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    The making of Elon Musk: how did his childhood in apartheid South Africa shape him?

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    With an imposing double-winged redbrick main building, and school songs lifted directly from Harrow’s songbook, Pretoria boys high school is every inch the South African mirror of the English private schools it was founded in 1901 to imitate.Elon Musk, who has rapidly become one of the most powerful people in US politics, spent his final school years in the 1980s as a day pupil on the lush, tree-filled campus in South Africa’s capital, close to his father’s large detached home in Waterkloof, a wealthy Pretoria suburb shaded by purple jacaranda blossoms in spring.View image in fullscreenSouth Africa was rocked by uprisings as apartheid entered its dying years. In 1984, black townships across the country revolted. By 1986, the white minority government had imposed a state of emergency. But in the segregated white enclaves, life was affluent and peaceful.“While the country as a whole was very much in flames and in turmoil, we were blissfully very safe in our little leafy suburbs, going about our very normal life,” said Jonathan Stewart, who was a year above Musk at Pretoria boys, which also counts the Labour politician Peter Hain, the Booker prize-winning novelist Damon Galgut and the murderer and Paralympian Oscar Pistorius among its former pupils.“You had this wealthy set, in relative terms, and everybody else was excluded.”View image in fullscreenMusk, who was born in Pretoria in 1971, railed on his social media platform X last month against the “openly racist laws” of the country of his birth and responded “yes” to the statement: “White South Africans are being persecuted for their race in their home country.”After the posts by the man now at the helm of Donald Trump’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge), a special group Trump has created, the US president signed an executive order accusing South Africa’s government of “unjust racial discrimination” against white Afrikaners, citing a law allowing land to be expropriated in certain circumstances. The order cut aid to South Africa, which receives 17% of its HIV/Aids budget from the US, and offered asylum to Afrikaners.It was not clear the extent to which Musk, who left South Africa in 1989 for his mother’s country, Canada, and then went to the US, had a direct hand in encouraging Trump to issue the order.Trump has taken an interest in the alleged persecution of white South Africans since his first presidency, when an Afrikaner rights group travelled to the US to claim, falsely, that white farmers were being murdered for their land with the complicity of the government. Trump saw one of the group’s leaders interviewed on Fox News and tweeted his support.Trump has also been influenced by other interests, including US groups critical of South Africa’s case against Israel at the international court of justice (ICJ) over the war in Gaza, which he referred to in his executive order.View image in fullscreenBut with Musk now among Trump’s closest advisers, it is unlikely he has not made his views known to the president, given they are also tied up with his business interests in South Africa.Musk has claimed that land reform laws, in a country where the white minority, who make up just 7% of South Africa’s population, still own more than 70% of agricultural land, are racist and amount to theft. He has endorsed claims that the killings of white farmers amount to genocide; research suggests the crimes are financially motivated.Musk’s attacks have ratcheted up at a time when he is in a dispute with the South African government about affirmative action laws, as he tries to sell his Starlink satellite network in the country. The world’s richest man objects to a law requiring that foreign investors in the telecoms sector provide 30% of the equity in the South African part of the enterprise to Black-owned businesses.Trump’s executive order will add to the pressure on South Africa’s government to exempt Musk from the Black empowerment laws.X’s press team and Musk’s lawyer did not respond to interview requests or emailed questions.To what extent Musk’s years growing up under the collapsing apartheid regime influenced his positions today, from making what looked like a Nazi salute – a characterisation he rejects – at Trump’s inauguration celebrations last month to his embrace of far-right political parties such as Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, remains an open debate.View image in fullscreenWhite, English-speaking South Africans such as Musk’s family benefited from apartheid’s racial hierarchy but lived mostly separate lives from the ruling Afrikaners.Musk spent the first two years of South Africa’s five high school years at the all-white Bryanston high school in Johannesburg’s leafy northern suburbs. Founded in 1968, it is a mixed-sex, English-language, fee-paying state school, made up of rectangular mid-century buildings.Like South Africa then and now, Bryanston high was sports mad. “It was a little bit like when you think of American society,” said Lesley Burns, who finished at the school in 1984, Musk’s first year. “There were all the jocks and the popular guys in the football team.”Musk, who was on the school’s chess team in 1985, was viciously bullied. The hounding culminated with him being thrown down a set of stairs, beaten so badly that he was hospitalised. The school declined an interview.View image in fullscreenMusk’s father moved him and his brother, Kimbal, to Pretoria boys, where he was well liked, according to Gideon Fourie, who had computer science classes with Musk.“He was a very average personality,” Fourie said. “He wasn’t in any way like a super jock, or a super nerd, or a super punk … He had a group of friends.”South African media were subjected to strict government censorship. Newspapers would appear with censored sections blacked out, particularly reports of the growing unrest in the townships and mass arrests, until those were also banned.In contrast, the fee-paying Pretoria boys was liberal, for its time. In 1981 it became the first government school to admit a Black pupil. The then headteacher, Malcolm Armstrong, used a loophole that allowed it to let in the sons of diplomats from the “homelands” within South Africa that the apartheid system claimed were independent states.“Armstrong even defied the authorities by meeting with the ANC [African National Congress] in Dakar while it was still banned,” said Patrick Conroy, who was in Kimbal’s year, two years below Musk. “He frequently addressed our school assemblies, emphasising the importance of democracy, human rights and social justice.”The school’s current headteacher, Gregary Hassenkamp, was also in Kimbal’s year and has similar memories of his predecessor, although he noted that not all teachers shared Armstrong’s liberal views.View image in fullscreen“I remember him forcing boys to think about the country in which we lived and the attitudes we had,” Hassenkamp said in an interview in his wood-panelled office, wearing a flowing black gown and a tie and socks in the school’s red, white and green colours.Musk has previously described himself as “not a conservative” and backed the Democratic candidate in every presidential election going back to Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, until he moved to the right. But Musk is clearly suspicious of democracy and the leaders it produces.In the 1930s, his grandfather headed an anti-democratic fringe political movement in Canada with fascist overtones, which campaigned for government by elite technocrats. He then moved to apartheid South Africa because the racist system appealed to him.Musk now appears happy to embrace the US version of the “strongman” ruler by backing Trump’s claim that the will of the president is paramount.Some of Musk’s school peers speculated that his current views of South Africa may be influenced by his missing out on the ups and downs of the negotiations to end apartheid and the “miracle” of Nelson Mandela becoming the country’s first Black president in 1994.Since then, the governments led by Mandela’s ANC party have failed to address the world’s worst economic inequality. While its Black economic empowerment policies offer tax breaks and state contracts to Black-owned companies, Black people are five times likelier than white people to be unemployed. South Africa also has one of the world’s highest murder rates.It is not uncommon to hear white South Africans say they are being discriminated against, often citing affirmative action laws. In mid-February, hundreds gathered outside the US embassy in Pretoria carrying signs with slogans such as “Thank God for President Trump” and “Make South Africa Great Again”.View image in fullscreenWhile it is rare to hear white South Africans say they want a return to apartheid, it is also not uncommon to hear older people express nostalgia for that time.“It was a good time, because we had no crime. There were no problems. People, Blacks and whites, got on very well with each other,” Errol Musk said in a video interview from his spacious Cape Town home, when asked about his son Elon’s childhood. “Everything worked. That’s the reality. Of course people don’t want to hear that, but that’s the truth.”Musk and his two younger full siblings, Kimbal and Tosca, have had a tumultuous relationship with their father. Kimbal told Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson that their father would scream at them for two to three hours, calling them worthless and pathetic. Their mother, Maye, has accused him of physical abuse.“It’s rubbish,” Errol said when asked about the allegations, which he has repeatedly denied.The brothers became estranged from their father in 2017, not for the first time, when he had a child with his 30-year-old stepdaughter, Jana Bezuidenhout, according to Isaacson. In Errol’s telling, they got angry with him when he expressed his support for Trump in 2016, at a party in Cape Town they threw for his 70th and Musk’s 45th birthdays.“Things changed when Biden came in and Elon realised they’re trying to destroy America,” Errol said. “Now we exchange messages about every day. Of course, he’s not always able to answer, so his PA will answer me.”Additional reporting by Chris McGreal More

