Last month’s Western-civilization-themed address by Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference was timely in more ways than one. Rubio’s speech was at once a source of inspiration and an occasion for cynicism. Its themes are being tested now in the Persian Gulf and in our state legislatures, with the outcome uncertain and the fate of the West in the balance.
Rubio’s speech was a call for Western unity and revival in the face of challenges, not only from outside but also from what Rubio called our shared “delusion”: that national sovereignty and civilizational identity can be transcended in a borderless world — a world where international institutions rule, mass immigration poses no cultural challenge, a chastened West is merely one culture among many, and we are all “global citizens.” Against this fashionable globalist delusion, Rubio wants a revived pride in the West’s unique heritage to serve as a wellspring of joint European and American action in the international arena.
Will Rubio get his way, or has his call already failed? Our European allies waver in the Gulf, as the images of Churchill and other British greats are removed from U.K. banknotes. Perhaps worst of all — and virtually unknown even to conservatives — the study of Western civilization has largely disappeared not only from higher education but also from America’s K–12 schools. Rubio boasted that America, at least, had abandoned the globalist delusion, after which he invited Europeans to join our Western revival. Yet even as Rubio spoke, America’s K–12 schools were busy undermining his efforts.
The cynical reading of Rubio’s address is that he gave Europeans more credit than they deserved for loyalty to the West’s glorious heritage, hoping they would rise to his expectations. The still more cynical reading of Rubio’s address is that, knowingly or not, he gave Americans far more credit than we deserve for breaking with our own globalist delusions.
All is not lost, however. Although even America’s red states have largely purged the study of Western civilization from K–12, two states, Idaho and Texas, are pushing back against this trend. Rubio’s faith in our rejection of the globalist delusion is by no means sheer imagination, even if the countermovement he celebrates is still in its early stages.
Consider Idaho. You might think this ruby-red state would have preserved the study of Western civilization in its schools. Sadly, that is far from the case — and in no way unusual among red states. Until only very recently, the education bureaucracy and teacher corps of even the reddest states have been determinedly leftist and globalist in perspective.
This is reflected in Idaho’s current social studies standards. Most state social studies standards contain four basic subject bands: history, geography, economics, and civics/government. Idaho’s standards add a fifth basic subject in every grade: “global perspectives.” Idaho’s global perspectives subject band is overwhelmingly weighted toward a multiculturalist and globalist outlook, containing nothing on the importance of cultural assimilation, the dangers of relativism, the risks of dependence on adversaries for strategic goods, or the need to preserve national sovereignty. In short, the Idaho social studies standards purvey the very same globalist delusion that Secretary Rubio rightly deplores, while failing to teach his core concerns. Who would have guessed that Idaho, of all places, would be so very European.
And as in most other states, Idaho’s current social studies standards render it virtually impossible for students to gain any but the most superficial understanding of the role of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the development of the West — another theme that Rubio wants us to return to. This is first of all because the study of religion in Idaho’s standards has been globalized. That is, students are directed to study Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, as well as local indigenous religions, all at once and in equal measure. None of these religious histories are nested in a larger study of distinctive world regions — be it the West, China, India, or any other. Also, Idaho students learn little of the Judeo-Christian tradition, because the study of world religions is undertaken only in grades 6–9 rather than being repeated at a higher level of complexity in the later grades.
The result is that Idaho students gain only the most superficial understanding of civilizational traditions in general and the West in particular. Quite intentionally, study of the West’s distinctive character is diluted by the globalist perspective, as well as confined to the middle grades. Upper-level students get no opportunity to concentrate on the roots of the Western tradition — and this is common in the red states.
The good news is that Idaho Senate Bill No. 1336, sponsored by the state senate’s president pro tempore, Kelly Anthon (R., Rupert), has a very real chance of countering these problems, above all by instituting a required yearlong course in the “history and cultural heritage of Western civilization.” If S.B. 1336 is passed, Idaho would become, to the best of my knowledge, the first state in decades to require a dedicated Western civ course in K–12.
Idaho S.B. 1336 would also greatly improve the teaching of American history by mandating the study of original documents like the Mayflower Compact, the Northwest Ordinance, Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address, and more.
While S.B.1336 has cleared committee and seems headed for passage in some form, intense opposition to the Western civilization requirement remains, and various strategies for diluting or negating the requirement proliferate. Already, Idaho teachers are complaining that offering Western civ, even in eighth grade, would be “out of sequence.” Supposedly, Western Civ ought to be confined to younger students.
That is entirely wrong and reveals one of the education establishment’s core strategies for killing off Western civ. Unless students are taught a topic in high school, they’re going to get only the most superficial exposure to it and won’t retain it as adults. By bottling up Western history in middle school, leftist educators sabotage it, even as they claim to be teaching it.
Consider the magnificent, newly published, two-volume history of Western civilization The Golden Thread (the first volume of which I reviewed here). We finally have an up-to-date yet traditionalist Western civilization textbook, and a great one too. Yet it’s impossible to assign this treasure of a textbook to students who are not taking at least a high-school-level course in Western civilization. If Idaho were to require a year of Western civ in grades 9–12, it would be the first state to give public school students real access to The Golden Thread. Yet if Idaho allows a Western civ requirement to be fulfilled in the lower grades, left-leaning teachers and education bureaucrats would push it down to middle school. That would effectively gut the course and make it impossible to assign a textbook for mature students, such as The Golden Thread. That’s how Idaho could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
The other good news — and it’s very good — is that Idaho already has superb Western civilization standards (see pp. 68–72). These were drawn up for a high school Western civilization elective authorized in 2024–25. (Much credit for Idaho’s Western civ elective, and now the proposed Western civ requirement, goes to Samuel Lair, who works with the National Association of Scholars–convened Civics Alliance, of which I am a member.) Turning Idaho’s newly minted Western civ elective into a requirement — and placing it in high school — would vault the state into a position of national leadership in K–12 education, putting it on a par with Florida.
