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