For progressive educators, social engineering has long been the priority. This model curriculum is the latest evidence.
For progressive educators, social engineering has long been the priority. This model curriculum is the latest evidence.
M ost parents don’t know that the public schools were originally designed to replace them.
The progressive education movement in the United States, which is almost solely responsible for the establishment and administration of our schools, has always looked down on what Ellwood Cubberley called “mere learning.” The movement’s luminaries have historically held that governments should use public education to renovate society from the bottom up, engineering the thoughts, values, and habits of the populace and making them more pliable and useful to the state. From the 19th century to the present, parents have been greeted with suspicion by progressive educators as potential rivals for the mind and soul of the child. When you dig into the history, it’s not hard to see why.
Take Horace Mann, for instance, the father of the progressive education movement. A devout Unitarian and a believer in the perfectibility of mankind (those two often went hand in hand during the 19th century), Mann was of the view that education “must be looked to for the establishment of peace and righteousness upon earth, and for the enjoyment of glory and happiness in heaven.” It’s unsurprising, given these convictions, that when he became the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, Mann expanded the role of the teacher beyond its traditional remit. If utopia was to be birthed in 19th-century New England as he envisioned, teachers would have to annex social and spiritual territory that once belonged to parents and priests.
Mann was openly criticized for his policies by the House Committee on Education in an 1840 report. Congress, correctly, concluded that his methods had been devised “more for the purpose of modifying the sentiments and opinions of the rising generation, according to a certain government standard, than as a mere means of diffusing elementary knowledge.”
Mann’s ideological progeny have carried the torch of his vision ever since. His most influential heir was John Dewey, the Saint Paul of the progressive education movement and still, 70 years after his death, the most significant education theorist in American life. Like Mann, Dewey rejected the idea that the primary purpose of education was to impart elementary knowledge to children. He too wanted to fit rising generations for life in a society of his own political envisioning. “Apart from the thought of participation in social life,” he wrote, “school has no end nor aim.” He further noted that “the conception of education as a social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind.” In other words, the purpose of public education is to raise children for life in a political order envisioned by the educational establishment. See Dewey’s three-pronged educational creed:
I BELIEVE THAT
— the teacher is engaged, not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life.
— every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling; that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.
— in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.
Many Americans would argue that the first two of these prerogatives belong mostly to parents while the third belongs to Jesus Christ, if to anyone at all. But for Dewey the roles of mother, father, Lord, and savior to the children of America can and must be combined and played by a priestly caste of government-employed teachers.
There is a straight line to be drawn from these ideas to what is now happening in California. As I write, the state’s legislature is pushing to make ethnic studies mandatory for every high-school student in the state. Governor Newsom vetoed a bill to that effect last year, on the basis that it contained no clear course guidelines in the content of the bill. The law’s advocates were clearly attempting to sneak it through the legislature with a Pelosi-style “We have to pass it to see what’s in it” strategy. To Gavin Newsom’s credit, he was having none of it. The state is now required to submit, by the 31st of this month, a “model curriculum” for ethnic studies to the board of education for evaluation.
The first draft of the model curriculum was utterly appalling. The purpose of ethnic studies is ostensibly to teach students about the unique contributions that African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and other minorities have made to American life. This seems like a good idea. There is even research to suggest that the subject engages poorer students of color in their studies to an encouraging extent.
But the initial draft submitted to the school board was something far more sinister than what was advertised. It was, quite simply, the most radical piece of woke-left agitprop that you are ever likely to read. One sample lesson includes a list of historic American social movements. The list includes Black Lives Matter, Me Too, the push for criminal-justice reform, and, seemingly out of nowhere, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement for Palestine (BDS).
Leave aside the grotesque anti-Semitism of BDS for a moment — the movement simply has nothing to do with American history of any sort. Even so, the lesson plan describes BDS as a “global social movement that currently aims to establish freedom for Palestinians living under apartheid conditions.” That the authors of the lesson plan share in the anti-Semitism of the BDS movement is confirmed elsewhere in the curriculum. The 1948 Israeli War of Independence is referred to only as the “Nakba,” an Arabic word that means “catastrophe,” and the accompanying lesson contains nakedly anti-Semitic Arabic verses and proverbs directed at Jewish people. Needless to say, Jews were not included in the curriculum as one of the ethnic minorities fit for study and veneration.
