The words “patriotic education,” recently introduced by President Trump, bear an unfortunate similarity to patriotic reeducation, a term not generally associated with liberty.
Trump announced his intention to create a commission to study a pro-America curriculum during a speech Thursday, Constitution Day, from the National Archives. He said he wanted to “restore patriotic education to our schools,” largely in response to the Black Lives Matter movement and the New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project,” a series of essays that reframed American history as beginning with the arrival of the first slaves in the Virginia colony. The project, now being embraced by some colleges and already headed for grades K-12, places “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”
While this would have been an interesting idea for a doctoral dissertation, I’m not sure the country is quite ready to rebrand the Founding Fathers as little more than cruel, greedy bigots. Trump, while hardly the best narrator for this story, is not alone in worrying that the Black Lives Matter movement, for all the awareness of police brutality that it has created, has become a cudgel for those who want to deconstruct America, monument by monument.
Equally concerning are efforts underway to educate some federal employees about “White privilege,” “systemic racism” and “White fragility.”
In July, a whistleblower at the Treasury Department leaked documents about a diversity training course titled “Difficult Conversations about Race in Troubling Times.” According to Christopher F. Rufo, who received the documents and wrote about them in the Manhattan Institute’s “City Journal,” the course is based upon the “premise that ‘virtually all White people contribute to racism’ and have internalized ‘fairly consistent narratives about race’ that ’don’t support the dismantling of racist institutions.’ ”
Let’s just say, not really. At least not consciously, which is the conversation we’re not having but should: how the unconscious mind harbors racist attitudes. In his 2010 book, “The Hidden Brain,” former Post writer Shankar Vedantam argues that all people — Black, White and everyone else — are 100 percent racist in their subconscious minds. These biases form at early ages, and we basically spend the rest of our mature lives trying to tamp them down or eradicate them. Sometimes we fail, usually when stressed, afraid, angry or just plain tired.
This is also the underlying premise of the “diversity consultant” Howard Ross, who happens to be White, and who has led at least 17 training courses across federal departments, including at Treasury, since Trump’s inauguration. The problem, however, is that telling people they’re unconsciously racist, which requires about five minutes of explanation, doesn’t mean that all Whites are standby racists.
While I don’t worry much about adults being inconvenienced at work by a relatively innocuous time-waster, I do worry about programming young children to feel good or bad about their history. Ross tells his conferees to go home and talk to their children about race, which is fine to a point. The extent to which schools incorporate critical race theory into their curricula is bound to vary widely by state and district. Learning about the realities of slavery, Jim Crow, the ongoing fight for equality and other historical facts is justified and necessary, but the age-appropriateness of material should be scrupulously overseen by parents and pediatric psychologists, not agenda-driven ideologues.
It doesn’t take a degree in politics to see that, with Election Day six weeks away, Trump is creating a cultural conflict he thinks will get him reelected. Plainly, “patriotic education” is a coded dog whistle at a time when self-proclaimed “patriots” tend to cluster on the far-right fringes, bearing arms and waving battle flags. It’s the kind of tactic Republicans have employed for years, usually late in close campaigns. What a coincidence.
This much is certain: Trump isn’t the only one calling for a new curriculum in America. But he won’t be the one instructing children to go home and quiz their parents about their racism and white privilege. No, that job falls to the authorities from the Diversity Educational Complex, who are busy rewriting history as we speak.
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