The Deliberate Sabotage of Public Education: Who Benefits from Stupidification?
The dismantling of public education is a deliberate effort to restrict access to higher learning, roll back civil rights, and entrench class hierarchies. It is not failure or reform—it is a strategy of control.
Introduction
Of late, the assault on public education in the United States has been framed as a battle over efficiency, school choice, and parental rights, but this obscures the true objective: the reinforcement of rigid social hierarchies. As Jennifer Berkshire and Peter Greene have highlighted, the dismantling of public education is not a misguided attempt at reform, nor is it merely the product of “fiscal conservatism.” It is a deliberate effort to reduce the number of students attending university, roll back civil rights protections, and ensure that education ceases to function as a means of social mobility. This is not about improving outcomes, but about restricting access—ensuring that only those deemed worthy by the ruling class receive a full education, whilst the rest are funnelled into economic servitude.
Public education is being intentionally kneecapped, and not out of incompetence. The failures of the system—declining literacy, the erosion of STEM proficiency, and the deliberate confusion sown by incoherent curricula—are not bugs, but features. The goal is not to foster intellectual growth, but to stupify, to render the working class incapable of questioning its station or organising against the conditions imposed upon it. A well-educated public is dangerous to the interests of the wealthy, and so the mechanisms that once facilitated upward mobility are being methodically dismantled. The U.S. knows full well how to educate a population rapidly and effectively—it has done so before, particularly during the Cold War, when the spectre of Soviet scientific superiority forced massive investment in STEM education. Other nations, from post-revolutionary China to the USSR before Sputnik, have demonstrated what is possible when a state decides it must lift an entire population’s literacy and numeracy. But there is no political will for such a project in the United States today, not because it is infeasible, but because those in power have no interest in an educated working class. Education, in their view, should serve not as a means of liberation, but as a system of control.
The ‘Problem of Practice’: Declining STEM Scores and the Enshitification of Public Education
The decline of STEM education in the United States is not an unfortunate accident, nor is it the result of an inevitable shift in student aptitude or interest. Rather, it is a direct consequence of policy choices that have systematically degraded the quality of public education whilst funnelling resources into private and charter school models that remain exempt from the same dysfunction. Despite the rhetoric of “education reform,” the trajectory has been one of steady collapse—particularly in mathematics and science, where student proficiency continues to decline even as billions are poured into corporate-driven interventions.
One particularly egregious example is Kendall Hunt’s Illustrative Mathematics, a curriculum that embodies many of the problems plaguing public school instruction today. Instead of fostering mathematical fluency, it relies on breadcrumbing—doling out concepts in fragmented, disconnected ways that leave students without a coherent grasp of the subject. It employs spiralling, the assumption that skills will be repeatedly revisited and naturally reinforced, which in practice results in students failing to develop mastery before being expected to apply knowledge they never properly acquired. The result is a model that generates confusion and frustration rather than genuine understanding. This pedagogical incoherence is not unique to Kendall Hunt but is representative of the broader trend in STEM education: a shift from structured, logical progression to a chaotic and shallow approach that prioritises engagement metrics over actual learning. Meanwhile, the funding that could be used to provide well-resourced classrooms, trained teachers, and effective curricula is siphoned off by private actors—textbook companies, consultants, and education technology firms—who profit from perpetuating dysfunction rather than resolving it.
This decline is best understood through what Cory Doctorow has termed “enshitification,” a phenomenon in which platforms, services, or institutions undergo a steady degradation in quality as they become more focused on extracting value from users rather than serving them. In the case of public education, this process has transformed once well-resourced, community-centred schools into depersonalised, algorithm-driven environments where the focus is no longer on learning, but on compliance, data extraction, and test performance. AI-driven “solutions” now dictate classroom practice, replacing teacher autonomy with rigid, depersonalised instruction. Standardised tests, once intended as diagnostic tools, have become opaque instruments of power, deciding the fate of students and schools alike whilst remaining entirely unaccountable. The mechanisms by which these tests are normed, validated, and scored remain shrouded in secrecy—shielded behind proprietary protections and corporate interests. There is no meaningful public oversight of the sampling methods, no transparency in how questions are selected or weighted, and no way to verify the fairness or accuracy of the results. Instead, the public is left with little more than appeals to authority and marketing slogans, as if the mere repetition of terms like “rigorous” and “evidence-based” is sufficient to justify their dominance over the education system.
