On July 14, 1981—the twelfth day of the Hebrew month of Tamuz in the year 5741—the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, addressed thousands of his followers from a long white table in a crowded ballroom in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Ronald Reagan was president, having just recovered from an assassination attempt that lodged a bullet in his chest. Schneerson’s speech, given annually in honor of the anniversary of his father-in-law’s, the sixth Rebbe’s, release from a Soviet Prison in 1927, did not focus on the dangers of oppression, nor political violence, but its antidote: education.
This was not the Rebbe’s first address on the importance of education. Since the mid-1970s, he had sought to make the cultivation of character central to American life. He found support in this pursuit from Reagan’s predecessor, Jimmy Carter. Together, this unlikely pair, one a global Hasidic leader born in the Russian empire, the other a Baptist peanut farmer from rural Georgia, argued that education should be one “of the nation’s highest priorities.” In 1979, that vision prevailed when Congress created, and the president signed into law, the Department of Education. Forty-six years later, that department is being shorn of its staff, capacity, and purpose. What is such a department even for? What should America’s federal involvement in education be? What did the president and the Rebbe hope for American education?
On January 20, 1977, Jimmy Carter took the oath of office. For the only time in American history, the president of the United States quoted a teacher in his inaugural address, telling the nation, “In this outward and physical ceremony we attest once again to the inner and spiritual strength of our nation. As my high school teacher, Miss Julia Coleman, used to say: ‘We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.’” Julia Coleman had unbending standards for her students; she had assigned War and Peace to Jimmy when he was in the fifth grade.
Carter understood himself to be an education president; education is what got him into politics in the first place. He grew up on a homestead in a rural corner of central Georgia. Until he turned eleven, his biographer Jonathan Alter recounts, he “had no running water, no electricity, no insulation, and no mechanized farm equipment.” To tell time, children learned to watch the sun; to farm, they worked with mule-driven plows and hand-pumped wells. Jimmy’s education began young, under the tutelage of Jack and Rachel Clark, tenant farmers who worked for his father. At the age of six, his father told him to learn everything he could about the farm from Jack, and Jimmy complied. It was in that environment that he learned to respect all forms of knowledge—the kinds you acquired by watching, by doing, and by reading.
Outside the farm, communal life centered on the church and school. Jimmy’s wife Rosalynn, who grew up down the road in nearby Plains, described their childhood: “We had no movie theater, no library, no recreation center…. The social life of the community revolved around the churches…. The other focal point of our community was our school. We were very proud of our school, which had less than a hundred and fifty students in eleven grades, and the parents participated in all school activities.” The school was beloved; it was also segregated. When he came of age, Jimmy attended the all-white school Rosalynn described. From there, he left for Georgia Southwestern College to study engineering. He eventually continued his studies at the U.S. Naval Academy. In 1953, when his father’s death required that he take over the family farm and civic duties, he returned to Plains.
Carter understood himself to be an education president; education is what got him into politics in the first place.
Carter’s education did more than prepare him for a large life away from home; it gave him the tools to be of service when he returned. His education on the farm, in church, at school, and as a naval officer gave him a capacity for strict discipline and intense focus, and a voracious curiosity to learn new subjects. He became an autodidact who, writes Alter, “over the course of his life acquired the skills of a farmer, surveyor, naval officer, electrician, sonar technologist, nuclear engineer, businessman, equipment designer, agronomist, master woodworker.…”
When Carter came home to Plains, he became a teacher of Sunday school and a leader on the Sumter County Board of Education. He began a career-long commitment to education, recognizing its capacity to form character and harness a child’s potential. Deeply aware of the blight of segregation, his first act on the Sumter County Board was to suggest that all board members visit every Sumter County School, the black as well as the white ones. When he arrived in Washington, his public values were reflected in his private decisions. Jimmy sent his daughter, Amy Carter, to Thaddeus Stevens School, one of Washington D.C.’s oldest public schools, founded in 1868 to educate freed slaves. In doing so, Amy became the first child of a sitting president to attend public school since 1906.
