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My friend and colleague Larry Sand, president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network and the man to read on the current state of (mis)education in America, wrote recently at FrontPage Mag about the dismal but unsurprising results released this month of the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, the NAEP is a test that measures the knowledge of American students in various areas. The most recent results reveal that a pitiful 13 percent of eighth-graders met proficiency standards for U.S. history – “proficiency” meaning they could “explain major themes, periods, events, people, ideas and turning points in the country’s history.” Only about 20 percent of students scored at or above the proficient level in civics. Both scores are all-time lows for these two tests.
Yes, schoolkids are still reeling from the impact of the manufactured COVID pandemic, but Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (the organization behind the NAE) told reporters that the problems predate the pandemic. “It’s a decline that started in 2014, long before we even thought about COVID.” As Sand notes, “the Wall Street Journal observes that this is the fifth consecutive year that ACT scores have declined, and the first time that the average score has dropped below 20 since 1991. English scores fell to 19 out of 36, down from 19.6 last year.”
Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, a Biden appointee who has denounced the U.S. as a racist nation and who supports the Marxist-based tenets of Critical Race Theory and gender ideology, also blamed the pandemic but went on to accuse his political opponents falsely of “banning history books” and “censoring educators.” He’s referring to conservative efforts to push back against the kind of widespread ideological indoctrination Cardona wants in education – the kind that closes young minds, not opens them.
Larry Sand writes, “When teachers spend time forcing race- and gender-infused woke gibberish down the throats of American children, less time is available for more traditional subject matter.” He goes on to cite “a few of the myriad instances of students being hammered with the ravings of the woke”:
In Buffalo, New York, students were told that “all white people” perpetuate systemic racism, and kindergarteners were forced to watch a video of dead black children, warning them about “racist police and state-sanctioned violence” that might kill them at any time.
The San Diego Unified School District orders students to “confront and examine your white privilege” and to “acknowledge when you feel white fragility.” Additionally, children are told to “understand the impact of white supremacy in your work.”
In a training session for teachers in Seattle, schools were deemed guilty of “spirit murder” against black students.
In Springfield, Missouri, teachers are trained that people are given a “biological sex assigned at birth,” which often conflicts with their “gender identity” and “gender expression.”
In Illinois, the Evanston–Skokie school district has adopted a curriculum that teaches pre-K through third-grade students to “break the binary” of gender.
Sand rightly concludes, “So instead of learning factual American history—the good and the bad—students are now at the mercy of far-left advocates pushing a radical racial and sexual agenda. Unless the education establishment reverses course in a hurry, parents, already responsible for feeding, clothing, and housing their children, will need to educate them as well.”
I am in favor of reordering society so that parents are more responsible and involved in their children’s education, and part of that reordering involves completely abandoning public education, which is a terminally ill case. As I’ve written and spoken about on many occasions, the radical Left in our country long ago gave up marching in the streets for the “Long March through the institutions”; they realized that the system is more effectively and easily subverted from within than destroyed from without. The result is the complete takeover of the field of education by cultural Marxists whose fervent mission is the dismantling of Western civilization. The NAEP test results are the rotting fruit of the seeds sowed by those insurgents.
But our schools are only one, albeit a major, facet of the problem of American education. Other facets are cultural and technological – for example, there is the damage done by the soul-sucking abyss of cell phones and other tech toys that corrode our brains with the shallowest-imaginable distractions and trivia, like TikTok dances, gaming, and of course, the bondage — if you’ll pardon the pun — of porn. And our youth are deeply immersed in a pop culture that is driven by the now, the new, and the what’s next. All these things and more collude to push the past into a gaping black hole of forgetting.
My wife and I homeschool our own young children but I also teach teenagers from other families in our small homeschooling community. Just this month, for example, I concluded a course on the history of Christianity from the early church through the Reformation. The previous year I taught a Great Books class that was essentially a survey course on heroic epics from Gilgamesh – literally the earliest piece of literature in existence – through Homer and Beowulf and Arthurian romance to Don Quixote and C.S. Lewis.
My own personal teaching experience confirms the findings of the NAEP: that young people – even homeschooled kids, who tend to be better educated and less in thrall to the brain cell-killing distractions and seductions of pop culture – are disturbingly ignorant of world history, American history, even very recent history and current events. This is a generalization, of course – some kids are more knowledgeable than others, but the generalization still holds. It is disheartening and alarming that teenagers today (again, I’m generalizing) don’t have enough of a big-picture grasp of history’s timeline to know that Julius Caesar came before King Henry VIII, or who Charlemagne was, or that Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello and Leonardo were real-life Renaissance geniuses and not just Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
In a separate article about the NAEP results, Patrick Garry at The Imaginative Conservative notes correctly that the decline of history test scores “constitute a deliberate design” on the part of the Left, because the “erosion of historical knowledge is a necessary prerequisite to the construction of the new society evidently desired by” what he calls “modern liberalism” (I would argue that “liberalism” is a monstrous misnomer; today’s “liberals” are anything but liberal. They are totalitarian, while today’s conservatives are the true classical liberals.) Garry goes on to say that “an erosion of history is the first necessary step to the left’s transformation of the foundations of culture and society—a transformation that sees an ahistorical all-powerful government replacing all other traditional civic institutions.”
