Education Department Constitutionally Adrift

Larry P. Arnn, president of Hillsdale College in Michigan, is looking for a way to put morality back into America’s classrooms, a goal he believes the Department of Education has abandoned.

“The purpose of education has both an intellectual and a moral component,” Arnn wrote in an article that appeared in the Hillsdale newsletter Imprimis. “One will not find these sentiments in the plans made in the Department of Education today.”

Public schools may not promote a religion, according to the Department of Education’s website, but neither the Department of Education nor rulings by the Supreme Court prohibit schools to teach about religion, Arnn argues. The Secretary of Education under the previous administration, Richard Riley, wrote a Statement on Religious Expression which holds that public schools are allowed to teach the history of religion, comparative religion, scriptures as literature, and the role of religion in history. According to the report, schools may also teach morals.

“Though schools must be neutral with respect to religion, they may play an active role with respect to teaching civic values and virtue, and the moral code that holds us together as a community,” the report states.

Arnn claims that current Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings missed these points. He asserts that the Secretary is too concerned with trying to compete with China, focusing more on test scores than good living. “The report of the National Commission on the Future of Higher Education reduces education to the purpose of preparing young people for a job and of making the nation powerful and successful in its economic competition,” Arnn writes.

Given that the federal Constitution says nothing about public education, the truth of the matter is that the DE itself is constitutionally unauthorized.

In fact, the federal government’s first attempt of the DE was a product of post Civil War Reconstructionism. And if I remember correctely, about a year after the DE was established, states rights issues were raise with respect to federal government involvement in public education. So the first DE essentially ended up in a back room by the custodian’s closet.

FDR is the person who ignored his oath to defend the Constitution by creating the politically correct environment for constitutionally unauthorized federal programs on a grand scale, including the eventual resurrection of the DE. FDR’s disregard for constitutionally enumerated federal powers essentially put the federal government on steroids to rob the states of their 10th A. protected powers.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the people need to wise up to the problem that the federal government is wrongly pushing the states around based on constitutionally unauthorized federal powers in the form of non-enumerated federal spending programs. The people need to wise up to what’s going on and put the federal gorilla back in its cage. The people need to demand that the federal government put a stop to unauthorized federal spending programs like the DE and appropriately reduce federal taxes.

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