US election: Trump’s presidency and education are inextricably linked

Analysis: President-elect Donald Trump has promised to close the national Department of Education, incentivise home-schooling, and “turn back the tide of left-wing indoctrination”, by shifting education oversight from the federal government and schools to parents.
But the push for devolution, total parental control, and devaluing university education is causing concern among experts.
They worry is about the further erosion of critical thinking skills, given the part this has already played in the country’s decision to elect a candidate who has repeatedly used misinformation and non-credible claims to garner an emotional response from the electorate.
There is a lot to unpick when examining the systematic under-education of populations and the impact it has on people’s lives and which political ideologies they support. But at a time when more people are getting their information from unverified sources, including online influencers, it’s important to understand what part education played in the 2024 election, and Trump’s plans for the system going forward.
Three days after the election, the Trump-obsessed Elon Musk posted on his social media platform X/Twitter that there is “something seriously wrong with our ‘elite’ colleges”.
Below that was a post from someone saying that US colleges were “spreading Marxism”. The rationale behind the claim was a statistic that the five “most educated” states in the country (Massachusetts, Vermont, Maryland, Connecticut and Colorado) voted for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in this year’s election. Meanwhile, the five least educated states (West Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma) voted for Trump.
There are a series of reasons why people without a university qualification might be more likely to vote for Trump. Including things like the economy. People without a university qualification are more likely to be working class, low wage workers. They have been doing it tough during the cost of living crisis that came out of the Covid-19 policies that pushed up inflation. Trump’s promises to “fix” the economy, and fast, is appealing. It’s conventional political wisdom that an incumbent government will be punished on polling day when families are struggling to get by.
Meanwhile, these have long been conservative areas – economically and socially – where many people hold religious views and work in the agricultural sector. Speaking to farmers was a focus for Trump.
The lack of educational opportunities, for a variety of reasons, also makes some of these voters more likely to fall prey to misinformation. That doesn’t mean everyone without a university degree has been fooled by unfounded claims (like, Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in Ohio). It also doesn’t mean those who do have a bachelor’s degree or higher are immune to believing the misinformation swirling around this election.
But by under-educating large sectors of the population, stemming from education and economic policies, the United States (as well as other countries) has been left with an electorate that is not able to cast a fully informed vote.
Temple University journalism professor Linn Washington says people in the United States have been poorly served by their media and politicians.
Freedom of the press was enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution as a way to ensure the country had an informed electorate.
But the press increasingly operates in soundbites, and politicians follow suit, in a chicken-and-egg situation that leaves everyone with less information and context than they need to cast an informed vote, he says.
Moreover, trust in traditional media has been declining, pushing people elsewhere.
The 2024 US presidential election could be seen as the online election. More than ever before, voters are getting their information from social media, which has little in the way of effective checks and balances, or ethical bounds. 
A new Pew Research survey found more than half of all Americans now get their news from social media. 
At the same time, an Adobe survey released in September showed 94 percent of the country was concerned that misinformation would impact the presidential election. And throughout the campaign, misinformation efforts linked to foreign countries were revealed. 
Celebrities and online influencers, like Trump fanboy and soon-to-be presidential adviser Musk and alleged rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate, are now seen as trusted sources of information.
This election, Trump won the so-called ‘bro vote’, thanks in no small part to the online efforts of these types of influential personalities.
This election, for their longform interviews, candidates favoured podcasts, rather than current affairs shows. And initial attempts by moderators to fact check candidates in the major TV debates were quickly abandoned. 
Similar trends are seen in New Zealand, with politicians increasingly accepting interviews with fringe online media platforms. Meanwhile, many are favouring posting to social media platforms Tiktok and Instagram. In March this year, TV3 revealed the Prime Minister had seven people in his office working on his social media presence.
While politicians say this is a way for them to speak directly to voters, circumventing the traditional media to communicate messages also means their claims and policies go out to the public unchallenged.
