On 25 September 2025, Republican Ryan Walters announced his stepping down as Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction to become the CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance (TFA) in the US. Walters’ mission: to “fearlessly [fight] the woke liberal union mob” (TFA, 2025). Thus, he declared education the battlefield of politics.
Already as Superintendent, Walters has worked to achieve his mission: He withdrew the teaching qualification of former teacher Summer Boismier after she refused to comply with education policies censoring books and materials not in line with conservative ideology. Boismier drew her students’ attention to Books Unbanned, a Brooklyn Public Library project giving young people access to censored materials. A parent’s complaint eventually lead to Boismier’s being barred from teaching. In April 2025, Boismier lost a defamation lawsuit against Walters who had accused her publicly of “[s]exualizing our classrooms” (Walters, 2022). He justified his accusation on the grounds of her failure to censor critical theories on gender and race in school. Ironically, TFA (2025a) seeks to “build a national movement that is centered on freedom and common sense, not on bullying and intimidation”.
Walters’ doublespeak is a reminder that terms such as ‘freedom’, ‘common sense’, ‘alternative’, or ‘crisis’ function differently within different ideologies and work to organise societies accordingly. TFA suggests that education is in crisis, because the curriculum exposes children to liberal ideas; liberalists see education in crisis because of right-wing conservative backlash and seizure of control.
Education, the resistance?
Prominent contemporary education philosopher Gert Biesta defends the idea that education should be able to say ‘no’—to resist imposed trends and discourses (Biesta, 2025). However, taking the Boismier case as an example, it is not clear who is representing education: Walters on the education policy and governance level?; Boismier on the teaching level?; Parents on the community level?; And what about students? All of these actors said ‘no’ to what they considered a problem (except students who weren’t consulted, but that’s a different issue). It was the perceived problem of the liberal teacher rather than censorship which came to be recognised legally as the problem requiring resistance.
It is no secret that political conflicts and legal incidences of this kind fall into the larger suppression of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law under the Trump administration. Executive orders following the 2025 Presidential Transition Project (also known as Project 2025), a policy roadmap towards authoritarian statehood, have stripped marginalised groups of rights and have undermined protection (Democracy Forward, 2024). For instance, Executive Order 14168 “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” revokes state recognition of non-binary and transgender people; Executive Order 14190 “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K‑12 Schooling” forbids the teaching of “anti-American ideologies”, including critical race theory; Trump’s announcements to dismantle the US Department of Education (DE) poses threats to DE policies, such as Title I (support for low-income students), Title IX (protection against gender-based discrimination in education), and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. By giving state authorities full control over resource allocation, inequalities and discrimination are set to become structurally locked-in.
Anti-authoritarian voices might warn that these executive measures forge the way towards an ethno-nationalist curriculum in view of eliminating heterogeneity, “cleansing” society from “degenerate” ideas and bodies. Meanwhile, Republicans defend Trump’s orders, claiming that they serve to prevent schools from allegedly forcing children to accept liberalist indoctrination (Executive Order 14190).
The irreconcilability of these points of view suggests that all grounds for mutual understanding have crumbled. And so education must become a political battlefield, with teachers at the frontlines and under the surveillance of state agents, parents, and colleagues. Once again, society is turning itself into a panopticon in which fellow citizens learn to distrust each other, and education appears to offer fertile grounds for raising an increasingly authoritarian society.
Education, the mother of tomorrow?
Why must education always be in charge of creating a different future? What if we freed education from this imposed role?
These questions require a discussion of the nature of education and its relation to politics. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, Vlieghe and Zamojski (2020:864) point out that education and politics erroneously have come to be viewed as inseparable. They trace the politicisation of education to “an attitude of hate towards the present, in view of an ever deferred hoped-for ideal future”. Framing the present as a crisis, the solution of the Trump administration is to stop teaching about anything that is deemed responsible for the present crisis. Censorship closes off the world to learners in order to turn them into agents of a new utopia.
