Stop Hitting Yourself

Opponents of public education keep disrupting schools and prescribing additional right-wing policies as the only fix.

Hours apart on Tuesday morning, a pair of library culture warriors in public office made pronouncements about the state of education.

The first, Moms for Liberty founder Tina Descovich, decried the state of Holocaust awareness among young people. “What happened to Holocaust education?” tweeted Descovich, whose organization has successfully worked to remove an edition of Holocaust victim Anne Frank’s diary from a school in Florida, where Descovich sits on a state ethics panel.

The second, Oklahoma’s school superintendent Ryan Walters, announced the appointment of anti-LGBTQ+ influencer Chaya Raichik to a role overseeing school libraries. “No one has done more to expose what the radical left is all about than @ChayaRaichik10 and @libsoftiktok,” Walters tweeted, tagging Raichick and the Libs of TikTok account from which she has incited campaigns against queer educators. “Her's [sic] is a powerful voice to protect Oklahoma kids from porn in schools and woke indoctrination. I'm proud to have her on our team.”

When enemies of educational freedom find their way into authority positions, they become doubly empowered. As influencers of school policy, they are able to undermine educators and institutions. And as idealogues from a movement that seeks to dismantle public education, they are able to characterize right-wing educational failures as broader flaws of public schooling, which can only be remedied with further interventions from the right.

Banning books about Holocaust victims and appointing hate-mongers to library boards will not improve schools. But it will create new cracks in an education system the right is determined to break and remake in their own image.