Project 2025 Decimates Our Education Infrastructure
The Olympic Opening Ceremonies Show Us Just Why We Need to Invest in Public Education, not Attack It
In my small-town Texas public high school, I excelled at Greek mythology.
It’s a weird thing to be proficient in, but it’s true. I was the envy of my AP English class and routinely made perfect grades without studying, which made my classmates furious. But this isn’t a brag because my effortless excellence really only applied to Greek mythology. I have no idea why.
Actually, I have somewhat of an idea: I was a nerd who had very few interests outside of theater class, reading, and my youth group.
Maybe it’s because I enjoyed learning the origins of words like atlas (named after the God who was forced to carry the world on his shoulders) and chaos (named after the void from which all life sprang). Or maybe it was because stories from ancient Greece were always imbued with deeper meaning, much like Jesus’ parables.
Icarus taught us that youthful exuberance and pride can be fatal.
Achilles reminds us to be aware of our vulnerabilities.
Apollo and Daphne communicate the pain of unrequited affection.
I loved it all.
To this day, I don’t pass up an opportunity to dress like a Greek goddess, which is how a photo of me ended up as art for this article about a candidate’s Lady Justice costume being stolen out of the back of her minivan.
I didn’t watch the Opening Ceremonies of the Paris Olympics, but I couldn’t miss the subsequent hubbub from the Christian right, accusing organizers of mocking the Christian story of Jesus’ last supper with his disciples.
The problem is that the performance had nothing to do with the last supper — or Jesus, or anything related to Christianity. It was the celebration of the Feast of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and pleasure.
You know, the ancient Greeks? The ones who created the Olympics?
If many evangelical Christians actually read the book they profess to follow, they would know that Jesus was joined by 12 disciples for the last supper, not the 18 or 19 people in the Paris Olympics scene. And if the performance was supposed to be modeled after the last supper, then who was that purple guy? I don’t remember reading about him in the gospels.
Christians’ knee-jerk overreaction was a glaring indictment of the gaps in our public education system and an embarrassing lack of contextual intelligence in today’s society. It’s only getting worse as rightwing evangelicals leaders work to dismantle the Department of Education and tear apart public schools.
They want to turn a gap in knowledge into a gulf.
When conservatives released their platform ahead of the Republican National Convention, they promised to plunder public schools to give to private — often religious — education institutions. This is the GOP ideology that most closely aligns with Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s plan for a Trump presidency.
From Education Week, under Project 2025:
Title I, the $18 billion federal fund that supports low-income students, would disappear in a decade.
Federal special education funds would flow to school districts as block grants with no strings attached, or even to savings accounts for parents to use on private school or other education expenses.
The U.S. Department of Education would be eliminated.
The federal government’s ability to enforce civil rights laws in schools would be scaled back.
All of their published plans confirm, Republicans will wither our country’s institutes of learning. They will give public tax dollars to private schools, weakening the public schools that are the heart of our communities and ensuring that education is no longer a fundamental right.
We’ve already seen this in action. The walls that divide church and state have gone from an erosion to an explosion in recent months — especially when it comes to classrooms.
Evangelicals have more power and influence than perhaps any other time in U.S. history. House Speaker Mike Johnson, (R-Louisiana) is a proud Southern Baptist who has been vocal about his syllabus to advance Christianity in government. Earlier this summer, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed a bill into law that requires the Ten Commandments to be posted in every classroom.
A week later, Ryan Walters, Oklahoma Secretary of Education, declared the state would begin requiring Bible lessons in public school classrooms.
Mandatory Bible classes are something Walters is familiar with. I know because I graduated from Abilene Christian University, a conservative Christian college that is considered a sister college to Walters’ alma mater, Harding University. Our colleges were born from the same denomination, the church of Christ, that bans female leadership, queer relationships, and in the most dogmatic circles: dancing.
As undergrad students at ACU, we had to attend Chapel — a half hour mini-church service complete with singing, prayer, and a Bible lesson — every weekday.
We also had to complete at least 12 hours of Bible classes to attain our degrees. Between signing up for classes to jumpstart my journalism career, I took Message of the Old Testament, the Life and Teachings of Jesus, and oddly, a Christianity and pop culture class where we listened to a lot of U2.
The thing is, we asked for this. As 18-22 year olds, we were choosing to remain in a familiar bubble that felt like an extension of our evangelical homes and youth groups. Our Bible classes weren’t forced on us. We chose them when we enrolled in private Christian universities. But it is being forced on every student in Oklahoma and Louisiana public schools thanks to Walters’ and Landry’s Christian nationalist agenda.
My issue isn’t with young people knowing about the Bible. Obviously, I’m okay with kids studying Greek mythology, I’m also comfortable with them learning about the Bible and its influences.
My issue is that children in Oklahoma public schools will be forced to interpret the Bible through a lens of evangelicalism, which believes the Bible is inerrant and most of the text should be interpreted as black and white. Evangelicals fail to read the Bible with the nuance and historical context required to discern a more than 2,000-year-old document.
Perhaps that is why we have gotten to the place we’re in today, where evangelicals find similarities between Jesus, a poor, nomadic carpenter who healed the sick, defended the poor, and stood up against the religious rulers of his day, and Donald Trump, a 34-time convicted felon who was found liable for sexual assault and sued for business fraud.
Many evangelical Christians seem to believe that Trump was anointed by God like the prophets of Biblical times, and has imbued him with the power to defeat the forces of evil. You know, evil stuff like knowing Greek mythology or that some kids have two dads.
That’s why we have to fight against every effort to dismiss Project 2025 as a rightwing pipe dream, and take seriously the threat it presents to our lives.
Share this post. Share this page. Share Project 2025 with everyone you know. Let them see for themselves the hellscape that they have planned for us.
Onward, Democracy Defenders!
Nailed it!!!
I ran a Holistic Health Bookstore that employed a Evangelical College Graduate. For Christmas I told the Employees to pick out any 3 books they would like. She came up to me with 2 books: a encyclopedia of Health and a Comprehendum of Health and asked which had everything about Health in it. I said they were both good but they had differences. I said take both. "No, I only want one like the Bible, that has everything in it.". These people don't want to think. And they desire to have a outside authority telling them what to think and do.