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      Trump administration launches portal for reporting DEI in public schools

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      The Trump administration has launched a controversial online portal allowing citizens to report diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices in public schools, escalating an aggressive campaign to purge those initiatives from American education.Unveiled on Thursday, the Department of Education’s “End DEI” portal arrived just before the expiration of the administration’s contentious two-week ultimatum for schools and universities to dismantle DEI programs or face funding cuts.The portal explicitly asks for complaints about “discrimination based on race or sex” in K-12 public schools, requiring users to provide personal details, school information and allegations limited to 450 words, with options to upload evidence.Tiffany Justice, the Moms for Liberty co-founder, in a statement posted on the website, urged parents to “share the receipts of the betrayal” in public schools, claiming institutions have “brushed off, mocked, or shut down” parental concerns about “critical theory, rogue sex education and divisive ideologies”.The administration intends to use these submissions to target schools for investigation, according to the website.Critics note the irony that while the administration frames DEI programs as primarily benefiting racial minorities, both private and government research show that white women have historically gained the most from such initiatives in education and employment.Legal resistance to the administration’s policy on schools is increasing. The American Federation of Teachers sued the education department on Tuesday, calling its 14 February memo unconstitutional. Filed jointly with the American Sociological Association, the lawsuit argues the directive violates first amendment and fifth amendment protections and is dangerously vague.“This letter radically upends and re-writes otherwise well-established jurisprudence,” the lawsuit states. “No federal law prevents teaching about race and race-related topics, and the Supreme Court has not banned efforts to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in education.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe portal launch follows a significant setback for the administration when a federal judge blocked portions of Trump’s executive orders seeking to terminate DEI-related contracts throughout the executive branch.The education department’s deadline for schools to eliminate these programs expires Friday. More

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      A soccer ball, a T-shirt: teachers scramble to say goodbye to students fleeing under Trump

