‘Every child in America should be acquainted with his own country,” Noah Webster wrote in 1788. “He should read books that furnish him with ideas that will be useful to him in life and practice. As soon as he opens his lips, he should rehearse the history of his own country; he should lisp the praise of liberty, and of those illustrious heroes and statesmen, who have wrought a revolution in her favor.” Today’s American schoolchildren are certainly learning to rehearse useful ideas. But the exact nature of those ideas, and the ends they’re being used for, should send a shiver down the spine of anyone who cares about the real history of this country, not to mention our heritage in the heroes and statesmen of our past.
A new report from the Manhattan Institute’s Zach Goldberg and Eric Kaufmann provides some insight into what, precisely, American students are learning — and perhaps more important, how they’re being shaped by the taxpayer-funded activism that passes for education in this country today. The report begins predictably enough, detailing how “a representative survey of more than 1,500 Americans aged 18 to 20” suggests “that Critical Race Theory (CRT) and radical gender ideology, together known as Critical Social Justice (CSJ), is widespread in American schools.” Ninety-three percent of the surveyed demographic “said that they had heard about at least one of eight CSJ concepts from a teacher or other adult at school.” But the real revelation is the empirical evidence that exposure to those concepts “appears to have a significant impact in shifting children to the political left” — even if the children hail from more conservative upbringings:
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