“Seizing political control of the schools is not a campaign slogan. It’s a plan to turn power into more power” The right has been attacking public education as long as anyone can remember. It’s usually about unions or dumbing down and losing to the Chinese or something like that. But as Jonathan Chait writes in this excellent article about what’s actually happening in today’s right wing assault on education, they have now decided that academic freedom is for losers — they are convinced that it’s time to completely take over American education and indoctrinate children into right wing ideology. The article is long so I’d recommend that you read it in full if you can but suffice to say that Chait makes many good points about the historical antecedents of various attempts to dominate education and points out that there are excesses on the left as well as right. (Of course he does.) But he seems to have taken a hard look at this and finally realized that enemy in this war isn’t the kids who want trigger warnings and safe spaces but the authoritarian extremists who have decided it’s time to use state power to force educational institutions, even private ones, to carry their party line — or else. An excerpt: Republicans have begun saying things about American schools that not long ago would have struck them as peculiar, even insane. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has called schools “a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.” Former secretary of State Mike Pompeo predicts that “teachers’ unions,…