What makes this even more insidious is that elite private schools—the institutions that educate the children of those making these policy decisions—are not subject to this enshitification. They are not shackled by algorithm-driven curricula, nor are their students subjected to the same high-stakes, opaque assessments that dictate the futures of public school students. Instead, they receive an education that still values critical thinking, deep knowledge, and intellectual independence. The two-tiered system is by design: public schools are being systematically deprived of the tools necessary to provide real education, whilst private institutions ensure that the children of the ruling class never have to endure the same degradation.
Historical Precedents: How Nations Have Successfully Educated Their Populations
There is a peculiar arrogance in the American belief that its education system is inherently superior, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The ingrained “America #1” mindset, which rejects any notion that other nations may have successfully built functional and even superior education models, blinds many to the realities of systemic decline. Born to a Crown subject abroad and deeply rooted in Scottish Marxist traditions, I do not share this narrow nationalism. I have the advantage of viewing education not through the distorting lens of American exceptionalism, but through a global, historically informed perspective—one that recognises that other nations have, in fact, rapidly and effectively educated their populations when the political will existed to do so.
The Soviet Union, in the years preceding Sputnik, provides one of the clearest examples of how a state can engineer mass scientific literacy when it prioritises national development over profit extraction. In the wake of the Great October Socialist Revolution, the USSR inherited a deeply uneven and largely illiterate population. Yet, within a few decades, it had built an education system that turned out world-class scientists, engineers, and mathematicians at a scale the West found alarming. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 was not merely a technological milestone but a demonstration of the success of a system that had prioritised STEM education as a matter of national survival. The Soviet approach was highly centralised and structured, with a strong emphasis on rigorous mathematics and applied sciences, ensuring that students not only learned theory but also developed the ability to apply it to real-world challenges. Importantly, education was not seen as a means to create passive, obedient workers but as a way to cultivate technological and scientific leaders. This terrified the West, leading to the brief but intense Cold War-era push to improve American STEM education—one of the few times in history that the U.S. actually invested in broad, high-quality scientific education. That investment, however, was reactive and short-lived, as it was not driven by a genuine desire to uplift the population but by geopolitical necessity.
A similarly radical transformation occurred in post-revolutionary China, where the Communist Party inherited a vast, predominantly agrarian nation with high levels of illiteracy. Unlike the capitalist model, which relies on education to sort individuals into economic strata, China’s leadership saw literacy and numeracy as essential to national development. The mass literacy campaigns of the 1950s, alongside major investments in universal primary education, lifted millions out of illiteracy within a generation. Education was designed to serve the needs of the nation, not private shareholders. Whilst later shifts in Chinese policy introduced capitalist elements into its economy, the fundamental premise of education as a tool for collective progress remained intact. The contrast with the American approach is stark: where China treated literacy as a matter of state-building, the U.S. has allowed its own system to be plundered by private interests, ensuring that education serves not the development of the nation, but the enrichment of a handful of corporations.
These historical examples demonstrate a fundamental truth: mass literacy and numeracy can be achieved when a society commits to them. The U.S. does not suffer from an inability to provide high-quality education to all; it simply lacks the political will. The ruling class does not see an educated population as an asset but as a liability—one that threatens the existing hierarchies of power and wealth. Where other nations have used education to build national capacity, America has allowed it to become just another site of extraction, where profit takes precedence over knowledge, and where the primary beneficiaries are not students, but those who profit from their manufactured failures.