From the Sumter County School Board, Carter went on to win election to the Georgia Senate, eventually serving one term as governor of Georgia before launching his presidential campaign. As a candidate in 1976, Carter promised the National Education Association he would push for its century-long goal of establishing a separate cabinet level department of education. In exchange, the largest teacher’s union endorsed him for president, its first endorsement in one hundred seventeen years.
Carter began considering the establishment of the Department of Education (DOE) in 1976, but the DOE was neither a new idea nor, really, a new department. Andrew Johnson signed the first federal Department of Education into law in 1867, during Reconstruction. Education had always been fundamental to a vision of American self-governance, but for the most part, it had been left to the states. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson all believed that the fragile miracle of a democratic United States could only survive with an educated citizenry. Noah Webster, America’s great lexicographer, put it this way, in 1783: “It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country.” For a century, civic virtues, such as personal sacrifice for the common good, would be stewarded in small community schools, where the day would open in prayer and literacy would be taught through the King James Bible.
Until the nineteenth century, schools reflected the particular needs and resources of local communities. By the late 1800s, however, changing economic and social conditions had created the need for a central government office to better understand the nation’s emerging schools. Inspired by Horace Mann’s common schools, a movement to offer free, universal, and standard education swept the country. New immigrants arrived in cities, prompting educational reformers to consider how to teach the principles of democracy, and the end of the Civil War opened the way for the federal government to participate in the education of freed slaves. The first federal Department of Education’s purpose would be to collect information and statistics on America’s rapidly expanding schools, including the country’s new freedman schools. It didn’t last. Within a year, the Department of Education was demoted, in bureaucratic speak, to an Office. For the next one hundred thirteen years, education lived in an administrative diaspora, shuffling between different agencies, until it landed in 1953 in President Eisenhower’s new Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW).
Jimmy sent his daughter, Amy Carter, to Thaddeus Stevens School, one of Washington D.C.’s oldest public schools, founded in 1868 to educate freed slaves. In doing so, Amy became the first child of a sitting president to attend public school since 1906.
By the 1950s and 1960s, the purpose of education in America had been transformed. In 1917, responding to national concerns over the education of new Americans, the Smith-Hughes Act provided federal aid to the states to support vocational education. In 1946, the federal mandate expanded once again, this time to provide low-cost or free school lunches. Perhaps the most significant conceptual change occurred during the Cold War, following the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957. American leaders recognized that education, specifically scientific education, would be a crucial weapon in an urgent global competition. The 1958 National Defense Education Act offered federal funding to higher education, particularly in science, mathematics and foreign languages. Throughout the twentieth century, the purpose of American education evolved to support the increasing demands of fostering scientific progress, encouraging the assimilation of immigrant students, advancing the cause of racial integration, and bolstering national security.
The most significant expansion came under the presidency of Lyndon Johnson and his War on Poverty. In 1965, Johnson signed into law the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which offers federal funds to nearly every low-income school district in the country. To this day, this remains one of the most important interventions to improve educational opportunities for all low-income students in the nation’s history—a policy win that would have been impossible before the Civil Rights Act. Johnson didn’t stop there. His administration also passed the Higher Education Act, increasing federal aid to low-income students beyond high school.
In 1867, the Department of Education had four employees and a budget of $15,000. By 1965, the Office of Education had 2,100 employees and a budget of $1.5 billion. The courts were also remaking education during the 1950s and 1960s, with pivotal cases like Brown v. Board of Education and Engel v. Vitale, outlawing segregation and school prayer.
By the late 1970s, families felt the influence of the federal government in their children’s education. For many, that influence was positive: expanded opportunities for college, better support in classrooms, and the full weight of the federal government to strive for equal rather than segregated schools. For others, the influence felt destabilizing or even dangerous. From the outset, the idea of expanding, or even focusing, attention on the federal government’s role in education would be divisive, thrilling some and enraging others.
