The New Neo

This sort of educational project is being exposed more and more now, but for a long time such things have been happening outside of people’s awareness. And that was part of the left’s plan.

It’s hard to say how many states have experienced this degree of change in the goals of public education. What percent of the whole? Is it happening only in bluer-than-blue states, or has it penetrated elsewhere? My guess is the latter, at least to some extent.

Here’s part of the story in Minnesota (MDE stands for the Minnesota Department of Education):

When MDE appointed the standards drafting committee, it took the unprecedented step of excluding academic subject matter experts in history, civics, geography and economics. Instead, it stacked the committee with political activists, community organizers and their allies, who dominated the process.

These activists’ goal was not to revise and improve “rigorous standards” in “core academic subjects” in our state’s K-12 public schools, as law requires. On the contrary, they view Minnesota’s public education system — as drafting committee member Jonathan Hamilton, of Education for Liberation Minnesota, has described it — as a “white supremacist puzzle that must be taken apart and exposed for the lie it is (emphasis added).”

Activists’ weapon of choice in taking our schools apart is Ethnic Studies. Forget about teaching students about the historical leaders and events that shaped our democracy, like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and America-led victories in World War II. MDE’s new “fifth strand” trains K-12 students to view our nation’s social and political institutions with suspicion and hostility and seeks to enlist them in what Hamilton has referred to as a “political struggle” to change the social, economic, and cultural system that underlies our polity.

How will Ethnic Studies play out in Minnesota classrooms?

When the Minnesota Legislature adopted our state’s social studies standards in 2004, it authorized MDE to revise them every 10 years to “raise academic expectations for students, teachers and schools.” By law, state standards must be both “objective” and “measurable,” and “consistent with” the U.S. and Minnesota Constitutions.

But MDE’s proposed standards fail on all these fronts. Under the new Ethnic Studies standards, one of which is entitled “Resistance,” for example, students are instructed to “organize” to resist America’s “systemic and coordinated exercises of power” against “marginalized,” oppressed groups.

“Education for Liberation Minnesota” – Minnesota is in need of liberation, but not the kind that Jonathan Hamilton seeks. No wonder the left is so against Florida, DeSantis, and what’s happening there, as well as demonizing writers such as Christopher Rufo who have been hard at work exposing the left’s racist education game. The left is well aware that most Americans are against this sort of pedagogy, but the hope was to accomplish it under the sneaky guise of something that sounds righteous such as “ethnic studies.” Now more and more of America is becoming alerted and alarmed.

I am reminded of some passages from Allan Bloom’s prescient 1980s book The Closing of the American Mind. He knew what was happening and what it meant, and tried to warn us. Here’s a passage of Bloom’s that I quoted in this previous post:

Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more or less explicit, more or less a result of reflection,; but even the neutral subject, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person…Over the history of our republic, there have obviously been changes of opinion as to what kind of man is best for our regime…A powerful attachment to the letter and spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each man’s reason, was the goal of the education of democratic man…

But openness…eventually won out over natural rights, partly through a theoretical critique, partly because of a political rebellion against nature’s last constraints. Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new. What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders being charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests. I asked my first history professor in the university, a very famous scholar, whether the picture he gave us of George Washington did not have the effect of making us despise our regime. “Not at all,” he said, “it doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” To which I rejoined, “But you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” He got angry, and that was the end of it. He was comforted by a gentle assurance that the values of democracy are part of the movement of history and did not require his elucidation or defense. He could carry on his historical studies with the moral certitude that they would lead to greater openness and hence more democracy. The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.

In my post, I added this observation:

I find that passage about the obtuseness of Bloom’s history professor astounding as well as very descriptive of how we got here. The complete dominance of the radical professors as far as numbers go are a more recent manifestation, although there have long been some. But Bloom was a student of that history professor back in the mid-1940s, having been born in 1930 but having also been precocious enough to get his undergraduate degree at the age of eighteen from the University of Chicago after having entered at fifteen. The unnamed history professor Bloom describes in that passage was almost certainly not a radical. At most he was probably only mildly liberal. Perhaps he even passed for what was then known as conservative. If so, he was also unaware of the lessons to which Bloom refers to in that last sentence I quoted, even though – as Bloom notes – they had just experienced those lessons in WWII. The professor did not see any relation between what he was saying about the Founders and what would ultimately undermine our republic and all the values he probably held dear.

But Bloom, his student, saw it, even back then, even at so young an age.

Note also the tone of barely-restrained sarcasm; Bloom seems to have had a certain amount of contemptuous anger at those academics who could have been so stupid as to not have realized the effects of their throwing out the precious baby and leaving the dirty bathwater (it seems his first history professor was none too happy with his challenges, either). As the book goes on, some of the best passages involve Bloom’s description of the faculty’s craven abdication during the student uprisings of the 1960s, when he was one of those who tried (in vain, as it turned out) to hold his finger in the dike of the best traditions of Western Civilization.

So here we are.