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      A soccer ball covered in signatures from classmates. A handwritten letter telling a child of their worth. A T-shirt bearing a school emblem meant to remind a newcomer how much they were loved in a place they once called home.These are among the items teachers have given their multilingual learners – students who learn in more than one language – whose families fled their school districts rather than risk being detained by immigration agents.“One of my students told me last week that their family had decided to go back to Brazil because they were afraid of deportation,” said Philadelphia teacher Joanna Schwartz. “It was his last day here. I scrounged up a T-shirt with our school’s logo on it and a permanent marker and my student had all of his friends and teachers sign it.”She said she taught the fifth-grader for three years.“It’s nothing big, but it was a treasure to him to have the physical signatures of his dearest friends and teachers to take with him,” she said.Some immigrant students wrestling with the fear of deportation leave school with no warning. Other times, they give their teachers just a few hours’ notice to process the loss of a relationship that might have lasted for years.Such scenes are unfolding throughout the country as the Trump administration ratchets up immigration arrests and removals and opens schools to enforcement actions, striking terror in the hearts of undocumented people and their advocates.Faced with the fallout, teachers who have spent their entire careers advocating for immigrant students – fighting battles even within their own districts to ensure students have a robust education – are left fumbling for the right words to say or gift to give a child under extreme stress.Schwartz, who teaches multilingual learners in Philadelphia, uses her prior training as a therapist to help kids through these toughest of moments.She said she often gives children who are leaving “transitional objects”, something tangible to help them feel connected to their friends in the United States.View image in fullscreenSchwartz wrote her departing student a letter in which she “reminded him of his many strengths and told him how much he will be missed”, she said. She added drawings, stickers and her email address.Areli Rodriguez was devastated when, last winter, during her first year of teaching in Texas, one of her most promising and devoted young students left for another state. The boy’s family had been growing wary of the anti-immigrant policies of the governor, Greg Abbott, and headed to Oklahoma, where they hoped they’d be safer.“He was my first student who left for this reason,” Rodriguez said of the fifth-grader who had arrived in the United States from Mexico less than a year earlier. “It just broke my heart.”The family didn’t know Oklahoma would propose some of the harshest immigration restrictions in the nation, including a plan, just this week rejected by the governor, to require parents to report their own immigration status when enrolling their kids in school.Rodriguez is not sure where the child is today. As a parting gift, she gave him a soccer ball signed by all of his classmates.Moments before he left, the boy, who had been chosen as student of the week when he departed, led the class in a call-and-response chant by Rita F Pierson that the class had previously learned:I am somebody.I was somebody when I came.I’ll be a better somebody when I leave.I am powerful, and I am strong.… I have things to do, people to impress and places to go.The boy left his teacher one of his favorite toys, a Rubik’s Cube.In a diary entry, he wrote to Rodriguez and another beloved teacher: “To say goodbye to all of you, Ms Rodriguez and Ms [S], I want to tell you that you are my favorite teachers, and I’m sorry for any trouble I may have caused. Maybe I wasn’t the best student, but I am proud of myself for learning so much.”“I think about him all the time,” Rodriguez said, adding that he embodies what she loves most about multilingual learners. “For him, school was a gift, an opportunity, a privilege. He just worked so hard … His parents were so supportive – they looked at education as something they wanted to seize.”The Department of Homeland Security is urging undocumented people to leave the country immediately. This isn’t entirely new: Joe Biden deported some 4 million people in a single term, double that of Trump’s first four years in office. But many of those he turned away had been newly arrived at the border. Unlike Trump, Biden shied away from raids.Trump has also signed an executive order aimed at ending federal benefits for undocumented people. It’s unclear how this might affect education: schools receive federal money, particularly to help support children from low-income households, but they also cannot turn away students based on their immigration status, according to the 1982 supreme court decision Plyler v Doe.That landmark ruling, however, is under attack by conservative forces, most recently in Tennessee, where lawmakers this month introduced a bill saying schools can deny enrollment to undocumented students. The sponsors say it’s their intention to challenge Plyler.‘We hugged long and hard’Educators are also preparing more practical gifts meant to help children resume their educations elsewhere.Genoveva Winkler, the regional migrant education program coordinator in Idaho’s Nampa school district, said she’s given more than 100 immigrant families, who may have to suddenly return to their home countries, copies of their students’ transcripts in English and Spanish, along with textbooks supplied by the Mexican consulate to improve their Spanish.Indianapolis teacher Amy Halsall said four children from the same family, ranging in ages from 7 to 12, left her school system right after inauguration day, headed back to Mexico.View image in fullscreen“They didn’t specifically say that it was immigration related, but I would guess it was,” Halsall said. “This is a family that we have had in our school since their sixth-grader was in first grade. The kids were really upset that they had to leave.”The youngest and the eldest had told Halsall they wanted to be ESL (English as a second language) teachers when they grew up, she said. The two middle children hoped to become mechanics and one day open their own shop. Halsall gave them a notebook full of letters written by fellow students and pictures of their classmates.“We hugged long and hard. I told them if they ever came back to Indianapolis that they should call us or visit,” she said. “I told them if I was ever in Mexico, I would call them. I tried hard to keep things positive, but it was hard for all of us. Everyone had tears in their eyes.”The anxiety continues, Halsall said. Just last week, another child, age 8, told her he worried that “la migra” – ICE agents – would take his mother away while he was out.“I told him that he was safe at school and if he got home and no one was there to call me,” she said.Another teacher, in Virginia, said she has had two students leave school so far this academic year. One hailed from Guatemala and the other from Mexico. Both were in their mid-teens and had impeccable attendance, she said.Their teacher did not have a chance to say goodbye in either case. Their departure, she said, left her feeling “completely empty”.“I’ve loved watching them integrate in our school and seeing how they realized they can have this pathway [to further their education] if they choose,” she said. “Watching that choice ripped away by fear is devastating.”