Californians, to their great credit, have noticed, and have taken action. Of the 57,000 comments that the state board of education has received about the first draft of the curriculum, 30,000 concern its marginalization of and/or outright hostility toward Jews.
But the curriculum’s manifold iniquities are not limited to instances of rabid anti-Semitism. Quite incredibly, a list of 154 influential people of color omits Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, and even the late congressman John Lewis. Instead we find a roll call of violent revolutionaries including Pol Pot, the architect of the Cambodian killing fields (and sometime beau ideal of one Noam Chomsky).
Then there are the neologisms and the newspeak. “Herstory” and “hxrstory,” for example, are to be found in the glossary of terms, and indecipherable nonsense like this appears in the introduction: “Ethnic Studies is about people whose cultures, hxrstories, and social positionalities are forever changing and evolving. Thus, Ethnic Studies also examines borders, borderlands, mixtures, hybridities, nepantlas, double consciousness, and reconfigured articulations.”
It goes on to say that the proposed curriculum would “critique empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism and other forms of power and oppression.” It would equip students to “build new possibilities for post-imperial life that promotes collective narratives of transformative resistance.”
The “post-imperial life” that the authors of the report are aiming at is a lineal descendent, in pedagogical terms, of Mann’s “establishment of peace and righteousness upon earth.” The purpose of the public school in both instances is to train the child to be an agent in bringing about the social vision of a technocratic elite.
California in particular has a fairly ignominious history in this respect. The California constitution, adopted in 1849, calls for a state superintendent of education. After the tenure of three fairly nondescript figures, the role was taken up by John Swett, an important figure in the history of progressive education. According to Swett, “children arrived at the age of maturity belong, not to the parents, but to the State, to society, to the country.” In his biennial report of 1864, Swett laid out a set of propositions considered by him to be essential for the development and success of the public schools. One of the propositions is as follows:
The vulgar impression that parents have a legal right to dictate to teachers is entirely erroneous. As it would be manifestly improper for the teacher to undertake to dictate to the parents in their own house, so it would be improper for the parents to dictate to him in his, the schoolhouse.
Thus, the principle is established that the authority that the teacher over the child at school is equal to that of the parent over the child at home. That being so, it was natural for the state, on March 28, 1874, to make it a penal offense for parents to send their kids to private schools without the consent of the local public-school trustees.
The basic project of progressive education has remained unchanged throughout the years. Educators hypothesize a utopian vision of a state-run future toward which children are shepherded and cajoled. The difference today is that the “post-imperial life” for which radical educators yearn is more sinister and more laced with intergroup violence than was the naïve, anodyne vision of a Mann or a Dewey.
American parents who have their kids in public school need to rid themselves of the widespread notion that their hopes for their own kids are shared by the theorists whose ideas have trickled down into our classrooms. The men and women who come out of our teacher-training programs have been equipped with a certain vision, of what it means to be human, that many parents would reject if it was spelled out for them.
Thankfully, the college professors, high-school teachers, and “ethnic-studies experts” who put together the first draft of this curriculum have spelled it out a little too boldly for their own good. The draft was rejected out of hand by the president of the state school board, dismissed by the governor, and excoriated by the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times. Even more encouraging, an inspiring campaign against the curriculum has been organized by a group of concerned California parents, who’ve come together to found the nonprofit Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies (ACES), under the leadership of Elina Kaplan. ACES exists with the sole purpose of “removing narrow political agendas from the model curriculum and ensuring that, instead, it builds inter-ethnic group understanding and mutual respect.”
But even if the curriculum were to be radically renovated for the next draft, could we really expect anything more than a subtler form of propaganda? The entire subject of ethnic studies as constituted in the California education system is so entangled with radical political theories that it’s doubtful a curriculum of any academic value could end up on the voting docket.
It seems inevitable that this will be yet another progressive experiment for which American children serve as lab rats. Since there is no other area of American life that conservatives have so comprehensively abandoned for such a long period of time as K–12 education, children in the public schools today are fated for this kind of indoctrination, just as the children of Mann and Dewey were by the educational puppeteers of their own day.
Short of putting their kids in private school, the best that parents can do is to take a leaf out of Elina Kaplan’s book and organize against the initiatives of the social engineers.