Hundreds of students walked out of classrooms around suburban Denver on Tuesday in protest over a conservative-led school board proposal to focus history education on topics that promote citizenship, patriotism and respect for authority, in a show of civil disobedience that the new standards would aim to downplay.
Got that? The conservatives in this school district want to replace an education in American History with “patriotic” indoctrination.
The school board proposal that triggered the walkouts in Jefferson County calls for instructional materials that present positive aspects of the nation and its heritage. It would establish a committee to regularly review texts and course plans, starting with Advanced Placement history, to make sure materials “promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights” and don’t “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.”
Those of us who had a fairly well-rounded education in history can see the fatal error in their reasoning here — namely, that the United States of America would have never come into being if there was not “civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law”. Civil disobedience is in our DNA and many of our signature civic achievements would not have happened without them. Pick your “agitator” — Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (the list is very long) — and you find Americans who exercised their rights to actively address a government that was oppressive. You can’t teach a sanitized history of the US — one that encourages blind obedience to authority — because blind obedience to authority is not our history.
Thank goodness these kids already know that and already know that sometimes you have to break the rules to tell an oppressive authority to check itself.
And how about those nanny state conservatives? Because there is NO Freedom in rewriting history in order to create a compliant citizenry.