      This story was produced by the 74, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on education in the US More

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      Julianne Moore’s freckles? How Republican bans on ‘woke’ books have reached new level

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      When the actor Julianne Moore learned her children’s book, Freckleface Strawberry, a tale of a girl who learns to stop hating her freckles, had been targeted for a potential ban at all schools serving US military families, she took to Instagram, posting that it was a “great shock” to discover the story had been “banned by the Trump Administration”.Moore had seen a memo that circulated last week revealing that tens of thousands of American children studying in about 160 Pentagon schools both in the US and around the world had had all access to library books suspended for a week, while officials conducted a “compliance review” to hunt out any books “potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics”.Although whether Moore’s book would be selected for “further review” or banned entirely remains unclear, the episode brought into stark relief that the movement to ban books in the US – which has been bubbling up for several years, mostly in individual states – had reached a whole new level: the federal one.Donald Trump’s re-election, and his subsequent crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, has many campaigners fearing that the Pentagon move to scrub its libraries of anything it opposes ideologically could be the first of a series of broad attempts to eliminate any discussions of race, LGBTQ+ issues, diversity and historical education from public schools.The Trump administration has scoffed at the idea that it is banning books, and last month it instructed the Department of Education to end its investigations into the matter, referring to bans as a “hoax”. Indeed, many deny that banning books is censorship at all – a disconnect that stems not just from the historical context of book banning, but from a semantic dispute over what it means to “ban” something.In the early 20th century, books such as Ulysses by James Joyce and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck were banned due to “moral concerns”.Likewise, the red scare of the 1950s saw increased censorship of materials perceived as sympathetic to communism, while the 1980s saw attacks against books dealing with race and sexuality, such as The Color Purple by Alice Walker, which was nearly banned two years after its release in 1984 after a parent petitioned against its use in an Oakland, California, classroom.The difference today, however, is that instead of coming primarily from conservative community organizers, the book banning movement is now coming from government – school boards, local governments and now, with the Pentagon move, even the federal government, increasingly working in lockstep.The modern wave of book bans could be said to have started with a backlash against The 1619 Project, a journalistic anthology by Nikole Hannah-Jones published by the New York Times. The project aimed to reframe US history by centering the contributions of Black Americans, but conservative politicians – including Trump – claimed it taught students to “hate their own country”.View image in fullscreenIn response, Republican lawmakers moved to ban the work in schools, marking the beginning of an intensified campaign against so-called “anti-American” literature.According to PEN America, a non-profit dedicated to defending free expression in literature, more than 10,000 book bans occurred in public schools during the 2023-2024 school year. Books that address racism, gender and history were disproportionately targeted.“The whole principle of public education is that it is not supposed to be dictated by particular ideologies that aim to censor what other people can learn and access in schools,” Jonathan Friedman, the managing director for US free expression programs at PEN America, said.Rightwing politicians, however, have increasingly used book banning as a rallying cry, portraying certain books as tools of “indoctrination” – failing to note the irony that indoctrination is the process of carefully limiting ideas, like banning books.One key figure has been the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis. He has echoed Trump’s dismissal of book bans as a “hoax”, and spearheaded multiple attempts to reshape education to reflect only conservative values, including the Stop Woke Act, which restricts discussions on systemic racism, and the Parental Rights in Education Act, widely known as the “don’t say gay” law, which limits discussions of gender identity and sexuality in classrooms.Banned titles in Florida schools now include Beloved and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Normal People by Sally Rooney, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.What DeSantis and other rightwingers often say is that these efforts don’t truly constitute “bans” because they only remove books from schools, rather than totally outlawing them from being bought in the US, and therefore don’t encroach on free speech. John Chrastka, the executive director and founder of EveryLibrary, argued that this is faulty reasoning.“The private marketplace is protected by the first amendment in ways that the government is not beholden to,” he said. “The idea that because a book is still available for sale means that it’s not being banned outright is only the difference between a framework that was in place prior to the 1950s” and today.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe noted that Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was first published in 1928 in Europe, was banned in the US for several years before finally getting its American publication in 1959 in what was a watershed affirmation of the right to free speech. Realizing that the first amendment prevented them from blocking the book from US bookstores, critics turned their attention to libraries instead, a grayer area in terms of constitutional protections.DeSantis and other rightwing politicians have taken the lesson: if the constitution prevents you from banning a book from being bought or sold in Florida, the next best thing is to ban it from the places most people would have the easiest access to it – schools and libraries.“It doesn’t add up,” Chrastka added, “the idea that a teenager in a state where it’s impossible for them to get to an independent bookstore because they don’t exist any more somehow has enough liberty to buy the book when the school library is blocked from having it available for them.”Another key distinction is between banning books from classroom curriculum versus removing them from school libraries – which, unlike classrooms, are historically protected spaces for free access to ideas.“What you read for a class supports the curriculum,” says Chrastka, whereas “the school library is supposed to support independent reading. One of them is required reading and the other one isn’t, but [the reading material] is meant to be available.”The landmark supreme court case Island Trees School District v Pico in 1982, when a school board in New York removed books from its libraries it deemed “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy”, established that school boards cannot restrict the availability of books in their libraries simply because they don’t like or agree with the content.Critics contend the new wave of book bans, although not yet about preventing sales at bookshops, fails to meet the intended purpose of libraries: to preserve and provide a variety of ideas and information that may not be readily or equally accessible to everyone.Now, many fear that once certain books are established as unacceptable in schools, the censorship could spread to colleges, bookstores and eventually nationwide bans. Even if that does not happen, experts say one of the most reliable ways to ensure ideas are suppressed is to dismantle the education system, making Trump’s repeatedly stated goal of eliminating the Department of Education a particular concern.“The vast majority of the budget for the Department of Education and the laws and regulations that make sure that the department is functional go to help students succeed and protect students who are otherwise vulnerable,” said Chrastka.With the education system having been chipped away at for decades with budgets cuts, low literacy rates and high dropout rates, book bans only make it weaker.“What we need in this country is for students to feel supported and to find their own identities, and reading is a core component of that,” Chrastka said. “Let’s let the kids discover themselves and discover their own path forward in the process.” More

