Add “patriotic education” to the list of Orwellian terms that have oozed out of the Republican Party during the past four years.
President Donald Trump’s call for new standards for American history education — to sanitize it by downplaying or removing references to slavery, the genocide of Native Americans and God knows what else — is the indoctrination playbook of dictatorial regimes. That’s not an exaggeration: To use one example, a key element of the Mao-era Cultural Revolution in China was to destroy old textbooks and replace them with new ones that scrubbed wrongdoing by the Communist Party and glorified the regime. The “elites” who taught the old lessons were purged or persecuted.
Now comes Trump and his proposal to establish a “1776 Commission” that will whitewash history texts in the U.S.
“We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms, and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country,” Trump said in a speech this month at the National Archives. “We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.”
Translation: Students would be taught that the U.S. stands above all other nations in the principles and wisdom of its leaders and institutions, and in the purity of our national values of freedom and equality. The message would be about a nation walking a shining path, not the sins it committed along the way. Those evils — slavery, the slaughter of indigenous peoples, Jim Crow oppression, internment of Japanese Americans, etc. — are all OK if we just focus on how great things turned out for white Americans. And of course if these things are considered just fine in history, they will be just fine if we do them again. This is exactly how indoctrination works: It seeks to permit atrocities in today’s world by forgiving or ignoring atrocities in history.
It’s a regressive and dangerous approach to learning history. Imagine if Germany suddenly decided that the Holocaust and Hitler were to be sanitized in schools — the whole world would realize Germans were preparing their youth to repeat these sins. This is precisely analogous to what Trump seeks to do.
Let’s be clear: American children already know they’re living in an exceptional nation. They learn early in life about the bravery of the patriots who fought for freedom, and about later generations that battled overseas to protect the world from tyranny. They learn about the wisdom and vision of the nation’s founders, who created a brilliant structure for a new democracy that has endured for centuries. They learn about our values of equality for people of all ethnicities and religions.
But for the nation to reach its ideal of liberty and justice for all, it’s vital for students to also learn how and why we have fallen horribly short of it in the past. They need to learn the various ways in which racist hatred has manifested itself, so they can spot it when it occurs today and can take action to stop it.
That means teaching them some highly uncomfortable truths about our history, and doing it frankly. Otherwise, we place ourselves on a path to repeating our wrongdoings.
And if there’s any doubt about the importance of teaching about the dark side of history, consider a recent survey showing that 63% of millennials and members of Generation Z were badly misinformed or confused about the Holocaust, not knowing that millions of Jews had died. Correspondingly, only 59% of the respondents said they believed something like the Holocaust could happen again.
Trump further went down the authoritarian path by vilifying history educators, accusing them of trying to divide and destroy the nation by trying to “make students ashamed of their own history.” He further accused educators of committing an actual crime, saying that the teaching of critical race theory was “a form of child abuse in the truest sense of those words.”
Trump’s speech was deeply disturbing. It was more than red meat thrown to his base supporters, more than his loopy idea of creating a park of statues of randomly selected American historical figures.
This is about weaponizing education and history, and propagandizing it. If Trump and the extremist right aren’t stopped, they will rob our children of the context they need to know to make our country a better place.
And given Trump’s clear designs on authoritarian power, it also opens the door to some dystopian possibilities. Today it’s about erasing slavery and genocide, tomorrow could it be portraying Trump as our Glorious Leader?
As has happened so often in the past four years, the situation prompts us to do something we never could have imagined we’d have to. In this case, it’s defending the history teachers who do so much to ensure that our children have a 360-degree view of our nation’s heritage and are equipped to keep us on a path to progress.