It’s often been said that history is defined by those who write it; but even more powerful are those who teach it, especially as it pertains to the public-school system. And for any parent of a child in that system today, what’s being taught should sound the alarm.
Deliberately revising history to shape culture is nothing new. There’s an old Soviet joke, “The future we know, it’s the past that keeps changing.” America is far from immune from such revisionism. John Dewey, who is known as the “Father of Progressive Education,” wrote in his Pedagogic Creed:
“Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. In this way the teacher is always the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of heaven.”
By “true God,” Dewey meant Secular Humanism. As a signer of the first Humanist Manifesto, Dewey taught that the Judeo-Christian worldview was a “false bias” which the public schools needed to be protected from.[1] And by the 1960s, with the help of the Supreme Court, public-schools were stripped of both prayer and Bible reading. Twenty years later the Progressive historian, Howard Zinn’s, The People’s History of the United States, became widely popular mainly because of its jaundiced view of America’s past. By 1987, education had changed so radically that University Chicago Professor, Allan Bloom, wrote in “The Closing of the American Mind“:
“There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.”
That was nearly forty years ago. Since then American public education has deteriorated rapidly. Classrooms are increasingly painting America’s past as defined by racism and oppression. At George Washington High School in San Francisco, a 1936 mural depicting the life of the school’s namesake was suddenly viewed as racist and offensive. The local school board voted to cover the mural up for fear of traumatizing students and others in the community.[2]
Recently, the New York Times published a series of articles called The 1619 Project, which interprets America’s Revolution and its founding solely as a means to maintain slavery, what the authors call, a “slavocracy.” Even though widely discredited, school curriculums based on the “Project” and Critical Race Theory are increasingly finding their way in K-12 school curriculums. From Buffalo to Missouri to Cupertino, public-school educated children are being taught that America’s present is rooted and animated by racism, and that their inherited racial identities make them either an oppressor or oppressed.
These are society destroying lies, which is the objective. The question for parents of children in the public schools, is this an objective you share? If not, it’s time to educate yourself, take action, and consider finding an alternative to protect your child from increasing historical fiction foisted upon them by the state.
[1] John Dewey, “The Middle Works” (1899-1924)
[2] https://www.hoover.org/research/how-not-teach-american-history