Once he became president, Carter set up a commission with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to study the opportunities and costs of fulfilling his campaign promise to create a separate Department of Education. The OMB called the move “most promising,” but Joseph Califano, the charismatic head of Health, Education and Welfare, completely disagreed, arguing it would create administrative bloat. Califano wrote to Carter, “All my experience in government—both as personal staff to a former President and as a Cabinet Secretary to you—leads me to urge, in the most forceful way I can, that you reject the narrowly-based separate Department on the merits as inimical to the President’s policy-making, managerial, and budgetary interests.” Prominent Democratic senators also aligned against the Department.
Although a public school day could no longer open with a prayer—the Supreme Court had banned the practice in 1962—the U.S. Senate kept the tradition. In the hearing about the DOE on April 30, 1979, Senate chaplain Edward L.R. Elson, a Presbyterian minister, offered the following prayer: “O God, our Father, Who has ordained that the welfare of the many must ever rest upon the shoulders of the few, make all who serve in this historic Chamber equal to their tasks. Grant Thy servants the wisdom and the grace sufficient for their high calling. Give them a part in the spiritual and moral renovation of the Nation, in the recovery of a refined patriotism and in the renewal of a clearly defined national purpose….” New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a man who embodied Elson’s prayer with his own refined patriotism, soon rose to reject the new department: “I will now make a point which perhaps is a bit indiscreet. There are those who know that I have said in private conversation that if I were a Republican, I would be very much against this bill, since it is apparently being put forward for the open and avowed purpose of electing a Democratic president in 1980. I shall do all I can to elect a Democratic president, the incumbent president. However, to bring education into politics at this level denigrates and defies two centuries of our tradition.” Moynihan continued to outline his main concern that, eventually, an expanded department would enable one party to push ideas that the other party deemed “utterly repugnant” into every classroom in America.
From his headquarters on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, the Rebbe came to the Department of Education’s defense.
Menachem Mendel Schneerson was born on the 11th of Nissan—April 18—in 1902, in Nikolayev, a city in the Russian empire (now in Ukraine), to a Chabad-Lubavitch family. Chabad-Lubavitch is a Hasidic movement within Judaism that began in the eighteenth century and welcomed new forms of piety and mysticism into traditional halachic, Orthodox Judaism. Until Schneerson’s death in 1994, Chabad had a single spiritual head, called a Rebbe. While chaos and violence disrupted the places he spent his childhood, Schneerson’s early life was still one of focus, studiousness, and devotion. By the time he arrived in the United States, he had lived through pogroms, World War I, a typhus epidemic, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the rise of communism and Nazism, all while receiving an unparalleled education.
Schneerson’s education was guided by his father, Rabbi Levi Yizchak Schneerson, a renowned Talmudic scholar, kabbalist, and community leader, and took place mainly in his home. Levi Yizchak brought expert educators to teach his three boys in traditional Jewish texts. The young Menachem Mendel impressed his teachers and even his community with his exceptional capacities. Not only did he commit significant Jewish texts to memory but also many dictionaries and works in astronomy and math. By twelve, the young boy had surpassed his educators and began the unusual practice of studying alone. One of his biographers, Chaim Miller, writes, “Over the next decade, Menachem Mendel would spend tens of thousands of hours in private study, poring over the Talmud, Midrash and a diverse selection of Jewish texts. His only teacher was his father, with whom he would often spend nights in study.” When a senior Hasid asked the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe about Menachem Mendel, his soon to be son-in-law, he described his learning: “He is wholly fluent in the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds; he knows Torah writings of the Rishonim (early authorities) and Acharonim (later authorities), and much, much more. At four o’clock in the morning, he has either not yet gone to sleep, or has already awoken.” He had also mastered more than ten languages, plus secular subjects like mathematics and physics.
