Mort Rosenblum: Indoctrination is a poor substitute for education

Donald Trump’s assault on schools aims to blot out critical thinking, history, geography and, above all, “civics” — how America’s federal republic with limited states’ rights is supposed to function.

He borrows liberally from Hitler’s playbook. Nazi cadres began washing 10-year-old brains in 1922. Kids joined the Hitler Youth at 14. Four years later, they blindly followed monstrous orders with nationalist zeal.

Trump is veering the United States toward plutocratic rule with only a thin Republican plurality largely because since 1980, Charles and David Koch, forward-looking libertarian brothers, have worked hard to undermine public education.

Their goal was a society in which greed was good. Unfettered corporations and families would be free to amass wealth without pesky regulations. They hated public schools but needed an underclass of hewers and haulers who asked no questions.

They began by infiltrating local school boards, then state legislatures. Kids were taught basic reading, math and a narrow view of U.S. history. The rest of crucial curricula was gradually phased out. Meantime, private academies educated a small ruling elite.

The brothers expanded their father’s oil empire into Koch Industries. By 2019, it was the second-largest private company in America with an annual revenue of $115 billion. Along with other conservative funding, that bought enormous political clout.

Ronald Reagan’s predilection for the rich and scorn for “welfare queens” who lived off the state helped at the outset. George W. Bush’s “leave no child behind” policy focused on teaching kids to pass tests, not to think for themselves and challenge rote lessons.

After Trump edged out Hillary Clinton in 2016, the elder Koch declared they had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. A look at education in other democracies, from kindergarten to university graduate schools, shows that is distressingly true.

But the Kochs saw Trump as too dysfunctional, influenced by Vladimir Putin, who regarded him idiotic yet useful. Nazi comparisons are extreme. The ex-Soviet Union — Reagan’s “Evil Empire” — and Putin’s Russia today better illustrates the threat Americans face.

A rusted Iron Curtain collapsed under its own weight in 1989. Moscow’s European satellites broke free. My most thrilling moment in a long life of reporting was dancing on Red Square all night two years later when “Communism” had supposedly died.

The United States could have led its allies to shape a peaceable, prosperous world. Bill Clinton moved on to other priorities. Many Americans saw Russia in past tense until Putin took charge in 2012.

His Nashi (“Ours”) program was effective. Teenagers left summer camps with a fervor to restore the motherland’s lost grandeur. Trump ideologues took note. Kash Patel’s books for children feature a noble king committed to giving them a bright future.

When I started school at Peter Howell Elementary in what today seems like a century ago, colorful maps on classroom walls inspired me to go see those places and learn how the world’s other 95 percent lived.

All Tucson kids saw those maps. We followed our various careers mostly aware of what was beyond insulating oceans. Trusted newspapers and broadcasters, all heavily dependent on the Associated Press, reported real news beyond our own line of sight.

We learned about checks and balances: a president with clearly defined powers, lawmakers sworn to serve even those who vote against them and an independent judiciary to uphold the Constitution.

Today, complex reality is reduced to meaningless catchphrases. Too many citizens react to breaking news without understanding why it broke. Trump won largely because his gross distortions misled so many. Take, for instance, the border.

In the 1980s, Central American “contras” shipped cocaine to Florida in CIA planes. Military thugs murdered priests and tortured to death suspected leftists. Reagan called them freedom fighters. Entrenched harsh rule today impels refugees to flee northward.

Arizona has long been far and away the state most impacted by a national trend to replace universal standards in public education with unregulated charter schools. It deprives a growing number of voters from shared understanding of existential issues.

In Trump’s first term, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos championed school choice. She said Barack Obama’s support for underperforming public schools was throwing away money. Now, Trump intends to abolish the Education Department entirely.

He intends to leave teaching to the states, which have widely disparate goals and capacities. Schools that resist his narrow ideology will lose federal funds that enable poor and disabled kids to keep up with their peers.

Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) are too complex to summarize, but the upshot is clear. They give parents $7,000 to help transfer kids to private or religious schools, if not homeschooling, with little regulation or oversight.

Natalie Luna Rose, who heads the Tucson Unified School District’s governing board, excoriates that. “Traditional public schools are being starved, and that’s intentional,” she told me. “You can’t make money off them.”

She said charter schools can cherry-pick students, excluding those with special needs. “The endgame of all this,” she concluded, “is dismantling public education.”

Already, about 580 of the state’s 2,000 or so schools are private, and the balance is shifting fast. Teacher salaries start at $40,000 a year, stuck at pre-Covid levels, and only a special, and unlikely, budget override can increase them.

Public schools are forced to spend heavily on security and essential repairs, which eat away at dwindling federal grants. Teachers face political and parental criticism for heated issues like critical race theory. which is not even part of classroom curricula.

Teaching is a labor of love, Luna Rose said, but teachers deserve a living wage. New scrutiny and what some see as harassment are prompting an exodus from a crucial profession, likely to worsen as Trump’s policies take shape.

Europeans, in contrast, see across-the-board quality education as vital to prosperity and stability. Finland’s schools, all public, are consistently rated as the world’s best. Rich parents ensure that every kid, poor ones included, is brought up to the same standards.

Many Americans argue that their own children have finished school, or they have no children. Why pay for other people’s? Elsewhere, most citizens realize that unless fresh generations grow up with a solid education, they could end up with a Donald Trump.