The lack of guardrails placed around information shared or posted on social media means mis- dis- and malicious information can easily spread, and it’s up to voters to determine what’s real and what’s not.
But the systematic under-education of parts of the population across decades, and across administrations on both the left and the right, means not everyone is equipped to make these determinations. Meanwhile, they often don’t understand systems of government well enough to understand who controls what, and where to access source information.
A recent study from the University of Michigan found that educating people to make discerning judgments about what they see online is more effective than banning of censoring content. 
“Teaching people to recognise their biases, be more open to new opinions, and be skeptical of online information proved the most effective strategy for curbing disinformation,” the research said.
Meanwhile, Trump’s plans for education have some experts like Temple University’s Washington concerned about a move away from bolstering critical thinking skills.
The president-elect’s policies, as laid out in his allies’ Project 2025 and his Agenda47 policy manifesto, focus on devolving power, to give more control to local school boards and parents.
The education policies rail against the so-called woke agenda being taught in schools and say anyone (school, city, state, union etc) that disagrees with a parent’s right to be their child’s primary educator “should be  immediately cut off from federal funds”. 
Among the verbosity of the 900-page document, Project 2025 asserts that young children are being taught things like critical race theory (which is taught in law school, not primary school), and makes the unfounded claim that young children are encouraged to undergo gender reassignment surgery by schools.
“These theories poison our children, who are being taught on the one hand to affirm that the colour of their skin fundamentally determines their identity and even their moral status while on the other they are taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women,” Project 2025 says.
Instead, the soon-to-be 47th president of the United States is pushing “western values” in schooling, reminding people that “schools serve parents, not the other way around”.
Like New Zealand, the United States saw a surge in homeschooling during the Covid-19 pandemic.
During the 2020/21 school year, the number of children being homeschooled doubled to 6 percent. By 2023 there were 2.7 million children being homeschooled in the US, and this year, there are approximately 3.7m.
School superintendent candidate Shelli Boggs told a crowd in Arizona in the days before the election that it was time to take back control of their children’s schooling.
Boggs has eight grandchildren who are all home-schooled.
She also talked about the need for teachers to be “detoxed” from the system.
Trump says during his term he will give parents up to $10,000 per home-schooled child per year, to spend on their education.
“When I am re-elected, I will do everything I can to support parents who make the courageous choice of homeschool,” Trump said when announcing his homeschool policy.
In tertiary education, Trump has pledged to incentivise ready-for-work programmes over university qualifications – building on moves being made by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida.
The president-elect says he will establish the open, online ‘American Academy’ to give people greater access to tertiary qualifications, without having to complete an expensive four-year degree.
“It will be strictly non-political, and there will be no wokeness or jihadism allowed—none of that’s going to be allowed,” Trump said.
Temple University’s Washington says there’s already a lack of critical thinking in the United States.
And the new Trump administration is going to “go after education”.
“They really want to, I feel, want to stop people from being able to think for themselves,” he says.
“Instead of thinking for yourself and thinking critically, you know just follow what we say. That’s a real danger.”
Washington says a greater emphasis needs to be placed on education, in order to lift people out of poverty and ensure they have the tools to arm themselves with all the information needed to cast an informed vote.
The MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality has taken a first step by offering an online media literacy courses, designed for university students and educators. But empowering people to think critically, armed with skills and knowledge, needs to happen at all levels of the education system.
During the earlier days of the campaign, in the northern summer, Peter Wehner wrote about “motivated ignorance” in The Atlantic.
Wehner said: “Motivated ignorance refers to *willfully blinding* oneself to facts. It’s choosing not to know. In many cases, for many people, knowing the truth is simply too costly, too psychologically painful, too threatening to their core identity.”
Talking about both the current conversations and the future education of the country’s electorate, Washington says: “There’s nothing more dangerous than conscious stupidity or wilful ignorance. And we have too many of our Americans who are wilfully ignorant or consciously stupid.”