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      Climate researchers should play the Trump card | Brief letters

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      The obvious solution to American researchers having grants withdrawn for projects containing the word “climate” (Outcry as Trump withdraws support for research that mentions ‘climate’, 21 February) is to rename climate heating “Trump”. We could be amazed that “Trump makes seas rise”, “Trump makes Greenland a green land again” and “Trump makes summer warmer and longer”. Who would oppose that?Mark DavisFrome, Somerset My friend always said that you should never leave a small child and a dog of any size together as it is equivalent to leaving two toddlers together and giving one of them a pair of sharp scissors (The rise of the cane corso: should this popular status dog be banned in the UK?, 19 February).Vanessa RickettGreat Missenden, Buckinghamshire Aged 14, I received an otherwise good school report (Letters, 20 February) that included an observation made by Mrs Tinlin, my art teacher: “Steven is too easily satisfied by a mediocre standard of work.” Her acid comment provided me with the lifelong motivation to pursue a scientific career.Prof Steve ArmesUniversity of Sheffield When I worked in mainstream schools, pupils’ feedback on their teachers was all the rage. One favourite comment: “I hate RE with Mr Grieve as he occasionally manages to teach me something.” Ian GrieveGordon Bennett, Llangollen canal Re the Duchess of Sussex’s latest rebranding effort “As Ever” (Emma Brockes, 19 February), I couldn’t help feeling it was a little too close to “Whatever”.Sarah HallLeamington Spa, Warwickshire More

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      Trump administration gives schools deadline to cut DEI or lose federal funds

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      The Trump administration is giving the US’s schools and universities two weeks to eliminate diversity initiatives or risk losing federal money, raising the stakes in the president’s fight against “wokeness”.In a memo on Friday, the education department gave an ultimatum to stop using “racial preferences” as a factor in admissions, financial aid, hiring or other areas. Schools are being given 14 days to end any practice that treats students or workers differently because of their race.Educators at colleges nationwide were rushing to evaluate their risk and decide whether to stand up for practices they believe are legal. The sweeping demand threatens to upend all aspects of campus operations, from essays on college applications to classroom lessons and campus clubs.It’s meant to correct what the memo described as rampant discrimination in education, often against white and Asian students.“Schools have been operating on the pretext that selecting students for ‘diversity’ or similar euphemisms is not selecting them based on race,” said Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights. “No longer. Students should be assessed according to merit, accomplishment and character.”The guidance drew sharp backlash from civil rights groups and university groups. Some believe its vague language is meant to have a chilling effect, pressuring schools to eliminate anything touching on the topic of race even if it may be defensible in court.“Creating a sense of risk around doing work that might promote diverse and welcoming campuses is much more of the goal than a clear statement of existing law,” said Jonathan Fansmith, senior vice-president of government relations at the American Council on Education, an association of college presidents.The memo is an extension of Donald Trump’s executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs. As legal justification, it cites the 2023 supreme court decision barring race as a factor in college admissions.“Put simply, educational institutions may neither separate or segregate students based on race, nor distribute benefits or burdens based on race,” it said.On Monday the education department announced it also cut $600m in grants for organizations that train teachers. The programs promoted “divisive” concepts such as DEI, critical race theory and social justice activism, the department said.Confusion around the implications of Trump’s anti-DEI order was apparent at last week’s confirmation hearing for education secretary nominee Linda McMahon. Asked whether classes on African American history would run afoul of Trump’s order, McMahon said she wasn’t certain.The California School Boards Association is awaiting legal guidance so it can advise schools on the Trump administration’s deadline, spokesperson Troy Flint said.“At this point there is not enough information for a step-by-step playbook that tells school districts if you were doing A then now you should do B, or perhaps eliminate the whole program entirely,” he said. “I know people want that granular level of detail. But this is a new era, with some novel civil rights theories and there is no definitive reference for what’s happening now.”The new guidance takes aim directly at college admissions, suggesting colleges have sought to work around the supreme court’s decision.College essays, for instance, cannot be used to predict a student’s race, the guidance says. In the supreme court decision, Chief Justice John Roberts said nothing prevents colleges “from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life,” though he warned that colleges couldn’t use essays as an indirect workaround to consider students’ race.The memo also said it’s unlawful for colleges to eliminate standardized testing requirements “to achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity”. Dozens of colleges across the US have dropped SAT and ACT requirements in recent years, citing concerns the exams favor students from high-income families.Practices that have long been commonplace could become legal liabilities, including recruiting in underrepresented areas or buying lists of potential students with certain academic and demographic information, said Angel B Pérez, the CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.“Colleges and universities are going to find themselves between a rock and a hard place,” Pérez said. “They know that what they’re doing is not illegal, but they are worried that if they do not comply, not having federal funding will decimate them.”Some universities said they expect little change. At Oregon State University, a legal review concluded that its programs “are fully compliant with all state and federal laws”, according to a campus message from Rob Odom, vice-president of university relations and marketing.The department memo appears to take aim at scholarships for students from certain racial backgrounds. There’s been legal debate about whether the supreme court decision extends to financial aid, with some schools and institutions deciding to scrap racial requirements for some scholarships.The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators said there’s no consensus on the question, and the group is trying to understand how the memo could affect student aid.“The last thing students need when making plans about how to pay for college is uncertainty over when or whether they will receive financial aid they’ve been relying on,” the group said in a statement.Trump has called for the elimination of the education department, and Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has slashed dozens of contracts deemed wasteful.The Doge team won a legal victory on Monday when a federal judge declined to block it from federal student loan records. The judge said the plaintiff, the University of California Student Association, failed to prove it was harmed by Doge’s access to the data. More