Yet much now hangs on the exact form that Idaho S.B. 1336 takes following amendments on the senate floor. Again, what’s needed is a full-year Western civilization requirement in grades 9–12. Pass that, and a national movement to restore Western civ to K–12 could follow. No stronger reply to the cynics would be possible.
Texas is also considering changes to its social studies TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) standards that would return Western civilization to its lost position of prominence. Because Texas is such a large state, this change would be immensely influential nationally. Textbook publishers closely follow Texas standards.
Note, however, that Texas is not (yet) considering a change as great as Idaho’s. The committee of subject experts that currently recommends expanded treatment of Western civilization in the TEKS standards cannot require a dedicated full-year course in Western civilization at the high school level. Only the Texas legislature can (and should) do that, and the Texas legislature is out of session until 2027. Yet a committee of subject matter experts is recommending a significantly more coherent and thorough emphasis on Western civilization in the state’s current high school world history standards. That is a very important development.
No state understands the importance of place, sovereignty, or heritage more than Texas. Yet the current Texas world history standards are surprisingly globalist in character. Material on Western civilization, particularly in high school, is thin, broken up, and scattered with little rhyme or reason among treatments of every other area of the globe. The Texas high school world history standards make it impossible to develop a clear sense of narrative continuity, not only for Western history but for the history of China, India, the Islamic world, and other regions as well.
This is intentional. The very purpose of globalist world history is to undercut or “deconstruct” any coherent sense of national or civilizational continuity, not only in the West but in general. The goal is to create not American citizens but global citizens. So, the globalist “delusion” decried by Secretary Rubio is being actively taught in, of all places, Texas. How could this have happened?
A big part of the answer can be found in an academic article — “Teacher Voices in Writing World History Standards: Hard Lessons from Texas” — by a professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, David Fisher. Fisher participated in two earlier TEKS revisions, and his article (which he surely thought would go unnoticed by conservatives), gives away the game. Fisher is stunningly honest about the mentality that prevails in the teacher-dominated “work groups” that play such an important role in the TEKS development process.
Although Fisher admits that the TEKS process is democratic and transparent, he bemoans the fact that teacher “expertise” must defer to the views of elected Texas State Board of Education members. Fisher treats K–12 teachers and professors like himself as neutral experts, as if only elected board members have values and biases. In truth, Fisher’s article reveals that he and most of his fellow educators are intensely biased against Western civilization, American exceptionalism, the free enterprise system, and Christianity. In fact, Fisher treats the very topic of Western civilization as inherently biased, as if any attempt to elevate and teach the cultural sources of our constitutional republic was itself a form of bigotry.
Fisher’s repeated description of the teacher work groups as “moving forward” toward a “global perspective” gives you a sense of his bias, as does his description of the elected members of the Texas State Board of Education, whom he says constantly slide “backward towards a more parochial perspective.”
Fisher exults over the ability of past teacher work groups to effectively hoodwink the Texas State Board of Education into accepting opaque wording changes to the state’s world history standards with little attention or debate. As Fisher explains, those changes all had the effect of thinning out coverage of the Western tradition, especially ancient Greece and Rome and above all the history of Christianity.
True, the Texas State Board of Education has a record of pushing back against the teacher work groups on high-profile controversies such as the Arab–Israeli dispute and the characterization of Islamic terrorism. But as Fisher gleefully reports, most teacher work-group recommendations on world history are obscure enough to be rubber-stamped by the Texas State Board of Education, without attracting “undue attention.”
This record of baseless, biased, and stealthy attacks on Western history by the teacher work groups is exactly what a newly appointed Texas committee of content experts has attempted to remedy. Instead of a brief passing mention of ancient Greece and Rome, the recommended revisions to the TEKS world history standards include specific treatment of ancient Rome’s “contribution to the development of republican self-government,” as well as crucial events like the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars. Landmark developments in the history of Christianity, like the Council of Nicaea, will also now be included in TEKS, unless the work groups manage to cut them out. None of these additions reflect Christian or Western “bias.” The newly recommended world history revisions simply restore the fundamentals of our common history.
Yet, just as they have in the past, teacher “work groups” are once again trying to block the return of Western civilization. This year, however, the work groups may be given less scope to interfere. And with luck, this time, the Texas State Board of Education will refuse to be snowed by deeply biased teacher work groups posing as neutral experts. The proposed revisions to the TEKS high school world history standards (see especially I-178–I-181) would mark a huge step forward for K–12 Western civ nationally, since Texas standards have an outsized effect on textbook publishers.
That said, the Texas legislature still ought to mandate a one-year high school course in Western civilization. Even if all the recommended revisions to the TEKS world history standards are adopted, it’s impossible to properly cover the history of Western civilization in the context of a world history course. The Golden Thread, for example, would still be tough to assign for a course so focused on the world outside the West.
A full year devoted to Western civ is what Texas high school students need and deserve. Non-Western history still can and should be taught, of course. That can be done in middle school and followed up on with an elective in high school. World geography courses can take up much of the slack on non-Western history as well.
When it comes to Western civilization, we are in a parlous state all around. Yes, the signs of Western cultural suicide are alarming. Yet the positive signals are real as well. Rubio’s address, the publication of The Golden Thread, and significant moves in at least a couple of red states toward a restored teaching of our heritage hold out real hope of restoration and revival. We will likely know within a month what’s happened in Idaho and Texas. Stay tuned.