Public Schools Are Molds Not Platforms

Last week, my colleague Rick Hess published an essay that hits an increasingly raw nerve in American education. Writing about Oklahoma’s new “teacher test” aimed at ferreting out “woke indoctrination,” he observed that while the state is right to be concerned about politicization of the teaching profession, it has chosen the wrong remedy.

In brief, Oklahoma lawmakers have proposed requiring teachers from New York and California to affirm their commitment to “Western civilization,” “parental rights,” and other values meant to counter the progressive ideology of teacher training programs. Rick’s point, which I share, is that the impulse is understandable, but the execution is wrongheaded. States have every reason to worry about ideological capture within schools of education. But trying to correct for one political orthodoxy by imposing another only deepens the problem.

The challenge isn’t which ideology prevails in the classroom. It’s the mistaken belief inculcated by too many teacher-prep programs and education’s professional culture that teaching itself is a form of personal expression—a political vocation rather than a public trust.

Education’s Self-Conception vs. Its Civic Role

American education has long indulged an exalted self-image. Teachers are told they are “change agents,” “child advocates,” or “architects of democracy.” Schools of education speak of “challenging systems of oppression,” “transforming society,” and “teaching for justice.” This language flatters teachers’ sense of purpose, but it misleads them about the nature of their work—particularly those who teach in public schools. To be clear, this is not a recent development; it was a well-established by 2005 when the AERA Panel on Research and Teacher Education published its definitive survey of teacher prep programs and noted that “conceptualizing teaching and teacher education in terms of social justice has been the central animating idea for education scholars and practitioners who connect their work to larger critical movements.”

Public education is, however, an essential government service. It exists not to change society but to sustain it—to transmit the shared knowledge, language, habits, and civic norms upon which self-government depends. That mission requires restraint, not evangelism; humility, not heroism.

When teachers are encouraged to see themselves as “change agents,” they are implicitly (and often explicitly) told that the society they serve is defective and their duty is to fix it. The public would rightly recoil if a judge, soldier, or police officer adopted the same view—that their primary loyalty is to their conscience rather than the Constitution or the law.

As Yuval Levin observed in A Time to Build, a healthy society depends on institutions that function as molds—shaping the character and conduct of those within them—rather than as platforms for self-expression. He was writing mostly about Congress and journalism, but the same dynamic is visible in education, writ small: classrooms, too, have become stages for performative displays.

This tension runs deep. For decades, teacher preparation programs have evaluated candidates not only on their knowledge and skills but on their dispositions—the personal attitudes and beliefs deemed necessary to be a good teacher. These include “commitment to diversity,” “cultural competence,” and a “social justice orientation.” In subtle but significant ways, the culture of teacher preparation trains educators to treat the classroom as a platform for identity and belief rather than as a civic institution that molds citizens. The result is inevitably the same loss of trust that has befallen so many other public institutions once they ceased to be formative and became performative.

Curricular and cultural debates increasingly pit teachers’ sense of moral mission against parents’ and taxpayers’ expectation of neutrality. When parents object to politicized classroom content, the response from many educators is defensive, even indignant—it’s perceived as an unwelcome overstepping of boundaries. But public schools don’t belong to teachers. They belong to the public.

The Case for Humility and Neutrality

In a paper I wrote with Tracey Schirra for the American Enterprise Institute not long ago, I argued that restoring trust in public education begins with recovering a nearly lost professional ethic: humility. Teachers are not free agents but figures of enormous influence over other people’s children. Their authority depends on the confidence that they will exercise their power judiciously on behalf of the public, not in service to their own personal or political convictions.

To put it plainly, public school teachers are state actors. Their speech and conduct are appropriately limited by that fact. When they cross those boundaries—whether in service of the left or the right—they betray the civic purpose of their role. Seen through this lens, neutrality is not cowardice; it is a civic virtue that is required to sustain or restore or faith in public education .

Oklahoma’s teacher test, by contrast, is a misguided attempt to enforce political neutrality through policy rather than professionalism. What’s needed instead is a renewal of norms that remind educators what public service requires.

In my AEI report, we proposed the use of codes of conduct for teachers—analogous to those that govern judges, civil servants, or journalists. These codes wouldn’t dictate ideology but define professional boundaries: the difference between teaching about politics and teaching politics, between modeling civic virtue and recruiting followers.

Such standards would help protect teachers as well. A clearly articulated code of conduct allows educators to resist inappropriate pressures—whether from activists, administrators, or politicians—by appealing to professional duty rather than personal belief. It says, in effect, I can’t take sides. That’s not my role.

This is not censorship. It is the moral discipline required of a profession that understands its public charge. When we fail to draw these lines, we invite exactly the kind of overreach that produces both ideological capture and reactionary backlashes like Oklahoma’s. The more education sees itself as a moral crusade, the less the public will trust it. The more it behaves like an impartial public service, the more legitimacy it regains.

Rick Hess is right: Oklahoma has identified a real problem—the loss of neutrality in education—but chosen the wrong solution. The right answer is not more ideology, but less. Not a new orthodoxy, but a rediscovery of an old one: that public institutions serve best when they serve all, and when those who work in them understand that their authority rests not on self-expression, but on self-restraint.

Public schools are not platforms. They are civic institutions. And the teacher’s highest professional virtue—one that deserves to be taught, honored, and enforced—is humility.