The End of the Department of Education: Disaster Or Opportunity?

The Trump administration is gutting the Department of Education. Mass layoffs, budget cuts, and talk of shutting it down entirely have set off alarms across the political spectrum. Critics argue—rightly—that this will worsen educational inequality, leaving millions of students even more vulnerable to underfunded schools and inconsistent policies. The rich will insulate themselves in elite private schools, while public education crumbles.

And yet, is it possible that there's a silver lining? A moment, an opening, to rethink what education should be?

Let's be clear: education, as it is currently exists, has problems. The Department of Education has spent decades enforcing standardized tests, rigid curriculums, and bureaucratic red tape that treats students like data points rather than people. If you’re looking for an education system that actually empowers students to think critically and participate in democracy, you won’t find it in the version that exists today. That’s exactly the critique that two of the most important educational thinkers—John Dewey and Paulo Freire—would have made.

How Dewey and Freire Would View This Moment

John Dewey

John Dewey, one of the greatest champions of education as a democratic force, believed that learning should be active. Schools shouldn’t just be places where kids memorize facts—they should be places where students engage with the world, solve problems, experiment, and learn how to participate in their communities. Education, for Dewey, was democracy in action. But he also saw that too many schools operated like factories, designed to create obedient workers rather than engaged citizens. In Democracy and Education (1916), Dewey called for more thought and reflection in education: "Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results."

Paulo Friere

Paulo Freire took this critique even further. He described traditional education as the "banking model," in which teachers deposit information into passive students who are expected to absorb it without question. As he wrote in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), "knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing." Freire argued that this model reinforces existing power structures, discouraging critical thinking and maintaining oppression. Instead, he advocated for education as a practice of freedom—one that empowers students to think critically, challenge injustice, and actively shape society rather than merely conform to it.

Would either of them have defended the Department of Education? Unlikely. Not because they’d support Trump’s political agenda, but because they knew that real education—the kind that empowers people—is almost impossible under a system built to maintain the status quo.

The Problem With "Diversity"—And Why We Should Aim for Plurality Instead

For decades, education reform has focused on diversity. More diverse student bodies, more inclusive curriculums, more representation in elite spaces. And while representation matters, diversity itself is often a superficial fix. It does not ask whether the system itself is designed to produce critical, engaged citizens—it only asks whether more people can fit inside it.

The rich will continue playing this game. They will send their kids to elite private schools that embrace diversity as a branding exercise—hiring a few more faculty of color, adding a handful of books by marginalized authors to the curriculum—without ever questioning whether those schools exist to reproduce privilege.

Plurality, on the other hand, is something deeper. It’s not just about who is in the room—it’s about whether the structure of the room itself allows for real engagement. A pluralistic education doesn’t just sprinkle in diverse perspectives; it fosters spaces where those perspectives can challenge, shape, and transform one another. It isn’t just about who gets access to knowledge, but about who gets to create it.

If the federal government steps back from education, it will create a mess—there’s no denying that. But it might also create space for communities to build educational systems that focus on plurality rather than just diversity. Schools that don’t just add marginalized voices to a rigid curriculum but actually rethink what learning looks like. Schools that teach students not just to take in information but to actively participate in shaping their world.

A Hopeful Future

None of this means that dismantling the Department of Education is good. It will cause harm, especially to those who are already underserved. But if we only fight to resinstate what's being lost, we risk missing the bigger opportunity—to build something better.

Dewey and Freire wouldn’t have wasted time defending a bureaucratic system that is broken. They would have been asking, what can we build instead? If we’re bold enough to ask that question, we might just find a way forward that’s better than anything we had before.