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Sunday, April 18, 2021

Tag: Patriotic

What is ‘patriotic education’ and why is it controversial?

President Donald Trump recently announced plans for a new commission to support “patriotic education.”

“We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country,” he said. “We want our sons and daughters to know they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.”

The September announcement was criticized as the latest move from the Trump administration to block efforts to educate people about the country’s history of racism — education that, of course, may not elicit warm and fuzzy feelings about America among today’s students.

But the news may also have left some people wondering: What is a patriotic education in the first place?

A long history of political education

Patriotic education is a form of political education — essentially, efforts to teach people to love America, and that usually

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Trump’s patriotic education ignores hard truths of U.S. history

Straw man arguments are popular because they’re hard to argue against, but it is certainly the case that President Trump’s recent declarations about anti-racism and education are made of straw — they don’t resemble much of anything actually happening in schools or higher education.

According to press conferences, political rally speeches, and the right-wing author who claims to be the inspiration for Trump’s Executive order, critical race theory has infiltrated higher education and corporate America’s efforts at diversity and inclusion. In response, the president has both forbidden certain ideas in any program that receives federal funding and promised to support a K-12 curriculum that counters the so-called damaging perspective of the Pulitzer Prize winning 1619 Project.

University of Georgia North Georgia professor T. Jameson Brewer

While it is far from clear on how legal or enforceable either of these efforts are given that the federal Department of Education is explicitly

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History Teachers and “Patriotic Education”

Photograph Source: Larry Jacobsen – CC BY 2.0

Conservatives are kicking around high school history teachers like a “political football.” The Washington Post recently reported that, “Trump seeks to turn local schools into another front in the culture war he champions, positioning history teachers as opponents of American greatness along with kneeling football players.” The President declared his war on history teachers at the first White House Conference on American History: “We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country. We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.”

We might wonder what would happen if a teacher took a knee during the daily playing of the national anthem in schools? Colin Kaepernick could afford the repercussions of his action,

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Trump’s push for ‘patriotic education’ ignores the complexity of our national story

Florida Today

History is not about exceptionalism. It is about confronting the past to help inform the present. Individuals who only wish to espouse an exceptionalism narrative are ignoring a fundamental truth that must be shared: There are always victims as well as victors, and decisions have consequences.

History also is not simple or straightforward. To argue otherwise is not to fully understand it. The recent call by the Trump administration to counter what he called “the crusade against American history” by pushing “patriotic education” is an example of the oversimplification of our understanding of the past. As the late historian J.M. Roberts famously argued, “History is the story of mankind, of what it has done, suffered, and enjoyed.”

I have spent my career teaching introductory courses to university students in the history of the United States, Europe, Africa, and the world. Students often come to the classroom with a

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What President Trump Gets Wrong About ‘Patriotic Education’

Opinion

—Illustration by Vanessa Solis/Education Week; Photographs by E+, iStock / Getty Images Plus

A real patriotic education rejects blind nationalism

By

Chris Dier, Takeru “TK” Nagayoshi, Erin McCarthy, Cecilia Chung, & Lynette Stant

In a somber back-to-school season gripped by the pandemic, President Donald Trump late last month announced a commission to promote a “patriotic education.” He provides a bleak picture of our nation’s classrooms, a radical wasteland where “left wing” teachers indoctrinate children to “hate America.” And despite a growing movement of educators calling for a more culturally diverse curriculum that acknowledges the impact of slavery and systemic racism in our country, Trump decries this push toward truth as “a form of child abuse.”

We, five of our nation’s teachers of the year, are deeply troubled by this.

A “patriotic education,” as we see it, is one where we embrace and value all students’ worth and dignity while

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Opinion: Patriotic education is a whitewashing of history – Opinion – Austin American-Statesman

President Donald Trump recently announced a commission on “patriotic education” that aims to refute the focus on systemic racism and the role of slavery in our society. This will ultimately propagandize and omit the truth in confronting difficult aspects of our history.

American schools have grappled with this nation’s complex, malevolent treatment of Native Americans, enslaved Africans and other immigrants by glossing over our troubling chapters, such as the horrors of the “peculiar institution” by referring to enslaved Africans as “workers” and the omission of the federal government’s anti-Asian racism and internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s.

We can’t allow the daily onslaught of politics to obscure an attempt to palliate the painful aspects of American history that fall short of our ideals. Nonpartisan, scholarly, community-involved curriculum reform that honestly assesses our past and connects to our present social challenges will “help redeem the soul of America” for our

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‘We will teach our children the truth about America’: Trump defends patriotic education plan likened to Hitler Youth

Donald Trump has once again touted his plans for a “patriotic education” commission for American schools to teach children to “love America,” a plan that has been likened to the Hitler Youth programme from Nazi Germany.

“I announced last week that we’re launching a pro-American lesson plan for students. [The] 1776 [Commission],” Mr Trump said to a roar of applause from his supporters at an airplane hangar rally near Dayton, Ohio, on Monday.

“We will teach our children the truth about America — that we are the most exceptional nation on the face of the earth, and we are getting better and better all the time. … No party can lead America that will not teach our children to love America,” the president said.

Shortly after Mr Trump announced his plan for the 1776 Commission last week, “Hitler Youth” began trending on Twitter as users compared the two.

“Since people

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What’s behind Trump’s push for ‘patriotic education’?

“The 360” shows you diverse perspectives on the day’s top stories and debates.

What’s happening

President Trump last week said his administration would be taking action to promote a “pro-American curriculum” in U.S. schools in an effort to counteract what he called “left-wing indoctrination” in education. 

Speaking at the National Archives Museum, Trump said he intends to sign an executive order to create the “1776 Commission” to encourage schools to teach a positive view of American history. The commission’s name appears to be a dig at the 1619 Project, a series of essays published last summer by the New York Times Magazine that argue slavery and racism are foundational elements of American history. Trump also took aim at critical race theory, an academic discipline focused on systemic racism.

In his speech, Trump called these views an “ideological poison” that threatened to erase the “miracle of American history” from U.S. education.

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President Trump’s ‘1776 Commission’ on Patriotic Education Is an Overdue Effort

America’s proud history is worth defending, and it is worth defending through government and politics. There are fair arguments about how best to go about that task consistently with a duly conservative skepticism about the proper powers of federal and local government, but conservatives should not shy away from conserving the core of our national history, ideals, and culture — a goal that not so long ago was neither partisan nor ideological.

The current lines of battle are joined around the teaching of the New York Times 1619 Project, Howard Zinn’s 1980 screed A People’s History of the United States, and other fact-challenged efforts to supplant the story of America, its ideals, and its exceptional history with critical-race and gender theory and leftist agitprop. It is wrong to fill the heads of children with falsehoods, or to subject them to outside-the-mainstream theories until they are old enough to

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Trump Said TikTok Deal Would Create $5B Patriotic Education Fund. ByteDance Says It Has No Clue

President Donald Trump suggested Saturday that the TikTok deal he gave his “blessing” to involved a $5 billion education fund for the United States, but ByteDance claims it didn’t hear of this until media reports emerged.

What Happened: “They are going to pay $5bn into a fund for education so we can educate people as to the real history of our country. We are getting very close to that deal,” the president had told his supporters on Saturday in North Carolina, the Financial Times reported.

ByteDance, in a Chinese social media post on Sunday, said it was the first time it was hearing of such a fund, according to Reuters.

“The company has been committed to investing in the education field, and plans to work with partners and global shareholders to launch online classroom projects based on AI and video technology for students around the world,” the TikTok parent said

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