In their latest piece for American Mind, Southeastern Legal Foundation’s General Counsel, Kim Hermann, and Litigation Director, Braden Boucek, explain that America’s public K-12 schools must stop teaching critical race theory and instead teach our children about true patriotism: the value of individual liberty and the price Americans have paid to secure it.
They start out by explaining:
Parents across America are fed up with schools replacing traditional education with identity-based programming and thinly disguised political indoctrination. Schools should be teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. But they aren’t, and the low proficiency rates only further expose the replacement of traditional education with activist ideology.
The social justice ideologies that have infiltrated our K-12 schools teach children to look, first and foremost, at skin color, undermining the uniquely American idea that all of us share a common identity, regardless of where our ancestors came from. This is destructive to the fabric of our country. But perhaps that is the point.
School districts are not subtle that their goal is to replace individual liberty with collectivism and state control as the purpose of government. One of our cases at Southeastern Legal Foundation alleges that the district teaches that individualism is oppressive, that both “equality” and the nuclear family are racist, and that we should question “the very foundations of the liberal order,” and even constitutional law.
After giving ample examples of how our nation’s schools are wrongly teaching ideas like America’s stated commitment to liberty is a lie and a pretext for white supremacy that must be countered by an intentionally discriminatory government willing to set aside equality, Hermann and Boucek challenge parents to remain engaged and focus not just on what should be excluded from curriculum. They explain parents must also focus on what should be included curriculum.
Which history are we going to teach? Teach it all. But parents have every right to expect that negative events are placed in proper context. It is far more common for America to have fought for freedom and equality and against racism, than the opposite. Our historical record proves it. The sad, simple morality lesson of America, the land of conquest and white supremacy, that divides us all and repels parents is truly bad history.
Perhaps because the concept of promoting values in schools makes us skittish, we’ve allowed this distorted version of history to become normalized. Public schools work for us. Let’s act like it. As parents, we have every right to demand our educational system cultivate a sense of gratitude for being an American. These are our children after all.
We never should have taken our eyes off the educational bureaucrats in the first place. Now we know. It’s a mistake we can correct. It’s time to tell the system how to do its job.
Read the full piece in American Mind.
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