Public Education is the Cornerstone of Democracy

Public education is the key to a better future

“Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.” – F. D. Roosevelt

The battle over schools is not something we should take lightly or seen as a blip in a partisan battle. This is a generational challenge that threatens the very existence of our state and our country. In Iowa the arguments between public and private schools with voucher programs is lately taking up a lot of space in our political discourse, and for good reason. With a lot of public dollars going to private religious institutions and the intentional defunding of public education, we are seeing an intentional attack on the very institutions that have made the United States and place like Iowa even possible.

Diverse books and points of view: the Arch Nemesis of Conservatism

This isn’t as simply put as “I just dislike religious schools teaching religion” or “Its only the wealthy who get more opportunities”, though those things are true. What seems to be the intended goal here is not to necessarily give citizens choice on education or allow folks to attend their preferred religious school, but to undermine the very idea of education itself. The evidence for this is overwhelming when we look at the function of these laws and the priorities of lawmakers that push them.

Often, we hear from conservatives that “schools should just be for learning reading, writing, and math” and that everything else is either a distraction or a waste of time. Besides this being outwardly ignorant and inwardly inconsistent, it does belie a certain anti-intellectualism inherent to that kind of thinking. Anyone who echoes some shade of that gives away that they really don’t care about education, they only care about the idea of education. Conservatives think it’s good to be smart and highly qualified, they just don’t think the steps to get that way are worth funding, at least not with their dollars and not in a way that they themselves don’t understand. They seem to be scared of new ideas and of critical thought and their policies towards education reflect that.

If you keep putting people like that in charge, you aren’t just going to get citizens who aren’t as flexible or resilient in their thinking, you’re going to get citizens that don’t know what education is. Education is more than sitting in a room for a few hours a day receiving lecture or doing macaroni pictures with a bunch of little kids. It always has been more than that, too. No great culture or society or civilization had great engineers, scientists, or artist by blocking off access to information and “only teaching the basics”. They pushed their academic doors wide open and made their mark on history by pushing boundaries and the years of collapse are often marked by fear, superstition, and disassociation from the pursuit of knowledge.

And you can mark the collapse of that culture when education and reason give way to superstition and fear.

Republicans seem to think this isn’t true -likely because if they had critical thinking skills they wouldn’t be republicans.

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” — Aristotle

Conservatives’ entire ideology seems to be based on the idea that knowledge is actually a bad thing, something that is not only inherently dangerous but is de facto harmful for folks to have. We see this reflected in their crusades against even mentioning that LGTBQ people exist or that non-religious folks are inherently evil or broken. They are required to create a sort of outgroup and taboo to justify removing access to information and knowledge, lest the people be corrupted by thinking.

This leads me to see education as the enemy of conservatism, and they seem to agree with me as this is the real reason they want to erase history. They want to create a world where education is something that is shallow and narrow and only within the certain confines of their ignorance. For conservatives and republicans, if an idea takes time to understand and explain it isn’t worth having available to the public. They seem to be incapable of understanding that educated people can hold an idea in their head without adopting it. If an entire generation doesn’t know how to write a paragraph, know about the struggles of certain groups of people (Even their own ancestors!), know how to function on a global stage, then that generation is lost to the first huckster or conman that promises them fame and fortune. If a people don’t know their history then it is doomed to repeat it.

This is why republicans in Iowa want to attack public education, they absolutely love affirmative action for bad ideas. They know their ideas are old and they are bad and that the academics and intellectuals and educated people outside of their spheres reject many of their axioms as false due to lack of data or consistency. They know that when given a choice with a diversity of thought, young people given access to different viewpoints, whether it be film, theater, literature, political theory, or philosophy, very few people land on their set of values or ideas. Conservatives are generally only made through affirmative action and shielding from critical analysis. Since they can’t compete academically or philosophically, they create siloed institutions that mimic education and inquiry with separate standards for theocratic apologetics and pseudo-science and want to use public funds to do it.

This was meant to be a joke, but this is LITERALLY WHAT IOWA REPUBLICANS ARE SAYING IN THE CAPITOL

Its little surprise that prominent conservative “thinkers” tend to come from a very small subsection of institutions and strangely all tend to have the same ethno-religious make up.

They like the idea of “separate, but equal” to quote Jim Crow era laws and the bill Gov. Reynolds signed¹ so they don’t want to teach kids about it. They like the idea of a poll tax, so they don’t want to teach kids about it. They like the idea of persecuting sexual and religious minorities, so they don’t want to teach kids about it. They like the idea of authoritarianism and dislike civic participation, so they don’t want to teach kids about it. Sure, they get rich by funneling public money to their private donors, but they also get to erase the ability of a people to function democratically.

Conservative Christians and Republicans want to bring us back to the Bad Old Days of Jim Crow and the Red Scare and find the 1^st amendment only as useful as far as they can use it to control the public sphere.

If they are successful in this endeavor, we are likely to see the end of democracy as we know it.

The first step on this path to authoritarian theocracy is to dismantle public education so that in a generation our children won’t have the tools or language to call this out or to fight for democracy. Education is the cornerstone of our democracy, don’t let nonsense scare stories fool you, this is one of our best Public Goods and what has made America so successful.

If Iowa or this country is to survive we can’t let them succeed.

1. https://legiscan.com/IA/text/SF418/2025