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.

Arnn points to founding documents such as the Northwest Ordinance as guides to restoring a more principled style of learning, and proof that morality in the classroom is what the founders would have wanted. In the Northwest Ordinance, for example, Arnn specifies the third article that asserts, “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

The Hillsdale College President also uses the Constitution as the answer to the problem of the bureaucracy which, in his view, has entangled public education. As Arnn indicates, the government has no constitutional authority to have a Department of Education at all. Even Secretary Spellings in an interview with Human Events, could not find language in the Constitution which sanctioned the department’s existence. Arnn’s article looks back on the Reagan administration which he believes got it right when it attempted to abolish the department altogether, stating in its 1996 platform that the government would “end federal meddling in our schools, and promote family choice at all levels.”

If Americans keep the government in line with these original governing documents, Arnn believes education could return to its original purpose, which does not include government involvement in school programming. Schools, in Arnn’s view, are meant to aid families in creating well-rounded citizens, and he believes the state has forgotten this purpose.

“A government that forgets this sentiment is not competent to give instructions for higher education,” he concludes. “Forgetting the purpose of education, such a government is likely to forget its own purpose, too. That is dangerous both to liberty and to justice.”.

Amanda Busse is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.