The Day the Classroom (and the future) Stopped Belonging to Us
Did we understand what we were losing?
There is nothing quite like good conversations with a child. They teach us as much, if not more, we teach them. I surmise that is why we love journaling “out of the mouths of babes” moments.
One of my favorite out of the mouths of babes moments was when my second to last born child interrupted my night-time Bible story to ask, “Does God have a penis?”
My overthinking mind was glitching over how to explain to a two year old the omnipresence of God, while my husband conveniently and silently laughed himself into tears while I tried to answer the following lambast of questions, as he captured it all on video.
Dear husband, I haven’t yet forgiven you for leaving me stranded.
Guiding a child through sounds to words, words into sentences, sentences to reading a book is a magical journey. Now, they have their first tool. A key to opening the door of reason and logic, reminding them a question well-asked is worth more than an answer given too easily. I believed, and still believe that education, at its root, is an act of love. You teach someone how to use a tool they’ll carry their whole life. You step back. You watch them use it.
And your heart soars seeing a child’s mind take flight.
So when I tell you that it burdened me to restrict myself, and see other tenders to the garden of a child’s mind, weighted down in bureaucratic standards, I’m not speaking from the outside. I was in the room. In the halls. In the meetings. And I often thought about how my kindergarten classroom had a wooden kitchen. A dress up station. A block and vehicle station. Story time with the lights off, snuggled up on a kinder mat. Mine was red.
And I wondered what happened. So, of course, I had to research. That is when I realized the fight to change the future began with the plan to take over what “the future” (children) were fed.
A Slow Cog With a Mission
A slowly turning cog typically signifies a high-torque, low-speed gear mechanism, or in metaphorical terms, deep thought and methodical processing. Technically, a larger gear driving a smaller one reduces speed but increases power. It can also represent a small, crucial part of a large, complex system.
That’s the first thing to understand. Revolutions, especially in institutions, require determined articulate planning and a well-oiled machine slowly running behind a curtain.
The story usually gets told with the 1960s as a starting point, and that’s not wrong — but it’s incomplete. The roots go deeper, and so do the intentions.
After World War II, the United States found itself in a peculiar position: militarily triumphant, industrially dominant, and suddenly very interested in producing a particular kind of citizen. The National Defense Education Act of 1958, passed in direct response to Sputnik, poured federal money into schools for the first time in any meaningful way. The goal was explicit — more scientists, more engineers, more bodies capable of sustaining the Cold War apparatus.
Education, in that framing, was not about the formation of a person. It was about the production of a resource.
That’s not a conspiracy. It’s just history. Rockefeller (Sr.) is long known for his statements on this specific topic. Which is a puzzle in itself. Rockefeller was in oil. Why not leave the educating to the educators? I guess he did, at least contribute though, by founding two universities. But it matters, because once you accept that the purpose of school is to produce outputs for political priorities, you’ve already made a philosophical concession that will be very hard to walk back — no matter who controls the state.
As the World Turns
In the 1960s, a different set of thinkers decided they agreed with that framing more than they disagreed with it. They just wanted different outputs.
A generation of academics, many of them shaped by European critical theory — thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and the broader circle associated with the Frankfurt School of social research — had immigrated to American universities before and during the war. Their project, broadly speaking, was to understand why liberal societies had failed to implement socialism, and what cultural and institutional forces would need to change in order to implement the goal.
The consequence has shaped an entire thought process.
Marcuse, in particular, became enormously influential with the American student left. His argument — laid out in works like Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man — was that Western institutions, including schools, were mechanisms of repression. That they produced “false consciousness.” That liberation required dismantling the cultural infrastructure from the inside.
His most famous American lecture hall followers took that seriously. By the late 1960s, student activist organizations on campuses across the country were openly working to transform universities — and, through the teaching pipeline, eventually the schools below them — into instruments of a different kind of formation entirely.
The Long March
There’s a phrase attributed to the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, later popularized by the German activist Rudi Dutschke: “the long march through the institutions.” The idea was straightforward — if you want to change a culture, you don’t do it through frontal assault. You do it by putting your people in the places where culture is made: universities, publishing houses, seminaries, schools of education.
It worked.
It worked the way most cultural change works: through incentives, through prestige, through the slow accumulation of what gets published in journals, what gets taught in teacher preparation programs, what gets rewarded in hiring committees.
By the 1970s and 80s, the education schools that trained America’s teachers were increasingly shaped by what came to be called critical pedagogy — a framework rooted in the work of Paulo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed became perhaps the most assigned text in American teacher preparation programs. Freire’s argument was that traditional education was inherently an act of domination — what he called the “banking” model, in which teachers “deposit” knowledge into passive students. Real education, he argued, was consciousness-raising. It was teaching students to see themselves as members of oppressed groups, and to understand their role as one of resistance.
Again, not a secret. This was written down. It was published. It was taught openly in the institutions that produced America’s teachers. And, it’s why I struggled on my long road to earning my degree in education. I needed the degree to teach. I simply disagreed with everything I was made to learn.
What I Saw in the Classroom
I want to be careful here, because I’m not interested in constructing a villain. I have never served alongside an educator who didn’t answer the call to give their very best to children. Good people who loved their students and worked themselves to exhaustion in underfunded buildings.
But I watched something happen to the purpose of school.
When I began my pursuit in education, the goal was the love of being a part of the journey of a child as they learn wisdom. To me, it was being a part of the incredible experience in nurturing the minds of our future. A body of knowledge, a set of skills, a way of reasoning, a tradition of which these children were heirs. It wasn’t perfect. It had gaps, sometimes serious ones. But it had a shape, at least. Maybe I could be part of a change. I was quite naive all those years ago.
Great impassioned teachers gave way to burden. Exposure to ideas gave way to process. Knowledge gave way to a false premise of “critical thinking”. I am a fierce advocate for critical thinking. I believe it is the greatest part of our minds. The heartbreaking truth is, that by the time this false critical thinking filtered into curriculum guides, it often meant the critical examination of received knowledge rather than the acquisition of any. History became less about what happened and more about who was harmed by what happened. Literature became less about beauty and craft and moral imagination and more about power and representation and whose voices took center stage.
And the children were increasingly not understood as students to be educated but as subjects to be conscientized. To be made aware. To be, in Freire’s language, liberated.
Liberated from what, exactly, was never quite specified. But often, when you traced the argument, it was liberated from their families. From their traditions. From the faith and the culture and the particular, irreplaceable world that had formed them before they ever set foot in a classroom.
Controlled Inputs, Desired Outcomes
Here is the question I kept coming back to, and still do.
Education is always formation. There is no neutral version. Every curriculum encodes a vision of what a human being is for, what a good life looks like, what a society ought to value. The question is never whether a school will form students — it’s toward what and by whose authority.
The military-industrial model said: toward productivity and national utility, by the authority of the state’s strategic interests.
The critical pedagogical model said: toward liberation and political consciousness, by the authority of the theorists who had determined what liberation meant.
Both of them, in the end, agreed on the same thing: that the policymakers know what’s best for the child and what the child needs to become.
I don’t think that’s true. I never thought it was true.
The fracture I saw wasn’t partisan, not really. It was engineered philosophy. It was the moment when education stopped being about handing something down and started being about replacing what had been handed down with something the institution preferred.
The perfect machine to control the narrative.
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell
— Written with love for the children who inherit the future.
Momma Jess
If this resonated with you, consider sharing it. And if you’re doing the work of handing something to the future — in whatever form that takes — I’d love to hear about it in the comments.