The Left-Wing Plot to Misinform Our Children

I wrote here and here about the promulgation of new Social Studies standards for K-12 public education in Minnesota. Under the direction of far-left Governor Tim Walz, a committee representing various left-wing pressure groups is trying to completely revamp what we teach our children about, among other things, world and U.S. history. My organization has taken the lead in opposing this effort, and you can read the basics here.

Today, my colleague Kathy Kersten has a great op-ed in the Star Tribune on the proposed standards. You should read the whole thing for a horrifying exposé of how the Left plans to brainwash the next generation of Americans, as the same thing is going on across the country. Here are some excerpts:

By 2022, as your first-grader is learning that two plus two is four, the Minnesota Department of Education intends to mandate that she also learn to recognize “stereotypes,” “biased speech,” and “injustice at the institutional or systemic level.”

Your middle schooler will be drilled in how his identity is a function of his skin color.

Your high schooler will be required to explain how Europeans invented “whiteness” and that America’s 19th-century westward expansion was the shameful product of “whiteness, Christianity and capitalism.”
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If the new standards are adopted, the next generation of Minnesota citizens will be not only uninformed — but scandalously misinformed — about our nation’s history and democratic institutions. They will, however, be programmed to become the next generation of “woke” social activists, having spent their public-school years immersed in the lingo and thought world of the progressive left.
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George Washington and D-Day rate no mention, though they were highlighted in earlier versions of the standards. Abraham Lincoln and the Battle of Gettysburg are omitted, but students study partus sequitur ventrem — the legal principle adopted in Virginia in 1662 that a child followed the slave or free status of its mother.

World history from classical Greece and Rome to World Wars I and II — a major focus of the current and original 2004 standards — has been virtually eliminated. In its place, for example, as young people study “where buildings can and cannot be built” in the U.S., they will learn about “feng shui” — a pseudoscientific Chinese practice that Merriam-Webster defines as configuring a site or structure to “harmonize with the spiritual forces that inhabit it.”
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Indoctrination in identity politics under these standards would start in kindergarten, where 5-year-olds will “identify surface and deep characteristics of different ways of being (identity).” Fourth-graders are coached on how one’s “identity” and “biases influence decisions about how to use a space.” Seventh-graders are exhorted to “define race and ethnicity from different perspectives and make connections to one’s own ways of being (identities).”

By high school, students must “explain” — parrot back is more like it — “the social construction of race” and “assess how social policies and economic forces offer privilege or systematic oppressions for racial/ethnic groups.”

The standards portray America as a very bad place indeed. From elementary school on, students will be propagandized that we live in a greedy, “imperialist” nation, permeated by “powerful social, cultural and political inequities” which young people must “take action” to “address.” Yet they will lack the knowledge to put America’s alleged shortcomings in context, in part because the standards are silent on 20th-century totalitarian movements and atrocities like Soviet gulags, the Nazi Holocaust, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the 9/11 terror attacks.

He who controls the past controls the future. Where the Left controls the present, as it generally does in our public schools, it is determined to re-write the past. If the Left succeeds in that design, our country won’t have a future. A self-hating civilization cannot survive. Nothing is more important than resisting this radicalization and dumbing-down of the public schools.

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