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      Lessons for Elon Musk from the original Doge | Brief letters

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      As Elon Musk’s unelected “Doge” troops slash and burn US federal departments (Elon Musk appears with Trump and tries to claim ‘Doge’ team is transparent, 12 February), it is ironic to note that the Doges of ancient Venice were always elected, and by a process that was designed to avoid wealthy families taking too much power.John JacobsAlton, Hampshire I agree with your correspondents about the difficulty of hearing the lyrics in musicals (Letters, 13 February), but there’s little mention of the problem in cinemas, where conversations are drowned out by background music. In the recent film about Bob Dylan, Timothée Chalamet perfectly captured the musician’s mumble. What words he actually said remain A Complete Unknown.Joanna RimmerNewcastle upon Tyne Re the letters on analogue photography (14 February), there is a good compromise. I use a digital camera, which means I can go “snap happy”. Then I can look at all the images, select what I want and get them printed.Peter ButlerRushden, Northamptonshire I’m not entirely convinced that the Guardian style guide does a lot for women’s rights in advising that actresses should always be called actors (Editorial, 14 February). Why not the other way around?John OwensStockport, Greater Manchester My school report read: “Angela has influence, unfortunately in the wrong direction.” I became a probation officer (Letters, 16 February).Angela GlendenningNewcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire More

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      JD Vance and those threats from within | Letters

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      Among the justified furore around America’s new position in the world, one part at least triggers a bit of nostalgia (JD Vance stuns Munich conference with blistering attack on Europe’s leaders, 14 February). JD Vance’s description of the “threat from within” brings back memories of Margaret Thatcher’s designation of those who disagreed with her as “the enemy within”. I still have a badge with that somewhere. Maybe it’s time I dusted it off.Steve TownsleyCowbridge, Vale of Glamorgan As JD Vance lectures European leaders about freedom of speech, Louisiana is banning health officials from promoting vaccinations and libraries across the US are having to purge their shelves of any books that make mention of subjects that Republicans dislike. No hypocrisy there, then?Tony GreenIpswich, Suffolk Britain thought it had a special relationship with the US. Seems we got dumped on Valentine’s Day.Emma TaitLondon Your report (‘Guess who’s back?’: the inside story of Nigel Farage’s quest for power, 15 February) confirmed what I already suspected: Reform is basically a party run by millionaires, for the benefit of millionaires, with a good dollop of nativism added to the mix.Alan PavelinChislehurst, Kent Re remarks in school reports (Letters, 14 February), my favourite is from around 1971, courtesy of a great history teacher: “Intelligent answers, a mastery of the facts would help.” I’m sure CP Scott would have agreed with him.Kevin McGillPrestwood, Buckinghamshire More

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      Evangelical education nearly ruined me. Now the Christian right is coming for public schools

