Why DeSantis' pushback against woke education is so vital

The far left is winning its battle to teach a radically negative version of American history

While the mainstream media obsesses over Ron DeSantis’ pushback against woke education in Florida, it steadfastly ignores the rise of radically woke education in Blue states. Leftist organs like the Washington Post thereby uphold the fiction that DeSantis is a fanatic who has turned Florida classrooms into a culture war battleground.

The reality, as Stanley Kurtz shows in this article called “The Blue State Education Nightmare,” is that the left is the aggressor in this vital area of the culture war. It is hell bent on (1) indoctrinating America’s students in the belief that American history is little more than the story of “dominant classes” relentlessly crushing the “oppressed” and (2) organizing them to take the side of the oppressed in this struggle. And the left is succeeding.

Stanley focuses his analysis on nightmarish developments in Rhode Island, Illinois, and Minnesota. Of Rhode Island, he writes:

The Ocean State has just put in place an outrageously politicized and shamefully deficient set of social studies standards, and it has done so in the most underhanded fashion.

If you take a quick, superficial look at the content sections of Rhode Island’s Social Studies Standards, things might seem relatively normal. Many of the usual topics in U.S. history, for example, are present in the standards. The trick is that every topic must be taught in line with the new “anchor standards,” which demand radical leftist advocacy.

So, for example, the anchor standard on “power” tells teachers to “argue how power can be distributed and used to create a more equitable society for communities and individuals based on their intersectional identities.” This anchor standard on “power” is then cross-referenced in the various content units, for example, in the U.S. history unit on “The New Right and the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.” In other words, the standards effectively command Rhode Island’s teachers to present Reagan’s presidency by showing how an identity-based, equity-focused leftist coalition might have reversed his policies.

Almost all of Rhode Island’s anchor standards are about “equity” (equality of result), and the use of “identity, power, and resistance” to achieve it. Not a single episode of history can be taught outside the dictates of the anchor standards, i.e., without leftist advocacy.

Here’s another example. On economics, Rhode Island’s anchor standards instruct teachers to “argue how different economic systems can create more equitable outcomes for individuals and communities, particularly for those traditionally marginalized from the economic system.” That standard is cross-referenced in the U.S. history unit on the “Second New Deal.” That unit, in turn, suggests the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) as an example. Since the Socialist Party of America organized the STFU, this union is often cited by American history textbooks to illustrate the political goals of America’s socialists during the Depression. STFU organized poor black and white sharecroppers and tenant farmers, but its work was largely stifled by violent opposition from Southern white landowners and sheriffs.

There’s nothing wrong with studying STFU, but the anchor standards make that impossible to do without also advocating for socialism. Currently fashionable leftist histories, moreover, argue that capitalism is inseparable from slavery and racism. In that spirit, the deck is stacked against the free market and in favor of socialism by having students weigh alternative economic systems using an example in which a market economy is intertwined with segregation and racism.

The same story emerges from Illinois where, for example:

The “Informed Action” inquiry strand says that Illinois students must “analyze existing structures, systems and methodologies to determine what types of interventions or informed action will lead to increased equity, inclusion, and community and civic good.” Another inquiry standard tells students to “take measurable action to effect changes that bring about equity and inclusion.” Yet another inquiry standard explains that such action should be taken “in or out of school.”

Here we have a mandate for enforced political activism designed to advance DEI-based policies, both in and out of school. Thanks to the newly politicized inquiry standards, every topic in the Illinois social science curriculum is now an occasion for “action civics,” i.e., school-enforced political activism. And now, even the pretense of political neutrality is gone. Students are formally pressed to take political action in behalf of DEI.

Furthermore:

Civics must now “address inequalities” related to “sexual identity.” In economics, students must now compare capitalism, socialism, and communism with respect to their “impact on equitable outcomes.” As with Rhode Island, there is no call to compare different economic systems regarding their productivity, or scope for individual liberty. The questions effectively force students to choose socialism — and now they are pushed to undertake extracurricular political protest and lobbying on the topic as well.

As for Minnesota, Stanley contends that its new standards are even worse than those of Rhode Island and Illinois — worse in the sense of more openly radical:

Instead of stealthily interweaving traditional-sounding content with politicized “anchor” or “inquiry” standards, Minnesota is proposing new standards that formally add “ethnic studies” as a topic, alongside such traditional subjects as civics, history, economics, and geography. It’s tough to get further left than the coalition of educators who back “liberated ethnic studies,” and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has given effective command of the standards-writing process to that group.

The historian Wilfred McClay, author of the acclaimed history of the U.S. Land of Hope, blows the whistle on Minnesota’s standards in this report. McClay explains how the standards make “radical political activism” the goal of education. In effect, he says, “the standards require teachers to become political propagandists.”

McClay condemns the political ideology behind Minnesota’s proposed standards as counter to America’s founding principles. They amount to “an implicit calling-into-question of the very legitimacy of the regime under which we live.” American history is presented, not as “an effort to realize our noble founding ideals ever more fully, but rather as an ugly and soulless competition” between the “dominant classes” and the “oppressed.”

Can the far left pull off its attempt to have our schools delegitimate our constitutional system and demonize our country? The partial answer is that it already has in some states. And without strong resistance, including from moderate Democrats, the far left will continue its march through educational instruction in America’s Blue states.

In Florida, Ron DeSantis is resisting strongly. Other Red states will likely follow and even light-Blue Virginia is fighting back, for now, under Glenn Youngkin.

We’re on the verge of an America with two deeply conflicting versions of its history. When we reach that point, we truly will be two Americas.

That’s not a great outcome, but it’s far better than what looks to be the alternative — an America unified around the subversive and highly misleading version of our history the left has imposed in Rhode Island, Illinois, and Minnesota.