By Max Eden and Amy Haywood | American Enterprise Institute
Pete Hegseth being nominated for defense secretary wasn’t on our bingo cards. We’ll leave the questions about what that means for America’s military to our friends who do foreign and defense policy.
Here’s what we do know: Hegseth’s nomination could mean a truly great thing for the children of military service members.
The Department of Defense Education Activity manages 161 schools serving about 65,000 students.
As we and our friends at the Claremont Institute and Open The Books have been writing about for years, and as should shock no one, the Biden administration turned these schools into woke indoctrination factories, featuring a diversity, equity, and inclusion chief who posted racially disparaging remarks about white people on social media, curriculum designed to make white students cry, and secret gender transitions.
We fought the bureaucracy for almost a year to get parent survey results that would reveal how military servicemembers felt about these policies.
When the results were released, they showed that parents said things like, “Enough with … teaching that a child can choose their gender,” and, “DoDEA needs to get out of the business of promoting racism in any form including against whites.”
In President-elect Donald Trump’s first term, he left the Obama-appointed Tom Brady in charge as DoDEA director. Brady operated largely without supervision for a decade as over a dozen undersecretaries of defense for personnel and readiness cycled through the position that oversees the director. Brady began launching these DEI initiatives under Trump’s nose.
This time around, we trust, will be different. Trump and Hegseth will put their own person in to lead the DoDEA and task him or her with cleansing the DEI stables.
But hopefully the Trump administration will do more than that. Our military’s schools shouldn’t just ditch DEI. They should be reoriented entirely to focus on the good, true, and beautiful.
That’s where Hegseth comes in.
Hegseth is the New York Times bestselling author of Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation. The book charted the lamentable rise of progressive pedagogy in public education and called for a renaissance of classical education, which teaches students the best of what has been thought and said and inculcates a clear vision of human virtue.
Hegseth and co-author David Goodwin, the president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, were clear-eyed in their knowledge that the classical renaissance would primarily have to come through school choice. You can’t just flip a switch and transform public schools into classical schools.
But you can, more or less, flip a switch and transform the DoDEA into a classical school system.
The first step would be for Trump and Hegseth to select a new DoDEA director. Ideally, this would be someone who is military-connected and familiar with the agency and the needs of military families.
The director could hire a chief academic officer with substantial experience running classical schools, who could make a full net assessment of what the military’s schools need for a classical transformation.
The second step would be for them to secure resources and funding for these changes in the next National Defense Authorization Act.
To truly effect a full system transformation, the next DoDEA director would likely need to hire skilled outside consultants as contractors. The first group that comes to mind is Great Hearts, America’s premier classical charter school network, which runs 47 schools serving about 30,000 students. From within and without, DoDEA schools can be totally reformed.
But the Trump administration need not stop there — the DoDEA could be the tip of the spear for a broader transformative effort.
In the final year of the first Trump term, his administration released the 1776 Commission report, in many ways a laudable start to making good on Trump’s promise to promote patriotic curriculum.
But a robust curricular initiative requires more than a white paper. It requires a full scope and sequence of scaffolded lesson plans; attendant teachers’ manuals; psychometrically aligned, content-rich accountability tests; professional development training; and much more. This all costs quite a bit of money. But far less than a fraction of a fraction of what America has spent on the F-35.
A high-quality curriculum that teaches the next generation a healthy respect and appreciation for our country is a national security imperative. It’s about time we treated it that way.
And while the Education Department is statutorily prohibited from sponsoring, influencing, or designing curriculum, other departments are not.
The Left has spent tens, if not hundreds, of millions of federal dollars promoting the curricular work of left-wing activist education organizations. Trump could trump those initiatives through curriculum development defense contracts.
DoDEA schools can become a national model for success, and the military could indirectly and substantially defray the cost of public schools shifting toward a classical model.
For all we know, Hegseth has already drawn up these plans. If not, we hope that he and his team will soon start wargaming it.
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