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      When I got the chance to attend a conservative, evangelical high school in rural Iowa, I was ecstatic. My early education had been in a similar school – where creationism was the one true science, and evolution was satanic propaganda – and I’d spent the interim as a frightened pilgrim in the unholy land of public school. I was a teenage zealot and longed to be among my people.Throughout those years, my church leaders urged me to proselytize to the public school students, to debate teachers about the age of Earth or the founding of our Christian nation, to be a spiritual exhibitionist, praying loudly at my locker or the flagpole. The apocalypse was at hand, so who had time for algebra?I viewed my enrollment at Forest City Christian school in my junior year as being honorably discharged from my duty of “reclaiming our schools for Christ”. But what I envisioned as a sanctuary of faith, community and “true” education not only left me more disillusioned and bullied but also robbed me of a high school diploma and set me on a path of crushing financial insecurity that would haunt me for years.View image in fullscreenTwenty-five years later, Donald Trump and the Christian nationalist movement that put him in the White House (twice) are seeking to transform public education into something similar to what I was reared on, where science, history and even economics are taught through an evangelical conservative lens, while prayer and Bible reading are foundations of the curriculum.These efforts test the boundaries of the constitution’s establishment clause, reversing a century of civil rights victories in public schools, and have the potential to fundamentally alter the way American children learn – and what they learn about.The push comes in two forms: injecting more Christian rhetoric and rituals into public school curriculum and for the first time in history, using tax dollars to subsidize private religious schools, generally via vouchers that cover student tuition. Each has the potential to bolster the education of America’s most privileged students, while downgrading services for children of low-income families.In Oklahoma, the state superintendent ordered his public schools to teach from the Christian holy book; he later sought to mandate all schools to air a video in which he prays for Trump. On his desk sat a black mug with the Latin phrase si vis pacem para bellum: “If you want peace, prepare for war.”In June, Louisiana passed a law ordering all classrooms to display the Ten Commandments. And in Florida, Pam Bondi, now Trump’s attorney general, supported a constitutional amendment to allow state funding for religious schools before voters rejected it.In 2022, a supreme court ruling allowed private religious schools to receive government funding. In response to this, LGBTQ+ advocates helped pass the Maine Human Rights Act in their state, protecting students and faculty from discrimination. Two Christian schools are suing the state for the ability to violate the new law while still receiving government funding. Separately, the supreme court has taken up a case addressing whether to allow taxpayer funds for religious charter schools, potentially leading to the first Christian public school in the US.View image in fullscreenIn Texas, the state representative James Talarico has been fighting against a new elementary school curriculum that infuses Bible stories into language arts programs, as well as a bill that could allow students to use public funds to attend private schools, including Christian schools, a move he says will harm low-income students while bolstering the most privileged.“Attempting to indoctrinate public school students into Christianity is not only unconstitutional and un-American, it’s deeply un-Christian,” says the former public school teacher, who is also studying to be a preacher.And this wave of Christianizing is not limited to the south.In 2023, my home state of Iowa passed legislation granting taxpayer-funded scholarships to families who enroll their children in private schools, including Christian ones. And last fall, a wildly successful Christian lobbying group, the Idaho Family Policy Center (IFPC), announced the drafting of a new bill that would require Bible reading in all Idaho public schools.“By bringing back school-sponsored Bible reading, we are bringing God back into public education,” says Morgan MaGill, communications director for IFPC, which has drafted successful state measures restricting rights to abortion and transgender healthcare in Idaho.Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has characterized the growth of US Christian schools as an “educational insurgency” collecting “recruits” to build an underground army “with the opportunity later on of taking offensive operations in an overt way”, Hegseth said in a podcast appearance. Such militaristic language is reminiscent of the evangelical rallies, camps, youth services and Christian rock concerts I attended as a boy, where we were indoctrinated to be “soldiers in God’s army”, fighting to “take back our schools for Christ”.That, said Hegseth, is “what the crop of these classical Christian schools are gonna do in a generation”.View image in fullscreenTalarico views Texas’s efforts to create a voucher program for private Christian schools as not only bad for Jewish, Muslim and LGBTQ+ students, but also as stealing from the poor to serve the rich.“If you gave my students on the west side of San Antonio an $8,000 or $10,000 voucher, there’s still no way they can afford a $20,000 a year private school,” Talarico says. “But because the voucher program is universal, the wealthy family that is sending their kid to that private school will now get an $8,000 or $10,000 discount on their tuition, at the expense of the working-class kids on the west side.”Talarico adds that the voucher program includes funding for home-school students, up to 90% of whom are Christian and whose curriculum is often poorly regulated. “So we taxpayers will be funding homeschool programs that teach students the earth is flat,” he says.The battle for schoolsTrump’s promise to “bring back prayer to our schools”, shut down the Department of Education and embrace “school choice” fulfills an evangelical wishlist I’d heard about throughout my childhood. The belief that our government seeks to brainwash children into liberal atheists, close churches and outlaw prayer – threats that Trump promised to eradicate throughout the last election – were at the heart of the formation of the Christian right in the late 70s. But the clash over Christian education in America began long before.Protestant education was the norm in the US for nearly two centuries. MaGill points out that Benjamin Rush – a founding father who helped build the US public school system – was a strong advocate for Bible reading in US schools.And while opponents emphasize the idea of “separation of church and state”, those pushing to re-Christianize US public schools are correct when arguing that the phrase is not in the constitution. But it is misleading to claim that this was ever a settled – or simple – issue.In 1797, John Adams signed the treaty of Tripoli, which stated: “The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”View image in fullscreenThe first amendment says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Thomas Jefferson later said the amendment created “a wall of separation between church and state”.When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, it was often explained to me that this phrase was intended to keep the government out of religion and not the other way around. The issue of religion in public education muddies this divide.Throughout the 19th century Catholics fought for their unique prayers and scripture to be taught in public schools. When Tennessee