Education policy is certainly an area in which the establishment Left has been giving greater insight into its true beliefs, lately.  Maybe it’s the shock of following eight years in which the White House floated within the progressive bubble with the sharp prick of its exit under Donald Trump.  Here’s Frederick Hess, writing on National Review Online:

Within days of [Betsy] DeVos’s nomination [for education secretary], the Washington Post ran an op-ed by Columbia University professor Aaron Pallas that included this: “I’ve been joking that Ben Carson’s – Trump’s pick to be Secretary of Housing and Urban Development – primary qualification is that he grew up in a house. But Betsy DeVos attended private schools and sent her children to them. Her qualification to be Secretary of Education? She doesn’t even have that going for her.”

In a December New Yorker story titled “Betsy DeVos and the Plan to Break Public Schools,” columnist Rebecca Mead lamented that DeVos graduated from Holland Christian High School, “which characterizes its mission thus: ‘to equip minds and nurture hearts to transform the world for Jesus Christ.’” The horror of it all. Apparently, the 5.4 million students enrolled in 33,000 private schools have no standing at the U.S. Department of Education, parents (like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton) who send their children to private schools have no standing in education policy, and graduates from religious schools are to be regarded with suspicion.

Education, to these people, is not about informing children; it’s about maintaining a near monopoly for labor unions and an industry for bureaucrats.  Perhaps more centrally, though, its mission is to shape children, and shape them according to the progressive worldview.  Allowing more than a sliver of well-heeled students to be shaped according to the religious views of their parents is, to progressives, heresy.

They know they need the free run of 12-20 years of indoctrination for their delusional, emotion-driven beliefs to stand up against reality when students exit to the real world.  (Of course, it helps if they can then keep the dependency going with corporate and social welfare and other programs, like loan forgiveness.)