Network Schools – Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for

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I’ve written several times about the POTUS’ latest diversionary ploy of attacking the supposedly national movement toward adopting social study texts that are designed to indoctrinate school children to “hate America”. As noted in my posts and countless articles on this issue, Trump’s are wrong in many ways.

• First and foremost, there is no national social studies curriculum. Texts are adopted in most cases by States and in many cases States leave that decision to local districts
• The “textbooks” he cites, notably Howard Zinn’s, People’s History of the United States- are not on ANY State approved lists. Moreover, Zinn’s books are not history books, they are trade books assigned by some teachers to offer a counter-narrative to the mythological stories that passed for factual history prior in public schools at the beginning of the 20th Century. Like the biographies and in depth books that dig deeply into individuals or time periods, the books that the President fears are ones that force students to probe into the root causes of an individual’s actions or the temper of the times.
• More chillingly, many of the curricular materials he critiques, notably the NYTimes 1619 Project, are free and on-line not printed material. They are often intentionally biased and, when assigned, are done so by responsible teachers in that context. Why? Because contrary to Mr. Trump’s belief history is not a compendium of unarguable and proven facts. It is an interpretation of a sequence of unarguable and proven events based on the thinking at the time they are being examined or the thinking of the author who is analyzing them.

In the NBC report reference in the above link, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, associate professor of history at The New School in New York City, writes: .

…we must never lose sight of the fact that as Trump rages about “left-wing indoctrination,” he strives only to implement groupthink of his own.And unlike all but the most extreme of his right-wing predecessors, he not only seeks to impoverish our approach to understanding the past. He now seeks to undermine the institutions where, for nearly two centuries, we assumed we could weather the latest classroom war, and even seek to understand it better, together.

Like so many of his assertions about the left, the POTUS accuses them of doing exactly what he wants and hopes his supporters will do. He WANTS to see students indoctrinated into RIGHT-WING thinking and wants to see his supporters take to the streets to support his anti-government ideology… to protest in favor of close-mindedness the same way his opponents protest in favor of open-mindedness. He is projecting what he and the GOP want to see– a close-minded adherence to a singular ideology– onto the “liberals” who seek only open-minded inquiry, who want to question authority, who want to see students ask “are you sure” when they are presented with ideas. THAT kind of inquiry, not the rigid adherence to doctrine, is the basis of scientific and technological advancement. When we abandon different perspectives, different approaches to teaching and learning, and different ways of thinking we abandon freedom in its purest sense. Presumably those libertarians who strive for freedom to carry guns and end government regulation will speak out in favor of allowing the freedom of thought in the classroom.