At sixteen, Schneerson began studying for exams in mathematics and physics and eventually enrolled as a student at the University of Berlin, in 1929, and, after fleeing the Nazis, the Sorbonne, where he studied until 1938. At these institutions, he learned, in the scholar Eli Rubin’s words, “the irony of intelligence and immorality”—that exceptional minds and institutions can participate in barbaric acts of mass murder. He witnessed how education, severed from humility and ethics, could produce unprecedented scientific innovations deployed for the sake of human annihilation. Education, the Rebbe would later write, “must have a soul.”
When Schneerson arrived at Pier 8 on Staten Island in 1941, he called his new country a malchut shel chesed, a country of kindness. In contrast to the many countries he had just escaped, explains Rubin, Schneerson felt that America had a cultural framework that could allow for differences without division. America did not have a single religion with state authority, but it retained a national sense of being one nation under God. This attribute of the country would be the centerpiece of his vision for American education.
After ascending to leadership of the Chabad movement in 1950, Schneerson, who since inheriting his father-in-law’s mantle was now called the Rebbe, continued to widen the aperture of whom he served. Spending days and countless nights at his headquarters on Eastern Parkway, in Brooklyn, he deployed educators all over the country and the world to ensure all Jews would be sought out: not to be murdered, as they were in Europe, but to be given access to their faith and tradition. On college campuses and towns across the country, Chabad houses became ubiquitous, known for their hospitality and invitations for Jews to participate in Jewish rituals. The Rebbe also began making explicit forays into two areas of American life: prison, which he sought to limit; and education, which he sought to expand. For the Rebbe, the challenges of increased crime could only be fully faced with increased attention to how children were educated.
He witnessed how education, severed from humility and ethics, could produce unprecedented scientific innovations deployed for the sake of human annihilation. Education, the Rebbe would later write, “must have a soul.”
In 1978, the Rebbe used the occasion of his birthday, the 11th of Nissan, to inspire a national conversation on the moral purpose of American education. On the prompting of Congress, Jimmy Carter established Education Day, in honor of the Rebbe’s birthday. Every president since has followed suit, honoring the Rebbe, and, in turn, the Hebrew calendar, with a national holiday that is annually celebrated on the Rebbe’s Hebrew birthday, four days before Passover, which often falls sometime between March 21 and April 21.
Education Day was not designed to advocate for a particular policy, form of education, or curriculum; rather, it was meant, almost like a religious holiday, to be a day of serious reflection on the purpose of education. Americans are meant to contemplate: what is education for? What do we hope to receive or achieve through education?
On the first Education Day, the Rebbe held a public address to explain exactly what he meant by the term education: “Education, in general, should not be limited to the acquisition of knowledge and preparation for a career, or, in common parlance, ‘to make a better living,’” he said. “And we must think in terms of a ‘better living’ not only for the individual, but also for the society as a whole. The educational system must, therefore, pay more attention, indeed the main attention, to the building of character, with emphasis on moral and ethical values. (Need one be reminded of what happened in our lifetime in a country that ranked among the foremost in science, technology, philosophy, etc.?)”—he meant Germany, of course. The Rebbe feared that by reducing education to a solely technocratic endeavor, schools would push children towards materialism and selfishness; classrooms would train students for personal gain rather than cultivate moral beings with a concrete sense of duty to serve a community.
When the Rebbe referred to moral, ethical, and character education, he explicitly opposed prescribing a particular religion. Rather, he argued for what Philip Wexler and Eli Rubin describe in their book Social Vision as the vertical dimension of education. While the horizontal dimension is what students can understand from their sight line, and social and physical forces, the vertical dimension is what transcends any human being. The Rebbe explained, “An educational system must have a soul. Children are not computers to be fed a mass of informational data, without regard for their human needs for higher goals and ideals in life.” Educational systems must be geared to a higher purpose that allows an individual child to connect to something beyond themselves.