Who Really Benefits from Public School Dismantling?
Public education in the United States has not been dismantled out of inefficiency, nor has it collapsed due to simple mismanagement. Its degradation has been intentional, a slow-motion heist in which the looting of public funds is disguised as “reform” whilst the actual purpose of education shifts from empowerment to containment. The beneficiaries of this process are not students, teachers, or communities, but corporations and the ruling elite, who see education not as a public good but as a market to be exploited and a mechanism to reinforce existing hierarchies.
The relentless pursuit of shareholder value has turned education into a cash cow for private interests. Textbook companies rake in billions selling subpar, incoherent curricula whilst standardised test providers operate with almost no public accountability, dictating the futures of students through opaque, unverifiable metrics. Private equity-backed charter schools extract public money whilst skirting the regulatory and accountability measures imposed on traditional public schools, channelling taxpayer dollars into corporate profits rather than student learning. Education technology firms push AI-driven “solutions” that depersonalise learning, deprofessionalise teaching, and render students little more than data points for further monetisation. Meanwhile, voucher programmes, framed as a means of expanding choice, systematically strip funding from public schools, redirecting it into private institutions that cater to the affluent whilst leaving already underfunded schools to collapse under the weight of manufactured failure. Every aspect of education reform is designed not to improve learning but to create new revenue streams for corporations, turning the school system into yet another site of financial extraction.
Beneath this pursuit of profit lies a more sinister objective: the deliberate dumbing down of the working class. The oligarchs who fund and shape education policy are not simply indifferent to the failures of the public school system; they need it to fail in order to maintain their grip on power. A critically thinking, well-educated populace is a threat, one that would challenge the economic and political structures that keep wealth concentrated at the top. Thus, education is increasingly structured to sort rather than uplift—to ensure that the children of the ruling class receive rigorous, holistic instruction whilst the rest are tracked into menial labour. The destruction of STEM education, the hollowing out of humanities and civics instruction, and the emphasis on rote standardisation all serve this purpose. Schools are no longer places of intellectual growth but sites of containment, ensuring that most students emerge with just enough basic literacy and numeracy to perform low-wage work, but not enough to question the system that keeps them there.
The role of debt in this structure cannot be overstated. Student loans function as a tool of control, a means of locking young people into economic precarity before they even enter the workforce. The shift away from fully funded public universities to a debt-financed model was no accident—it was a strategic decision to ensure that higher education, even for those who manage to access it, would not serve as a pathway to freedom but as a mechanism of indentured servitude. An indebted population is a compliant population, one that cannot afford to strike, organise, or take risks. This is why student loan forgiveness is so fiercely opposed by those in power—not because it is economically unfeasible, but because it would remove a crucial tool of social control.
At every level, the dismantling of public education serves the interests of the wealthy. It ensures that corporate profits continue to grow, that the working class remains economically and intellectually stunted, and that the ruling elite never face the inconvenience of an educated populace capable of challenging their hegemony. This is not a failure of the system. This is the system.
A Marxist Analysis of the Education Wars
Marxist analysis is rarely welcomed in American discourse, and certainly not in discussions about education. Even within academia, where critical perspectives should thrive, outright engagement with Marxist theory is often dismissed as radical, irrelevant, or, in some places, outright criminalised. In states like Oklahoma, simply mentioning Marx in a classroom setting can be considered grounds for disciplinary action, a stark reminder that the ruling class does not merely resist challenges to its power—it actively seeks to suppress even the language necessary to critique it. This is not accidental. Americans are not encouraged to explore real opposing views, let alone engage with frameworks that directly expose the contradictions of capitalism. And yet, no analysis of the systematic dismantling of public education would be complete without drawing upon the work of those who have, for over a century, identified education as a primary battleground in the struggle between the ruling class and the working class.
