How Politics and Economics Shape Educational Institutions

Schools are rarely neutral spaces. Every decision made about what gets taught, how it’s funded, and who gets to belong shapes the kind of citizens, workers, and human beings students grow up to be. Behind every curriculum, textbook, and classroom policy are macro-level forces – political ideologies, economic priorities, and social values – that determine whose knowledge is centered, whose history is told, and whose identity is affirmed. Understanding these forces is essential for anyone thinking critically about youth, gender, and the formation of identity.

Political ideologies and the curriculum 🔗

Education has never been politically neutral. Governments across the world use schools as tools to build national identity, transmit values, and prepare young people for a particular vision of society. The content of a curriculum – which histories are taught, which voices are centered, which conflicts are acknowledged – reflects the ideological priorities of those in power at any given moment.

Militarized education: the Israeli case 🔗

One of the most studied examples of state ideology shaping schooling comes from Israel, where scholars have documented how militarized education functions as the primary form of political socialization. From preschool onward, children are exposed to military ceremonies, soldier-teachers, and visits to military bases, all of which normalize conscription and frame army service as inseparable from citizenship. The fusion between state ideology and formal education, as researcher Mirta Furman notes, begins in the earliest years of schooling.

Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli scholar and educator, analyzed History, Geography, and Civics textbooks used in Israeli schools and found that virtually all subjects carry some form of extreme nationalism – with Palestinians frequently absent from maps, depicted in stereotypical or threatening ways when included, and framed primarily as “problems” rather than as people with history and culture. The argument, as scholar Michal Zak articulates in the Middle East Eye, is that militaristic education is ultimately political education – it teaches students to see wars and military force as inevitable and natural, which serves the interests of the state in maintaining a population willing to serve. This has direct implications for gender identity: militarism promotes hypermasculine ideals of strength and sacrifice, which shape how young Israeli men and women understand their roles and worth.

Historical revision and nationalist narratives 🔗

India offers another prominent example of political ideology reshaping educational content. In recent years, curriculum changes under the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have involved removing or revising chapters on the Mughal period, caste discrimination, and democratic movements from school textbooks. Critics argue that these changes reflect a Hindu nationalist agenda that selectively highlights certain pasts while erasing others – particularly those that complicate a simplified, majoritarian narrative of Indian identity. When students receive a curated version of history, their sense of who “belongs” in their country, and who is worth remembering, is shaped accordingly.

This pattern is not unique to any one country or political direction. In the United States, debates over curriculum have intensified around questions of race, gender, and sexuality, with some states banning books, restricting discussions of gender identity, and limiting what teachers can say about the history of racial inequality. According to Pew Research Center data, whether topics like gender identity are taught in schools correlates strongly with the political leaning of the district – with Democratic-majority districts far more likely to include such discussions than Republican-majority ones. These decisions are political choices that directly affect how young people understand their own identities and the identities of those around them.

What this illustrates is a fundamental truth about schooling: the curriculum is never just about knowledge – it is about power. Which stories get told, which are erased, and which are framed as “normal” all communicate to students who matters and who doesn’t.

Economic factors in education 🔗

Political ideology does not act alone. Economic priorities – how governments allocate education budgets, whether they invest in public schooling or move toward privatization – profoundly shape which students receive quality education and which are left behind. These decisions reproduce inequality across class, gender, race, and geography.

Budget allocation and its unequal consequences 🔗

Funding is not distributed equally across schools, and the consequences are not trivial. According to the Education Law Center’s 2024 report, the gap in per-pupil spending between the highest and lowest funded states in the US persisted at between $13,000 and $14,000 per student over a decade – a disparity that directly affects the quality of teachers, resources, counseling services, and extracurricular opportunities available to students. Schools in lower-income areas, which disproportionately serve students of color and marginalized communities, receive fewer resources, making educational achievement harder to attain – not because of any deficit in students, but because of the structural underfunding of the institutions meant to serve them.

This matters for gender and identity in concrete ways. Schools with fewer resources are less able to provide counseling services for LGBTQ+ students, less likely to have diverse libraries, and less equipped to implement inclusive curricula. Funding gaps, in this sense, are also inclusion gaps.

Privatization and the two-tier school system 🔗

A growing trend in several countries, particularly the United States, is the diversion of public education funds to private schools through voucher programs. Advocates frame these as expanding “school choice,” but critics point out that they effectively create a two-tier system: private schools, which can select their students and set their own policies, and public schools, which must serve everyone but with shrinking budgets.

A report from the Economic Policy Institute highlights that state spending on tax breaks and subsidies for private schools grew by 408 percent over a decade, while state funding for public schools increased by just an average of 1 percent per year after inflation. Research from Louisiana, Ohio, and Indiana found that test scores for students in voucher programs actually declined following program enactment, while school closure rates in private schools accepting vouchers approached 40 percent over 25 years in Milwaukee – displacing students and causing measurable harm to their academic trajectories.

