American education has been captured by the left — and deliberately ruined.  In their thoughtful article "Education: How to Destroy and Reconquer," Arthur Milikh and Scott Yenor describe what the Left has accomplished: 

In America's public schools, children are often taught to despise themselves and their country. Our history is distorted. Our constitutional traditions trashed ... our literature and heritage are ignored or rendered ugly ... students are encouraged to transition genders, and ... are taught whites are inherently evil and racist. ... While the Left obtains vast funding for woke education, the Right begs for "opt-outs" from sex education programs and seeks to ban pornographic books from school libraries.

Milikh and Yenor make a convincing case that because of the left's total institutional conquest, attempts to reform education will fail.  Nothing less than "destruction followed by reconquest" can possibly restore American education.  Read it for yourself, and you will be convinced they are correct about that.

They offer a detailed roadmap for a new educational vision and, at the outset, make this remarkable claim: "Of course, it would be best to dismantle the Department of Education, but this will not happen, even if conservatives talk about it for another generation."

We can all agree that it would be best to dismantle the Department of Education.  However, are we right to agree that it will not happen?  A roadmap for destruction followed by reconquest that leaves the Department of Education standing sounds like a contradiction in terms.  Wouldn't that be like a roadmap for the conquest of Nazi Germany without dismantling the Nazi Party?  The DOE is the most important source of the left's "vast funding for woke education."  It is also the power center in the Deep State, charged with the responsibility of executing the left's vision for education.

If the American people are going to take American education back from the left, the DOE must be dismantled.  It can be done because it must be done.   

The DOE is dedicated to carrying out the vision of the left for the most fundamental reason: it is in its DNA.  The left created the DOE in order to achieve the total conquest of American education.

A federal department of education is a jewel in the crown of the American left.  However, it was not something attempted at the outset of the Progressive project of creating the post-constitutional America in which you and I now live.  If there was going to be a post-constitutional America, there had to be a federal department of education — but, as the fellow says, you have to work up to a thing like that.  It took the left much of the twentieth century to be able to get away with standing one up.  The honor fell not to Woodrow Wilson or even FDR, but much later to Jimmy Carter. 

Dismantling the DOE is not only essential to restoring American education, but essential to restoring America.  If we are to restore the constitutional republic that has been taken from us year-by-year by the Democrats, we must dismantle the DOE and the other post-constitutional departments and agencies that house and empower so many of the agents of the Deep State.

Milikh and Yenor, I suspect, have a low opinion of Republican politicians.  Normally, so do I.  But we have reached a point where the Deep State is so obviously destroying the country that people of goodwill need to rise to the occasion, put previous political cynicisms aside, and begin the process of restoring constitutional government.  The elimination of the DOE is central to this.

Robert Curry is a director of the Claremont Institute.  He is the author of Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World and Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea.  Both are published by Encounter Books.

Image via Pxfuel.