Joy Pullmann writes for the Federalist about a major shift needed within the nation’s public schools.
President Trump is bringing some attention to the connections between this summer’s riots, the 63 percent of young Americans who believe America is racist, and the disaster that is civics and history instruction in U.S. public schools. He recently announced a federal commission to counter the saturation of anti-American ideology in American education institutions through “patriotic education.” He also “threatened to cut funding to schools that teach the 1619 Project.”
This is a start, but it’s going to take a lot more to address this serious problem. Significant structural changes are required, and state-level elected officials need to do most of it. Since schooling that teaches children to hate their own nation threatens its very existence, it’s past time to get serious about this.
The examples are myriad and expansive, and they are not limited to deep-blue locales (as if indoctrination is okay if local politicians approve). The College Board’s changes to its U.S. and European history Advanced Placement curriculum, which more than 800,000 American high school students take each year, are one major example. …
… Its curriculum revamp a few years ago more deeply reflected academia’s anti-Western, anti-American bias. College Board removed Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson from its curricula several years before protesters started tearing down their statues.
The bent of its curricula is to teach America’s best and brightest students to see their country and the Western heritage as racist, sexist, imperialist, and so on — as a story of oppressors and victims. It is not as blatantly offensive as critical race theory, but holds and imparts the exact same underlying anti-West, anti-American philosophy.
Obviously, such efforts to prejudice young Americans against their own country have been highly successful. We are now seeing the results on our Main Streets.