Vladimir Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism offers a prescient lens through which to understand the transformation of education into a profit-generating industry. Lenin describes how monopoly capital no longer seeks mere competition within markets but instead restructures entire social institutions into extractive enterprises. This is precisely what has happened to education in the United States: it has ceased to function as a public good and has instead become a mechanism for wealth accumulation, both in direct financial terms (through private equity-backed charter schools and testing companies, standardised testing, and student loans) and in its role as an instrument of class control. The interests of monopoly capital are served not by an educated, politically conscious working class, but by a stratified system in which knowledge is concentrated among the elite while the majority are trained only to be compliant, precarious workers.
Mao Zedong’s On Contradiction provides another vital framework for understanding the dialectical tension at play in public education. Education possesses a fundamental contradiction: it is both a means of emancipation and a tool of class subjugation. The ruling class is fully aware of this contradiction and seeks to resolve it in its own favour—ensuring that education no longer serves as a pathway to liberation but instead functions as an ideological state apparatus that conditions students to accept their subordination. The deliberate destruction of STEM education, the narrowing of curricula to focus on test-based compliance, and the increasing reliance on AI-driven depersonalised learning are all symptoms of this contradiction being resolved in favour of the ruling elite. However, as Mao reminds us, contradictions are dynamic, and struggle is the engine of history. Education, no matter how controlled, always retains the possibility of revolutionary potential, which is precisely why it remains such a fiercely contested space.
Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony provides the final key to understanding how the ruling class has managed to manufacture consent for the destruction of public education. The myth of meritocracy—the idea that those who succeed do so purely because of their intelligence and hard work—is one of the most effective tools of ideological control in modern capitalism. School choice propaganda, charter school expansion, and attacks on teachers’ unions all rely on the illusion that education is an individual, not a collective, struggle. If a student fails, it is not due to systemic underfunding, racial and economic stratification, or the intentional dismantling of pedagogical coherence—it is simply because they did not try hard enough. This is how the ruling class ensures that the working class blames itself for its own subjugation rather than recognising the structural forces at play.
These dynamics are not new. Literacy and education have always been key sites of class struggle. Slave codes in the United States forbade enslaved people from learning to read and write precisely because literacy was recognised as a tool of liberation. The British Empire systematically denied education to colonised populations to maintain control. The ruling class has always understood the power of knowledge and has fought to keep it out of the hands of those it seeks to dominate. Today’s attacks on public education—from book bans to the defunding of public universities—are merely the latest iteration of this centuries-old strategy.
If anything, what is happening now is even more insidious. Where past ruling classes sought to restrict access to education, the modern oligarchy seeks to appear to provide it whilst gutting it from within. By maintaining the illusion of a functioning education system while ensuring that it produces little more than obedient workers saddled with debt, they create a system in which people believe they are being educated even as they are being intellectually disarmed. The destruction of public education is not simply a matter of neglect or ideological preference; it is a direct attack on the ability of the working class to think, to question, and to resist.
The Call to Action: Where This Fight Can Be Won
The battle over public education is not being fought in some distant political arena beyond our reach—it is happening in our communities, in our schools, and in the governing bodies that most people overlook: local school boards. These boards, often dismissed as mundane bureaucratic entities, are among the last spaces where the public still holds some measure of direct control over education policy. It is here, at the local level, that decisions are made about curriculum, funding, teacher protections, and the creeping encroachment of corporate interests into classrooms. And it is here that the right has already mobilised with full force.
Groups like Moms for Liberty and other reactionary movements have seized upon school boards as a key battleground in their war against public education, using them to push book bans, eliminate diversity initiatives, and undermine teachers’ autonomy. Their success is not due to the strength of their ideas—most are little more than regurgitations of corporate-backed talking points—but because they show up, organise, and flood school board meetings with manufactured outrage. Meanwhile, leftists, historically disengaged from these hyper-local battles, have failed to mount a serious counteroffensive. This must change.