The gendered dimensions of privatization are particularly significant. Research from developing regions shows that in contexts where privatization increases school fees, girls are disproportionately likely to be pulled out of education first – reflecting both economic pressure and existing gender norms that prioritize boys’ schooling. Privatization, in this context, does not just sort students by class; it reinforces pre-existing gender hierarchies. Private schools that receive public funding through vouchers are also not required to provide the same protections for LGBTQ+ students or students with disabilities as public institutions – raising serious equity concerns about whose identities are protected and whose are not.

Diversity and inclusivity in educational environments 🔗

Beyond what is taught and who can access schooling is the question of what the school environment itself communicates. Does a student see their culture reflected in the curriculum? Are their pronouns respected? Do the books in the library include people who look and live like them? These are not marginal concerns – they are central to identity development, especially during adolescence.

How inclusive environments shape identity 🔗

Research published in peer-reviewed sources confirms that for students who have been historically excluded or marginalized, exposure to diverse educational content positively influences school connectedness, identity development, and academic outcomes – including test scores, educational aspirations, and academic self-confidence. When students see themselves reflected in the material they study and in the educators who teach them, they receive an implicit message that they belong and that their existence is worthy of study and celebration. The reverse is also true: when students are invisible in their curriculum, or when their identities are treated as controversial or disruptive, the educational experience can become alienating and even harmful.

The research on inclusive schools published in Frontiers in Psychology shows that collaborative classroom practices, extracurricular activities designed to build empathy, and teachers with intercultural competencies all contribute meaningfully to creating school environments where students develop their competencies and identities more fully. This is not just about adding diversity content to a syllabus – it requires a structural commitment across the entire school community, from administrators to families.

State-level frameworks for inclusive education 🔗

Some jurisdictions have moved toward codifying inclusion into their education systems. The New York State Department of Education’s culturally responsive-sustaining (CR-S) framework, for example, directs educators to build student-centered learning environments that affirm racial, linguistic, and cultural identities, develop students’ abilities to connect across difference, and elevate historically marginalized voices. Washington State has similarly adopted educator standards that explicitly incorporate cultural competency, diversity, equity, and inclusion. These frameworks represent a policy position: that the school’s role is not to flatten difference but to make space for it.

Contrast this with approaches that restrict what can be taught about gender, sexuality, or race. When state governments ban books, prohibit certain classroom conversations, or defund programs that serve marginalized students, the message is the opposite: difference is a problem to be managed, not a resource to be engaged. For young people still working out who they are – particularly LGBTQ+ youth, students of color, and those from non-dominant cultural backgrounds – the consequences are not abstract. Research consistently shows that students who feel unseen or unsafe in their schools have worse mental health outcomes, higher rates of absence, and lower academic achievement.

The role of the school in identity formation 🔗

Schools are not simply places where academic content is transmitted. They are, as sociologists have long argued, sites where young people learn what is normal, who has power, and what kinds of lives are possible. A curriculum that centers only certain histories teaches students whose past matters. A school that uses gendered language exclusively teaches students what gender is supposed to look like. A classroom that never addresses race tells students that race is either unimportant or too dangerous to discuss – neither of which serves them well in a diverse world.

The University of Illinois summarizes the stakes clearly: integrating diverse curricula and perspectives empowers students to see reflections of themselves in the material and develops their capacity to critically analyze issues of identity, privilege, and social justice. This kind of education does not just benefit marginalized students – it prepares all students to live and work in a complex, pluralistic society.

The political and economic forces that shape educational institutions, then, are not background noise. They determine, in very concrete terms, whether schools serve as engines of equality or engines of reproduction – reproducing the inequalities, gender norms, and exclusions that already exist in the wider society. Recognizing those forces is the first step toward challenging them.

What do you think? If political ideologies inevitably shape what gets taught in schools, how do we ensure that diverse perspectives – rather than the views of a single ruling party or economic class – are represented in the curriculum? And when economic pressures push education toward privatization, who bears the greatest cost, and how does that cost map onto existing inequalities of gender, race, and class?

References

1. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23337486.2024.2349365
2. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2012/6/29/militarising-education-in-israeli-schools
3. https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israeli-schools-help-create-militaristic-culture
4. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10936395/
5. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/02/22/race-and-lgbtq-issues-in-the-classroom/
6. https://edlawcenter.org/making-the-grade-2024-education-funding-disparities-persist-as-some-states-prioritize-tax-cuts-and-privatization/
7. https://firstfocus.org/resource/privatizing-public-school-funds-threats-to-equity-access-and-educational-quality/
8. https://www.epi.org/publication/u-s-investment-in-public-education-is-at-risk-vouchers-state-budget-austerity-and-federal-attacks-on-the-department-of-education-threaten-childrens-futures/
9. https://www.academia.edu/127598957/Impact_of_Privatization_of_Government_Schools_on_Quality_and_Access_to_Education_Perceptions_of_Stakeholders_Global_Educational_Studies_Review
10. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9597872/
11. https://edgate.com/blog/k-12-standards-integrates-dei
12. https://education.illinois.edu/about/news-events/news/article/2024/04/12/nine-powerful-ways-to-promote-inclusion-in-the-classroom