When Carter read portions of the Rebbe’s words on the first Education Day, which were published on September 11, 1978, in a full page ad in The Washington Post, he penned a response. “I admire the thoughts which you expressed,” he wrote. Carter’s chief domestic policy advisor, Stuart Eizenstat, explained to me that Carter, like the Rebbe, “felt that education … was not just an academic pursuit, it ought to have built in values, civic values, appreciation of the Constitution, for the rule of law, for the equality of all men and women.” While both Carter and the Rebbe believed in the separation of church and state, they also understood that a family’s private faith or a community’s ethical foundations should play a role in a child’s growth and education. The question was how this important attribute of a child’s moral development should appear in public schools, without diminishing the beliefs of other students. As one answer to this question, the Rebbe later came to advocate for a moment of silence to start a school day.
As the debate around Carter’s proposed Department of Education swept through Congress, the Rebbe threw his weight behind the cause; he made his case through his emissaries in Washington, D.C., and reached out directly to Carter. He wrote that “it will come as no surprise to you, Mr. President, that your proposal to establish a Cabinet-level Department of Education has received my fullest endorsement and acclaim…. This was one of the main topics of my public address on the occasion of the annual observance of the Yahrzeit [the anniversary of a death] of my saintly predecessor on the 10th of Shevat.” The Rebbe continued to remind Carter that when he used the word “education,” he meant a particular kind: “I am, of course, referring to education in a broader and deeper sense—not merely as a process of imparting knowledge and training for a ‘better living,’ but for a ‘better life,’ with due emphasis on character building and moral and ethical values.”
A federal Department of Education, the Rebbe believed, had much to offer America. First, it would elevate education to the “Nation’s highest priorities.” Education could take its rightful place alongside defense, commerce, and agriculture as the central activity, and even purpose, of the federal government. The DOE could also, the Rebbe wrote, “place much greater emphasis on character building and moral and ethical values.”
Education Day was not designed to advocate for a particular policy, a form of education, or a curriculum; rather, it was meant, almost like a religious holiday, to be a day of serious reflection on the purpose of education.
Character education is a murky goal. The educational historian James Fraser puts it this way: “[E]thical education and character education is a really sticky issue in the United States for very good reason…. We don’t want to mix religion and education. The American commitment to ‘the separation of church and state’ has allowed religion to thrive in the U.S., far beyond most other industrial nations.” However, Fraser continues, we are now living through the results of “at least two generations of no ethical education.” Rather than abandon moral instruction, the country needs to find a way to “attend to ethics.”
Finally, the Rebbe also wanted the DOE to ensure that the country had qualified, dedicated, and motivated teachers. He wrote explicitly about raising teachers’ salaries and about other ways to enhance the profession, stating that the DOE should be concerned with “the upgrading of teachers’ salaries on par with comparable professions in other fields of science and relieving them, as far as possible, of other frustrations and stresses.”
On October 17, 1979, Jimmy Carter signed into law the creation of the Department of Education. Less than a month later, he lost the presidential election to Ronald Reagan, who campaigned to eliminate this new department. Despite his initial rejection of a federal home for education, Reagan, during his presidency, came to soften his approach, in part due to the persuasive efforts of the Rebbe. In his first public appearance following the assassination attempt, Reagan voiced his concerns that the federal government had usurped important powers from the states. The Rebbe wrote to Reagan following the speech.
“When you, Mr. President, speak of the Nation’s intellectual and spiritual values,” the Rebbe wrote, “you are surely mindful of the fact that these values are cultivated and acquired through education, the primary function of which is the molding of character. Moreover, you have, in effect, defined education as a national resource of the highest importance…. Surely there is no more vital national resource than the one from which the nation must draw its spiritual strength. We confidently look forward to the implementation of your espoused principles through the Department of Education.” Reagan responded to the Rebbe: “[I] admire and respect your constant vigilance of one of the very foundations of our society, the education of our citizenry…. Our faith in the progress of the future is reinforced by our belief that a sound education will help provide us with the proper tools for spiritual and intellectual growth.”
