President Trump’s executive order that bans refugees and immigrants from six predominately Muslim nations from entering the United States, at first blush, has little to do with educational policy. Yet, upon closer inspection, this xenophobic action is possibly telling of the president’s vision regarding America’s public schools.
What, then, does this executive ban on refugees say about the president’s educational agenda? One possibility, of course, is nothing. Given Trump’s documented pattern of short-sighted, almost impulsive action, it is certainly conceivable that his executive order is not part of any comprehensive plan that connects to educational policy. He, then, is merely fulfilling his campaign promises to address the largely unwarranted fear of Middle Eastern families fleeing tumult and civil war.
Similarly, it is also possible that President Trump is woefully unaware of the social purposes of a public education system. That is, schooling at taxpayers’ expense has long had a broader aim than merely an individual’s academic or economic advancement. America’s system of public schools developed in the first half of the nineteenth century with the justification that the training of the coming generations to be upstanding democratic citizens was a social necessity. The nineteenth century was a time of massive waves of immigration and, as such, it was fully understood and accepted that these new institutions…