However, engagement must be undertaken with full awareness of the forces at play. The U.S. government, through its intelligence and police apparatus, has decades of experience infiltrating and neutralising leftist movements. COINTELPRO was not a relic of the past—it was a blueprint, and its tactics remain in use today. The state does not serve the people; it serves capital. This reality is evident in the disparity between police responses to different crises: when striking workers, environmental activists, or anti-fascist organisers protest corporate power, they are met with overwhelming force. Starbucks baristas seeking a living wage are arrested en masse, whilst Tesla employees who unionise find themselves surveilled and harassed. Yet when children are slaughtered in their own schools, police stand outside, armed to the teeth, unwilling to act. The priorities are clear: protecting capital is paramount; protecting lives is secondary. This same logic applies to education. The ruling class will permit no reforms that threaten its ability to profit from or control the school system. Therefore, leftist engagement in school board politics must be strategic, vigilant, and uncompromising.
Practical steps must be taken, and they must be taken soon. The first, and simplest, is showing up—attending school board meetings, identifying key policy changes, and making the presence of a counterforce known. Beyond attendance, the next step is more challenging but crucial: running for office or supporting candidates who genuinely seek to dismantle corporate control over education. But one must remain clear-eyed: progressives are not leftists. They serve as a pressure relief valve, absorbing dissatisfaction with the system whilst ensuring that real structural change never gains traction. This is why many self-proclaimed “progressive” school board members still uphold neoliberal reforms, allowing charters to expand, defending standardised testing, and supporting AI-driven enshitification. True leftist candidates must be backed—those who will fight to defund private interests, restore public control over schools, and protect the profession of teaching from continued degradation.
Beyond electoral engagement, there must be a concerted effort to reframe the entire debate around education. The ruling class has successfully shifted public perception, treating schools as little more than workforce training centres—sorting mechanisms designed to funnel students into predetermined economic roles. This framing must be rejected outright. Public education is not a commodity, nor is it a service to be delivered based on market efficiency. It is a human right. It is a tool of liberation, a means by which people develop not just skills, but the ability to think critically, to challenge power, and to shape the world in which they live. Allowing it to be destroyed, privatised, or reduced to a glorified job-training pipeline is an acceptance of permanent subjugation.
The school board fight is not just about individual policies or budget allocations. It is about the fundamental question of what education is for—whether it is meant to serve the people or the corporations that seek to exploit them. The ruling class has already answered this question to its own advantage. It is time for the working class to answer back.
Final thoughts …
The dismantling of public education is not a failure of policy, nor is it the result of bureaucratic incompetence. It is a deliberate act of sabotage, carried out to serve the interests of the ruling class. The collapse of STEM education, the enshitification of public schools, the looting of education budgets by private corporations, and the calculated effort to strip public education of its role as a vehicle for social mobility—all of it serves a single purpose: to ensure that the vast majority of people remain economically precarious, politically powerless, and intellectually disarmed. The U.S. has both the knowledge and the resources to provide a high-quality education to all, but the political will is absent because the true goal of the system is not an informed, critically thinking public but a docile, debt-ridden workforce trained to obey.
This project is already well underway, and if it succeeds, the consequences will be devastating. The future of education will be fully privatised and stratified: the elite will continue to receive a rigorous, expansive education that prepares them to inherit power, while the working class will be left with a hollowed-out, algorithm-driven simulacrum of schooling that teaches them just enough to be exploited, but never enough to question the terms of their exploitation. Knowledge will become the privilege of the few, and ignorance will be imposed upon the many.
This is not merely an education crisis; it is a crisis of democracy itself. The destruction of public education is a precursor to the destruction of democratic participation, because a people who cannot think critically, who cannot access knowledge, who cannot challenge power, will never be able to resist the forces that govern them. This is why the battle over education is existential. It is not just about defending schools; it is about defending the very possibility of a just and equitable society. The ruling class understands this. The question is whether the rest of us do—and whether we are willing to fight back before it is too late.