Former U.S. Education Secs Call for ‘Woke’ Civics
Six previous secretaries of education call for leftist reeducation of American students.
One would think that the last few generations of Americans were never taught the history of slavery, Jim Crow, the Trail of Tears, or the civil rights movement given a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed written by six former U.S. education secretaries. These relics of the swamp contend that 21st-century civics lessons must “grapple with the difficult and often painful parts of our history — including enslavement, segregation and racism, indigenous removals, Japanese-American internment, denials of religious liberty and free speech, and other injustices.”
We won’t argue that a few Americans could learn a thing or two about religious liberty and free speech, but we digress.
The fact of the matter is that it seems over the last couple of decades, these are the only civics subjects being addressed or “grappled with.” It’s not that students don’t know these realities existed in America’s history; it’s that too many young Americans don’t seem to recognize the distinction between past and current events. Nor do they understand the nature of progress.
Back to the education secretaries’ op-ed. As a solution to this nonexistent “problem,” they promote using the anti-American, Saul Alinsky-style community education known as “action civics.” Educating for American Democracy, or EAD — the curriculum promoting action civics — serves not to educate but to indoctrinate students with the leftist ideology of “social justice.” It would train students to become activists, not scholars. It teaches students not to learn history but to recreate it with points of emphasis coinciding with modern leftist sensibilities. And for the few conservative academics who dare to reject the Left’s revisionist history they face increasing hostility and discrimination.
As John Fonte of American Greatness warns, EAD is “a trojan horse for woke education” that has as its goal the fundamental transformation of the nation away from one rooted in individual rights and Liberty to a socialist nation governed by an ever-more powerful central government.
(Updated.)