passed a law in 1925 banning the teaching of evolution in public schools, the trial of a jailed science teacher captivated the nation, leading to a media circus that portrayed biblical literalists as “yokels”, accelerating the fundamentalist movement in America, as well as a deep distrust of both the media and intellectuals among evangelicals.In 1962, the supreme court ruled that teacher-led prayer in school violated the first amendment’s establishment clause, essentially banning the practice. Many evangelicals – particularly in the south – felt that their religious rights had been violated years earlier when the court mandated that all US schools be racially integrated, as many white, southern Christians at the time interpreted scripture as mandating segregation.In response, there was an explosion of what would come to be known as “segregationist academies”, private Christian K-12 schools and universities that believed they could continue to racially discriminate – while enjoying tax-free status – due to protections to their “religious liberties”. In time, they would create their own textbooks and accreditation systems, a whole bubble of education independent from public schools or conventional higher education.View image in fullscreenIn the late 1970s, the heavily segregated Bob Jones University had its tax-exempt status revoked by the IRS, a move that was interpreted by many evangelical pastors as the government shutting down a church. The ruling was blamed on Jimmy Carter’s new Department of Education (which would become a whipping boy for evangelicals in the years to come) despite the IRS acting on a court ruling from several years earlier.The perceived attack on segregated Christian schools by the US government helped galvanize evangelicals into voting Republican.Meanwhile, the Christian right doubled down on the creation of its own, independent education system, one that rejected evolution in favor of creationism, made students pledge allegiance to a Christian flag, and preached against environmental issues, LGBTQ+ rights and progressive policies.Escaping the bubbleI was born in 1982, and my education began in this isolated world of alternative facts. In my Christian kindergarten, I learned to read using the Bible and did math equations from scriptures on tithing. We were taught a great deal about the dangers of communism, while our working-class parents fell victim to predatory capitalism, manipulated into paying a tuition they couldn’t afford, convinced public schools were unsafe.View image in fullscreenThe collapse of my parents’ small business, a farm crisis tanking the Iowa economy, and years of tithing and additional “seed faith” donations to our church had left them broke.When I was in first grade, my mom and I performed janitorial work after hours for a reduction on my tuition. My dad borrowed money from family members to keep us enrolled and away from the dangers of public school. But following a divorce and bankruptcy, they, like many other working families, could no longer afford tuition.I was terrified of public school, which I imagined to be a cesspool of adolescent sin.I developed a hypervigilant paranoia when it came to the lessons of my public school teachers, particularly when it came to science and history. I was not only tasked with rescuing my classmates from hell; I had to avoid it myself, mainly through maintaining my belief in (a very specific definition of) God, which the “secular humanist” curriculum was a threat to. This required me to keep a heavy filter on the information I allowed into my mind and censor the thoughts that information inspired.Consequently, I flunked half of my classes.At the Christian school I attended my junior year of high school, things were different. We were taught from the lectures of creationists such as Ken Ham and Kent Hovind that our planet is only 6,000 years old, along with a detailed meteorological explanation for Noah’s flood. Hovind often blended conspiracy theories, such as evolution being a communist plot, into his lectures. Ham and Jessica DeFord’s book Climate Change for Kids explains to homeschooled and Christian school students: “Man cannot destroy the earth. God promised that.”In “Logic” class, we learned about gay rights rallies in San Francisco that were attempting, according to my teacher, to “indoctrinate children into that lifestyle”. It was not uncommon to hear leaders in the Christian school movement, like the “Christian economics” textbook author Gary North, argue for capital punishment for all homosexuals. North believed this should occur through the biblical practice of “stoning”. As a thin, effeminate young man with little interest in sports or hunting (yet perked up if the conversation turned to musicals or Alloy magazine), I was a relentless target for the rural boys at the Christian school, who saw it as their religious duty to shout “fag” in my ear as they tussled my hair and knocked books from my hands.The longer I stayed at the school, the deeper I fell into a malaise of depression and self-harm. In addition to the stress of bullies, I had trouble getting my mind around the logic of these classes, and knew that if I didn’t understand it, and believe it, eternal torture awaited me. Meanwhile, costs remained difficult. I was working part-time at Subway and Bennigan’s to pay for my Christian education, but it still wasn’t enough.I headed back to public school for my senior year. I’d been there a semester before it was explained to me that my credits from Forest City Christian school didn’t transfer, because they weren’t “accredited” by the government. (The school has since closed.)Instead, I was directed toward the GED testing center, where my education came to an unceremonious end with a generic certificate. Colleges and universities, I was told, were even worse than public schools in their liberal indoctrination, so I drifted through a decade of low-wage jobs in factories, restaurants and construction sites, as my fellow students who’d graduated from public school, then college, ascended the socioeconomic ladder.In time, I developed my own education at libraries and bookstores. But first, I had to, in the words of Yoda, “unlearn what you have learned”. In fundamentalist education, all knowledge and thought must bend itself to unarguable truth that the Bible is 100% factual in all matters. The itchy curiosity of philosophy, the relentless questions of the scientific method, the skeptic probing of journalism, have no place in that world.It was only through breaking out of the Christian education bubble – defecting from my duty to “reclaim America for Christ” – that I was able to cultivate strong learning faculties, eventually clawing my way into a career in journalism.Perhaps my financial prospects would have been much brighter if I had stayed in my Christian high school, attended a Christian college like Liberty University (which accepts students from non-accredited Christian schools) and gone on to work at a megachurch like Joel Osteen’s Lakewood church or in a Maga political organization like Turning Point USA. But my inability to get my head around the 2+2=5 logic of creationist science, or the claim that our founding fathers intended to create a Christian theocracy, prevented me from being an effective soldier in the fight for Christian nationalism, despite how eager I was to join the fight.Instead, I eventually traveled in the opposite direction, reporting extensively on the modern machinations of the Christian right. In the course of that work, I have often felt a deep sorrow for students enduring the bubble of private Christian education – particularly the poor and queer ones. Now it seems that compassion must extend to those in public schools as well.

      This story was co-published and supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project’s James Ledbetter Fund. More