In 1997, the Department of Education formally acknowledged the Rebbe’s work on its behalf. The U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley offered gratitude, saying, “His voice, so respected and beloved, helped make it happen, so I owe my job to him….”
In 2025, the Department of Education turned forty-six. In its last few decades, the department has served America’s students by administering the distribution of federal financial aid, disseminating data on America’s schools, focusing national attention on major issues in education, and enforcing federal statutes prohibiting discrimination in any program that receives federal educational funds. In the last few years, the department has employed over four thousand people and has spent, depending on the year, upwards of $100 billion annually.
The department has been instrumental in creating a national educational system that strives to serve all Americans, defend the rights of minority students, and create financial opportunities for students and teachers to continue their education. Federal dollars have been fundamental in ensuring that students, particularly ones who required more significant help than states could provide, either because of poverty or disability, are served in America’s classrooms. It has been able to accomplish this work through distributing funds provided by Congress and employing public servants. The department is not designed to establish schools or colleges, develop curricula, set requirements for enrollment or graduation, or determine state standards. With the exception of the controversial No Child Left Behind Act, implemented under George W. Bush, which held schools responsible for student achievement through national testing, the department does not develop and enact testing to measure if states meet their own standards. All of the above tasks are solely within the purview of the states and private sector.
On March 20, 2025, an executive order instructed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education….” The order fulfilled forty plus years of Republican concerns that the DOE wrongly asserts federal control over an arena that rightly belongs to local communities and states. It is now clear that much of the work of the department will either be reallocated to other arms of the federal government or eliminated altogether. One possibility is that the department disappears, and the states continue the work of educating students. This would be a grave loss. The single most important reason to create the DOE was always to elevate the value of education on the national agenda.
Today, the department’s stated mission is “to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.” This mission, so much a product of the last century, with individualism and Cold War competition at its center, fulfills only part of the Rebbe’s vision. It directs our educational efforts solely towards competition and personal gain but ignores the Rebbe’s call for the cultivation of character, morality, and a higher purpose. The DOE’s mission should be rethought for the significant needs and opportunities of this century.
Education in America must not be indoctrination, but it must also be more than technological instruction. The purpose of the Department of Education should be to reinforce to ourselves and the world that education is central to a free society committed to the prospect of self-governance. It should demonstrate to every young person inheriting this precious and fragile form of government that their country cares about them, not as competitive cogs but as human beings and citizens, capable of extraordinary personal growth and communal service. I would humbly suggest a new mission for the Department of Education: to ensure that all students know that this country values their education and requires their participation.
To take up this mission, the department could launch a year of national reflection on the purpose of education in America. We have a historic opportunity to reestablish the relationship between every citizen and the national institution devoted to their education. Across the country, at libraries and schools, families and communities should ask: what do we hope for in our education? What kind of education do we want to give the next generation? What attributes of education should be up to families, communities, and states? What attributes should be the rightful domain of the federal government? What should unite Americans? What values and ideals should hold this country together in a fragmented time?
Americans can come closer through shared questions rather than through shared answers. In the 1970s, two leaders, one a Hasidic rebbe, the other a president, sought to reorient America, and Americans, towards moral growth and collective potential. Born in a war-torn continent, the Rebbe arrived in America as a member of a minority denomination in a minority faith. Still, his dedication to a particular religious life motivated universal commitment. He sought to better his country and its citizens through an investment in education, a word he believed meant more than competition and more than individual advancement. He was joined by a president, who too had deep religious conviction that oriented his life toward commitment and service. They offered a vision of education that transcended the technocratic and the denominational, one that endowed young people with self-worth, a sense of purpose, and the knowledge that they are valued and needed. Carter gave America an institution where the aspirations of the entire country could be reflected upon and achieved, a gift we should not squander.