President Donald Trump has vowed to dismantle the Department of Education, yet his Education Secretary just unintentionally demonstrated why education is so important — by making an embarrassingly obvious gaffe.
When urging people to study American history, the Department of Education posted a photograph from British history.
“The Facebook post’s glaring error was first spotted by Wendy Rouse, historian and author of several books, including Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement and Her Own Hero: Origins of the Women’s Self-Defense Movement,” wrote Gizmodo’s Matt Novak on Wednesday. Responsibility for the post ultimately rests on the shoulders of Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, who shared Trump’s avowed goal to get rid of the Education Department.
“Rouse poked fun at the mistake on Bluesky, noting that it doesn’t show Americans, but rather British suffragettes,” Novak wrote. Breaking down the photograph in question, it can be deduced that it “dates to around 1912, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, and was taken in London. The caption ‘Suffragettes holding signs in London, c. 1912,’ really says it all. Women over 30 gained the vote in the UK in 1918, and British women over 21 gained the vote in 1928,” according to Novak.
The reporter added, “In the U.S., it was a slightly different story, with white women 21 or older getting the vote in 1920 with the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Women of color wouldn’t get full voting rights across the U.S. until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.”
Tossing in a dash of snark, Novak pointed out that “the gaffe by the Department of Education is rather humorous, but far from the first by this agency in the Trump era. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon regularly demonstrates the administration’s contempt for serious educational pursuits and has made verbal slips of her own since Trump took power again in Jan. 2025. One of the best examples is when McMahon referred to AI as ‘A1’ in a speech on education in San Diego, California, last year.”
Ultimately, Novak noted the striking parallel between an administration that says there should not be a Department of Education and the reality of McMahon’s mistake.
“They’re not technically able to completely abolish the Department of Education without Congress (though that didn’t stop them from destroying USAID), and they’re just hacking it into pieces to send various functions to other federal agencies,” Novak explained. “They’ve transferred at least 118 departments elsewhere, according to NEA Today, including the student loan debt portfolio which is now at the Department of Treasury.”