As I tell my students, if you don’t know the history of the civilization in which you have been blessed to be born and raised; if you aren’t familiar with the great figures of the past whose transformative charisma and courage helped steer us out of barbarism; if you don’t appreciate the grand sweep of our struggle for the freedoms and prosperity of which you are the heirs; then you will be easy prey for the lies and manipulations of totalitarians and their lust for power. You will find yourself under the boot heel of a State power that has rewritten or erased the past in order to prop itself up, and you and your friends and family won’t possess the cultural identity or legacy that would empower you to resist.
Ignorance isn’t bliss. It’s slavery.
POstmodern man is trapped in the prison of the present with no awareness of the past and an idealistic view of the future ..THey live in a hyper NOW NOW NOW ..just living for the day
Good one! Christopher Lasch said something just like that in, “The Revolt of the Elites”.
Ivan Pavlov would be proud. Those Marxist teaching are children have really got them trained. In college they’ll sit quietly while leftists spew their nonsense from the likes of Oprah, the Obamas,
Kamala, Bernie Sanders, Cher and that ilk. Yet, get all wee wee’d up when a conservative tries to speak. That isn’t protests, that’s obedience.
Yes , history is very important to both know and understand. As the ancient Roman , Marcus Tullius Cicero had ,wisely written “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history ?”
An writer for the newspaper “Epoch Times” was right on the mark when he wrote in his June ,8 2021 article
“If there is anything the Founders constantly repeated, certainly one of the most important was the importance of studying history.”
Hopefully, most of these kids will be like me… after realizing how I had bought into the post-Vietnam zeitgeist for ditching all classes in the 1970’s, and how the culture had robbed me of so much thru guilt trips and public shaming (you know, “School is for fools” etc. and “you’re a military brat with short hair, ergo, you’re a baby killer”
But that anger might have actually been a good thing, as in it pissed me off so bad that I’ve spent the last 35 years trying to play catch-up, devouring vast sums of information in all its forms.
FPM has been a touch-stone or me for most of those 35 years.
Whats the big deal? I watch a lot of documentaries on Netflix.
That should be educational enough imo.
The history of the United States is the history of racism.
Climate Change is a much more immediate problem. If we all just sacrifice a little bit more, it can be solved.
JFWY
We will die from not reading history, it will truly be the death of millions.
Which is just the way they want it.
“Climate Change is a much more immediate problem.” The old conundrum, garbage in, garbage out! Just what the article was talking about, the brain-washing of the gullible with leftist dribble!
Victim initiated redistributions of the accumulated proceeds of undeniable human slavery are not only just and justified, but mandatory.
The proper tactic, if you know what’s good for you, is to exit the vehicle when approached, leaving valuables upon the passenger seat, and placing the keys upon the roof. Practice the methodology prior to leaving the house to attenuate the prospect of the well preserved beating you have coming. You pig.
It certainly is a Babylon Bee headline but somehow, I’m not laughing.
If Our Children are to be “Taught”anything concerning”Racial Inequities”it should be that they should be PROUD of our Nation for “Healing”so many of it’s WOUNDS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sir John Glubb has a book length essay titled”The Fate of Empires” written in 1976. The adage that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it is well documented there. I believe the lesson of history is that we don’t learn from history. We are not immune from the stages of former civilizations that include our current trend towards cultural suicide. Can it be reversed? Keeping our children ignorant will prevent it.
Mr. Tapson, you mentioned teaching a course on the history of Christianity. Would you refer me to any books or websites that you use for this teaching?
This is deliberate. When the far Leftists of the 1970s found that bombing police stations, Army recruiting stations and the Capital building wasn’t winning them any friends, many, like Obama pal and former Weather Underground communist terrorist bomber Bill Ayers, went into education. (In Ayers’ case, he taught “education” to aspiring teachers at the prestigious Northwestern University. There, they trained a generation of teachers to put into practice the “critical pedagogy” theories of Brazilian communist Paulo Freire. He believed that teaching standard academic subjects only prepared students to replicate the existing “oppressive” society. Instead, he believed, education should be refocused on creating in students a “critical consciousness” to make them political activists and revolutionaries who would overthrow the structures of that society. Thanks to American-Canadian communist and Freire acolyte Henry Giroux, Freire is taught in all U.S. teacher colleges. And that’s why our students know nothing but can identify “systemic oppression” everywhere.
In the final episode of his great series, A History of Britain the historian Simon Schama described in The Two Winstons
And…