacy. Indeed, the two are inseparable — what students read and learn shapes their effectiveness as communicators, their level of cultural literacy, and ultimately their values.
There are two approaches for shifting schools and teachers back to a classical model that transmits the best of Western civilization: political and institutional. The political strategy seeks to judiciously leverage the delegated political power that governors, legislatures, and school boards have. Federal policy is too distant and broad to effect much change at the local level, but in state legislatures and school boards, where power constitutionally lies in American schools, there's much to be done.
For example, states and school boards approve curricula for schools, the actual content that educators are paid to teach. While curricular debates might not seem as important as other cultural battles in the near term, what our students learn and how has enormous significance in the long run. Thus, a focus on curriculum is essential for conservatives to win the broader cultural struggle with the left. Compare two opposite approaches to education at the state level: governors Gavin Newsom of California and Ron DeSantis of Florida. As a high-school graduation requirement, California has mandated ethnic-studies courses — a heady mixture of anti-Semitism, anti-Westernism, and progressive preaching. Conversely, DeSantis led his state through an intensive review of approved textbooks and prohibited the instruction of sexually explicit content in elementary schools.
Elsewhere in its education statutes, California prohibits schools from punishing children for "willful defiance." Meanwhile, Florida passed a teacher bill of rights, empowering educators to maintain control and authority in the classroom.
It is equally if not more important to engage at the local level of school boards. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, for example, touts 41 model policies for school boards covering a range of topics: transparency laws, controversial classroom displays, parental notice and opt-out forms, and processes for selecting library materials, just to name a few. Local school boards and state boards of education have the power under local, state, and federal law to make important policy decisions, such as approving curricula, setting standards for teacher preparation, and granting administrative support for teachers to maintain their authority in the classroom. They can and should wield that power accordingly.
While Ibram Kendi is a favorite bugaboo for conservatives, he has made one accurate observation: The interaction between cultural attitudes and public policy flows in both directions. Policy changes when opinions change, but altering laws can also shape what citizens perceive as right and good. When teachers experience an orderly school or have access to a high-quality curriculum, that experience may do more to shift their hearts and minds toward a more traditional approach than any rhetoric ever could.
The second path for reform is institutional. This entails building new programs that will advance a classical model of education as well as recapturing the hundreds of mediating institutions that support our schools. Much of this work is in progress. The Classic Learning Test (CLT), for example, has developed an alternative to the College Board, administering standardized tests that help students gain entrance to college as well as scholarships. The CLT, which now partners with more than 300 colleges, designs assessments to "promote critical and logical thinking" and includes "reading passages from classic and historical texts...."
The Core Knowledge Foundation, for its part, offers a sequenced curriculum across content areas that understands the importance of shared knowledge in distinct disciplines as well as formal teacher instruction. Systems of classical schools, such as Great Hearts Academies and Hillsdale College's charter-school network, educate tens of thousands of students and are beacons to countless schools serving thousands more. Each can and will shift the education sector in a more sensible direction.
BUILD, NOT BURN
W. B. Yeats wrote that "[t]hings fall apart; the centre cannot hold...." Today's American education system appears to be falling apart: low teacher morale, shuttered buildings, declining test scores, antagonism at school-board meetings, and chaos in the hallways. Not only have we failed in recent years to maintain a center through creating a common culture, but the stewards of our inheritance have followed Freire, bell hooks, and other activists to actively break it apart.
Teaching should be a reverential and constructive force, helping to preserve and transmit all the best ideals of Western civilization — such as liberty, equality, and the dignity of human beings made in a divine image, to name a few. These ideals are critical to both the health of the classroom and society. When teachers, schools of education, and the powerful education blob peddle the notion that educators should dismantle, deconstruct, and disrupt, there is a cost. For our nation to flourish, teachers should return to their core mission of knowledge transmission, cultural maintenance, and the cultivation of virtue — a vision of education that will inspire them and their students to build, not burn.
