The Trump Administration’s Assault on Education Demands a Radical Alliance—But Who’s Ready to Answer the Call?
As the Trump administration wages an all-out war on the foundations of American education, it’s easy to feel like defending our institutions from within is a losing battle. But crises, as they say, breed innovation. If higher education has a future, it won’t be found in isolation. Instead, it will hinge on a bold collaboration between groups often artificially divided: faculty, staff, and students. Yet, there’s another crucial ally we’ve overlooked for far too long: secondary school teachers. The divide between high school and college educators, especially in the humanities, has always been a missed opportunity. Now, with Trump’s policies in play, bridging this gap isn’t just a good idea—it’s an existential imperative.
But here’s where it gets controversial: While college professors have been quick to criticize their students’ lack of preparation for higher education, they’ve been far less curious about the forces shaping that very unpreparedness. This disconnect has allowed two powerful trends to hijack secondary education: the erosion of open-ended, abstract inquiry essential to the humanities, and the dangerous rebranding of inherently humanistic thinking as generic, quantifiable skills. By turning a blind eye to K-12 education, higher ed has not only missed the warning signs but has also allowed these trends to infiltrate its own halls. Worse, it’s let outsiders define what college is—and what it’s for.
Take the Common Core, an Obama-era initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which aimed to standardize learning expectations across American public schools. Despite its noble intentions, the Common Core’s obsession with assessable skills, mass testing, and “workforce training” has effectively sidelined disciplines not rooted in quantitative learning. And this is the part most people miss: At its core, the Common Core dismisses the humanities’ unique role in fostering writing, reading comprehension, and critical thought, reducing education to a mere preparation for the workforce. In its own words, the focus is on students’ ability to read “complex informational text”—a skill supposedly transferable across all fields. But here’s the kicker: Most college professors would argue that comfort with nuance, complex language, and abstract thinking are far more vital than parsing informational texts.
The Common Core and its cousin, the College Board, both Gates Foundation darlings, speak the language of critical thinking but strip it of its depth, reducing it to generic formulas. It’s as if the rich, disciplinary-specific thinking of the liberal arts has been fracked—extracted, processed into bland, quantifiable “skills,” and then reinserted into curricula in a barely recognizable form. While these organizations claim to prepare students for college, they’re actually pushing a vision of education that sees students as future workers and consumers. And because they’re perceived as neutral agents of success, their curricula, assessments, and even language dominate American education.
Here’s the real question: Is it any wonder that humanities fields, already under siege, are now forced to justify their existence in terms of pragmatism and career success? But this approach misses the point entirely. Students have been conditioned to see advanced writing, reading, and critical thought as skills divorced from the humanities—as something they can pick up in a math class or business lecture. To counter this, we need more than a defense of the English major’s job prospects; we need a robust argument for why humanistic thinking is fundamentally different from what happens in a chemistry lab or a business seminar.
This might seem like the wrong time to reflect on past mistakes, but forming new alliances to combat new threats requires understanding what’s been overlooked. When we talk about the failures of K-12 education, we focus on test scores and global rankings, not on the loss of opportunities for rich, intellectual exploration. In 2025, the Common Core’s failures are undeniable, yet instead of questioning its flawed assumptions, states and schools blame poor execution. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s push to dismantle public education threatens to replace it with underregulated private and charter schools, each with its own skewed vision of “college and career readiness.” These schools may gain traction among parents desperate for change, but their graduates will arrive on college campuses expecting validation of their limited worldview. And if history is any guide, colleges might just oblige.
Trump’s attacks on academic freedom and funding are immediate threats, but equally dangerous is his administration’s effort to raise a generation uninterested in—or unprepared for—the values of the liberal arts. This trend, already embedded in education systems focused on job training and wealth creation, is now flourishing unchecked. American colleges and universities will likely survive due to their economic clout, but in what form? For many, a college degree will remain desirable, but for most, it risks becoming a hollow transaction—a professional certification devoid of intellectual depth, driven by economic anxiety rather than scholarly pursuit.
So, what’s to be done? University faculty have contributed to their own marginalization by ignoring the changes in their own education schools, defining their disciplines too narrowly, and overestimating their ability to transform students’ thinking. Just like secondary school leaders, they’ve surrendered control over education’s purpose and meaning.
Here’s a challenge: How does your institution train future teachers? What classes do education students take? Could your department partner with local high schools for classroom visits or workshops? Could professional organizations include high school teachers in their conferences? If these questions haven’t crossed your mind, why not? And more importantly, what will we lose if we don’t act now?
This isn’t just a call to action—it’s a call to rethink everything. The future of education depends on it. What’s your take? Do you agree, or is there another angle we’re missing? Let’s start the conversation.
