Rep Chuck Owens was singin’
some high
praise of the Louisiana Dept of Education’s guidelines
for K-12 social studies classes just the other day. After taking a look, we would beg to differ
somewhat.
The trouble actually starts
with Dr Cade Brumley’s introductory remarks that preface the document
containing the standards. He makes the
‘quest for freedom’ as the reason-for-being of America:
‘The quest for freedom is a
hallmark of the American story. From the signing of the Declaration of
Independence, to the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, to the
ratification of the 19th Amendment, the journey towards freedom has been one of
struggle and sacrifice.
‘We must, and we shall, teach
our children the fragility of liberty.
‘ . . . President Ronald
Reagan said, “Freedom is one of the deepest and noblest aspirations of the
human spirit.” I believe these standards create a Freedom Framework for
Louisiana educators to cultivate those aspirations every single day.’
Individual freedom as its own
end, not in service to another higher goal (freedom to cultivate the virtues in
our lives, freedom for the sake of working out our salvation in Christ), begets
horrible things. Freedom, unrestrained
by some kind of guiding and uplifting metaphysical framework, devolves
necessarily into personal and social destruction, throwing down any traditions,
laws, etc., that inhibit the desires of individual men and women from being
attained, whatever those desires may be:
from a ‘right’ to using psychedelic drugs to stealing others’ property
to redefining marriage to transgender surgery to assisted suicide.
That is the error of the
standards writ large. But there are some
smaller problems that need to be addressed as well.
One of them is the wokeness
present in the document, which shows in a couple of ways. First is the use of the words ‘enslaved
people’ and ‘freed people’ throughout the standards instead of older, more
familiar words like ‘slaves’ and ‘former slaves’. That’s right out of the handbook of political
correctness, of forcing Orwellian standards of wrongthink/wrongspeech onto
people (Leftist media operatives openly discuss their preference for the
‘enslaved people’ jargon here). There is also the inclusion of Juneteenth in
the lists of major US and Louisiana holidays like Christmas Day and
Thanksgiving Day. That is laughable;
this ‘holiday’ is about as phony as anything one can conjure up, as recounted
quite well by one of the essays at the Abbeville Institute (‘Juneteenth: A Celebration of Nothing’).
Will it be permissible to
point this out in Louisiana’s classrooms?
The Civil War gets a lot of
attention in the document. There are
problems here as well. First, the name
itself is misleading. A civil war is a
war between two factions for the control of a national government. That is not what happened in the US from
1861-5. First, the United States aren’t
a nation; our union is a voluntary federation of nations. Furthermore, the Southern States peacefully
withdrew from the union (they weren’t trying to conquer Washington, DC), but
Lincoln and his immediate successors used the military to force them back in
and keep them there. Thus, a more
appropriate name for this conflict would be the War between the States or the
War of Northern Aggression.
Nevertheless, the Social
Studies Standards frame the War mainly within the context of the issue of
slavery, but economics
were just as big a factor, if not bigger, than the moral/metaphysical issue
of slavery. Tariffs that favored Yankee
industry and harmed Southern agriculture weighed heavily on Southern minds at
that time; they also stirred up plenty of Northern angst and greed for fear of
losing their Southern cash cow if the Southern nation-States left the union. But there is no mention of the antebellum
tariff issue in the document.
Likewise, racism seems to be
presented as appearing only in Dixie (Jim Crow, etc.), while ignoring the
rampant manifestations of it in the Yankee
States.
Will it be permissible to
point this out in Louisiana’s classrooms?
There is an attempt in the
guidelines to valorize the feminists who agitated for the 19th
Amendment (granting women the ability to vote).
Yet the suffragettes pressed for ‘reforms’ and held beliefs that are
detrimental to society: e.g., supported easy
divorce, attacked the divine origin and authority of the Bible, advocated for women
in the role of pastors and priests, desired the complete secularization of
government (all this from only one of the suffragettes mentioned multiple times
in the document, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton).
Will it be permissible to
point this out in Louisiana’s classrooms?
Meanwhile, Christianity gets
short shrift, . . .
The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2025/02/garlington-another-view-of-las-new-social-studies-standards/.
--
Holy
Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema
to the Union!
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