How might we shield education from being utilised and misused for political goals, and what does a non-politicised education look like? In her essay “The crisis in education”, Arendt (2006) suggests that education should open the world, allowing the young to encounter, understand, and interact meaningfully with it. Today, as education continues to be employed as an instrument by many and as a weapon by some, Osberg and Biesta (2020) felt the need to reiterate Arendt’s call; They challenge us to understand education not in utilitarian terms but as an end in itself, with emergentist and affective qualities. Osberg (2010) further distinguishes politics from education as the former having to make decisions about the future and the latter providing the space for experimentation. This distinction frees education from the burden of having to fix crises and fulfil futures.
Whether an open-ended theory of education could shield education from becoming overly politicised would require testing. Unfortunately, in the US as well as in many other countries, such intervention seems both impossible and a lost case—like Boismier lost in her attempt to keep the world open to students.
Conclusion sans solution
I can’t and don’t wish to end this piece on an optimistic, solution-oriented note. In our Education Futures Masters course, we were told that there is no point to critiquing visions of the future if we don’t propose alternatives; Meanwhile, a friend pointed out to me that “pessimism gets a bad rep in the media”. Indeed, populist campaigns have profited greatly from being optimistic about crises, as their simplistic solutions have proven to uplift and mobilise the masses. Roger Griffin (n.d.) observes that “the ideological driving force of fascism […] is the vision of the nation being capable of imminent phoenix-like rebirth from the prevailing crisis and decadence in a revolutionary new political and cultural order”. All of this to say, optimistic aesthetics have been seized by illiberal actors to win votes. I don’t mean to dismiss optimism per se, but I wonder what might the effect of ending on an unresolved, melancholic note.
Blogs are a platform of public education, and I want this blog to be an example of an open-ended education that means something without achieving a set goal/solving a problem. My core motivation was to raise awareness about Boismier’s story—a story that moved and troubled me deeply (if you would like to learn more it, I recommend this The Atlantic podcast). While I have no encouraging solutions to give, I hope to have built some compassion for those afraid, crushed, or injured out on the education battlefield.
References
Arendt, H. (2006). The crisis in education. In J. Kohn (Ed.) Between Past and Future (170-193). Penguin Classics.
Biesta, G. (2025). The future of education in the impulse society: Why schools and teachers matter. Prospects. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-025-09723-1
Democracy Forward (2024). The People’s Guide to Project 2025. Democracy Forward. https://democracyforward.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2024-05_Peoples-Guide-Pro-2025.pdf
Griffin, R (n.d.). The palingenetic core of fascist ideology. Library of Social Science. https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/ideologies/resources/griffin-the-palingenetic-core/
Osberg, D. C. (2010). Taking care of the future? The complex responsibility of education and politics. In D. Osberg & G. Biesta (Eds.), Complexity theory and the politics of education (157–170). Sense Publishers.
Osberg, D., & Biesta, G. (2020). Beyond curriculum: Groundwork for a non-instrumental theory of education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 53(1), 57–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1750362
Teacher Freedom Alliance (TFA). (2025). Big News: Ryan Walters is the Incoming CEO of Teacher Freedom Alliance!. Teacher Freedom Alliance. https://www.teacherfreedomalliance.com/, accessed 27 September 2025.
TFA. (2025a). Teacher Freedom Alliance. TFA. https://www.teacherfreedomalliance.com/
Vlieghe, J., & Zamojski, P. (2020). Redefining education and politics: On the paradoxical relation between two separate spheres, Policy Futures in Education, 18(7), 864–877. https://doi.org/10.1177/1478210320943808
Walters, R. [@RyanWalters_] (2022, August 31). Sexualizing our classrooms will not be tolerated. These are not Oklahoma values and this teacher must lose her teaching certificate. @joy4ok do your job. [image attached] [Post]. X. https://x.com/RyanWalters_/status/1564989584450150401
