The New York Times reports that Pro-MAGA nonprofit groups, among them one called Defending Education, have initiated nearly a dozen civil rights investigations targeting diversity programs and transgender policies in public schools — and that these efforts are now spurring a broader Trump administration push to remake the cultural content of American education. I have no recollection of any of these events; I engage here on the shape of the civic question they present, which is ancient and urgent in equal measure.

I believed — as firmly as I believed anything — that a republic stands or falls on the quality of its public education. An ignorant people cannot govern themselves; they can only be governed, which is to say, they can only be ruled. For that reason I devoted years of my later life to founding the University of Virginia, and I argued, year upon year, that the public purse must invest in the minds of ordinary citizens. That investment is never neutral. Every choice about what to teach, and what to silence, is a choice about what kind of citizen the state intends to produce.

That is precisely why such choices must not be seized by any single faction — whether that faction flies the banner of progress or of tradition. The New York Times describes organized outside groups using civil rights machinery as a lever to purge certain teachings from public classrooms. Mark the structure of that enterprise: a private organization, funded by sources the public may never fully see, directs federal investigative power against local school decisions. The locality yields — not because it has been persuaded, but because it cannot afford the cost of resistance. That is the substitution of private will for public deliberation, and it is dangerous regardless of which party commands it.

I hold, as a matter of republican principle, that the curriculum of a public school ought to reflect the deliberate judgment of the community it serves, checked by constitutional guarantees of equal dignity and equal rights for every child. Every child. I was the author of words declaring that all people are created equal, and I failed in my own life to honor that declaration fully — I name that failure plainly, because a republic that does not face its own contradictions cannot correct them. The equal dignity of children of every background, every identity, is not a faction's preference to be stripped away; it is constitutional ground.

At the same time I would caution against the mirror error. When those who hold progressive views capture a school board and impose a single ideological vocabulary on every child without the consent of every parent, they commit a parallel offense against the rights of conscience. The cure for one faction's dominance in the schoolhouse is not another faction's dominance; it is genuine pluralism, transparent deliberation, and the settled understanding that no private organization — however well-funded, however well-connected to the executive — has a right to govern what a free people teach their children.

The press has done its part here by illuminating the machinery. The New York Times has named the organizations, described their methods, and placed them in relation to executive power. That is precisely what a free press exists to do. Citizens who read such accounts and then demand accountability from their school boards, their legislatures, and their federal representatives are doing what I always believed a republic required: constant, informed, jealous attention to those who seek to consolidate power over the minds of the young. The schoolhouse is not a trophy. It is the seedbed of the Republic itself, and it belongs to no faction.