As we grow older, the playground slips into fragments—favorite teachers, first lunches, the thrill of a new school year or the sting of falling off the monkey bars.
What once felt vivid becomes a series of flashes of memory as our attention shifts toward the future. Yet even as those memories fade, the role of education in shaping that future has never been more urgent.
Across America, children are denied free lunches, books are banned and underpaid teachers struggle to hold onto the joy that first drew them to the classroom.
For college students and adults, playground memories may feel distant, but the reality of education remains immediate.
Teachers face classrooms where students arrive hungry, carrying clear backpacks that hold more fear than books. Too often, they shoulder these burdens alone. Local school boards, parent groups and volunteers may offer some support, but at the national level, education has been neglected.
As for the South, that neglect is not new. Arkansas, ranked 47th in the nation, carries a long history of poverty and now leads in food insecurity — a reminder that the region’s struggle with education stretches back centuries.
After the Civil War, intellectuals warned that widespread illiteracy among poor Southerners allowed elites to manipulate public opinion and fuel rebellion. According to Barnard’s American Journal of Education in 1865, “This ignorance enabled the rebel leaders to create prejudice” and convince uneducated people to support their cause.
Reconstruction sought to change that. In December 1865, a Republican congressman introduced a resolution to “enforce education without regard to color.”
Two years later, Congress created the nation’s first Department of Education to standardize schooling, address illiteracy among white Southerners, and educate millions of newly freed slaves.
But politics quickly weakened the department, and within a year, it was reduced to a small office.
Fast forward to today, and the cracks in our public education system are widening.
According to Elevate K12, reading and math scores are at their lowest levels in decades. Chronic absenteeism is rising. Teacher shortages have reached crisis levels, leaving more than 400,000 classrooms without a certified educator or filled by someone underqualified.
At the same time, federal support is faltering.
In mid‑2025, the U.S. Department of Education began mass layoffs and funding freezes, slashing billions from school budgets and eliminating vital guidance for special education, English‑language learners and compliance oversight.
This erosion echoes the past. When President Jimmy Carter reestablished the Department of Education in 1979, it was meant to restore national commitment to schools. Yet its ties to a teachers’ union made it a political target, and efforts to weaken or dismantle it have persisted ever since.
That history makes today’s debates especially troubling. The same political attacks that gutted the department after Reconstruction are resurfacing today.
In a March executive order aimed at shuttering the Department of Education, President Trump argued that it “has existed for less than one‑fifth of our nation’s history.”
By the end of that month, the administration had terminated about half the department’s workforce. In October, more jobs were cut from the Office for Civil Rights, which enforces laws against racial discrimination in federally funded schools and colleges. This month, the administration announced that critical responsibilities overseen by the department were being shifted to different government agencies.
Efforts to weaken or dismantle the Department of Education ignore its original purpose. Far from being a “newfangled invention,” the department was created as a safeguard against ignorance and inequality.
Yet recent cuts have gutted its workforce and stripped away protections — echoing the same neglect that once left the South vulnerable to poverty, illiteracy and manipulation.
The South can survive on the crumbs of a weakened national education standard, but democracy cannot if the very premise of the Department of Education is forgotten.
As college students — still close to the classroom, though farther from our hometown elementary schools — we cannot leave the burden of a failing system solely on teachers’ shoulders. To do so is to bite the very hands that gave us the knowledge to resist ignorance and build the lives we live today.