A recent review by the Dr. Wilfred McClay for the Center for the American Experiment determined that Minnesota’s academic standards are “among the nation’s worst.” We’ve seen and addressed these social studies standards before at MFC, but Dr. McClay’s review deserves a closer look. McClay believes that not a single aspect of the new standards is worth adopting – and he’s right. Minnesota schoolchildren deserve better than what these new standards will offer.
According to Dr. McClay, our goal should be to create “a citizenry that will be competent for the sustaining of a free and self-governing people.” Basically, civic education should focus on teaching students the principles that founded this nation. Students should understand where our nation came from (celebrating the good without avoiding the bad), how our government works, and how to be a useful participant in all of it.
A civic education isn’t just learning how to vote in an election. As Dr. McClay points out, “it is about promoting a vivid and enduring sense of what we have in common, of our belonging to one of the greatest enterprises in human history: the astonishing, perilous, and immensely consequential story of our own country.” A civic education needs to imbue in students a deep understanding of what our nation means to them. It needs to encourage patriotism. It needs to promote the idea that our greatest strength comes from what we have in common.
Under the new Minnesota guidelines, however, fourth grade students will be asked to “identify the processes and impacts of colonization and examine how discrimination and the oppression of various racial and ethnic groups have produced resistance movements.” They call for students to create plans to address pressing contemporary issues in order to raise up “resistance” efforts. These standards promote a view that all humans are fundamentally unequal. They teach that the “oppressed” should tear down the oppressor. In short, they call for division: division between male and female, black and white, religious and non-religious, rich and poor.
We have become hyper focused on the things that separate us, instead of leaning into the things that bring us together as a state and as a nation. Dr. McClay points out that these standards don’t show our country in the proper light. Instead, they represent our history as “an ugly and soulless competition between the narratives of the dominant classes and the stories of the marginalized and oppressed and forgotten.” In this kind of environment, a divisive narrative spreads like wildfire.
There is no benefit to adopting these new standards. Children of all colors and backgrounds will be hurt, parents will be undermined, and schools will suffer. Kids need to be taught a full view of American history and civics – including both good and bad. It’s a serious degradation of our academic standards to infuse our schools with radical and divisive materials.
In short, in light of the great divisions facing our country, the goal of curriculum writers should not be to increase ethnic and class consciousness, but to foster unity. In other words, they should hope, with Margaret Thatcher, quoting Francis of Assisi, that "Where there is discord may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope."
