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I can's say I miss the Soviet Union, but at least when their leaders lied, we knew it was propaganda. Trump's new school "patriotic education" plan sounds a lot like that.

Writer's picture: Chuck RaddaChuck Radda

Donald Trump, of Trump University "fame," would like American education to be more patriotic. His executive order would withhold funding from any schools teaching that the United States is "fundamentally racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory." This will be a tough pill to swallow for a country that is fundamentally racist, sexist, and otherwise discriminatory—a country that is preparing to expel millions of immigrants, where only one in ten CEOs is a woman, and where the president is asking Congress for special rules regarding the transgender and LGBGTQ+ communities.


To claim that Trump knows nothing about education is silly. He knows nothing about so many things that we tend to lose count. But Stephen Miller knows quite a lot, and we're sensing his brain at work these early days of the administration. The point of the "suggestion" is obvious: indoctrinating children into believing that America can do—has done—no wrong. Calling slavery an apprenticeship program where the government provided work experience for impoverished citizens may sound noble, but calling it what it was—some Americans owning and enslaving others—is more accurate. And more shameful. And addressing that shame would go a long way toward ensuring it won't happen again.


Trump doesn't care a whit about patriotism—he has spent his whole life stiffing the government. He does, however, care about forgetting, about our forgetting. If he can get us to forget about slavery, and his stooge Musk can get us to forget the results of fascism, it'll be clear sailing on the Gulf of White America where these two have yachts.


In the 1700s and 1800s, it was illegal for slaves to own books. Some benevolent masters snuck books to them, and others made an effort to educate them informally, at great risk to their own status and well-being. In Trump's fetid landscape, sneaking education to those deprived of it may come again.


Admittedly, some of Trump's agenda items are the ramblings of a nitwit, but for social studies instructors, even the possibility is chilling. And English teachers can forget Huck Finn and Atticus Finch, Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, probably Othello, definitely A Raisin in the Sun. Weak-minded superintendents and boards of education will be toast.


It's going to be the Civil War without weapons; Mississippi children will learn that transgender people are some sort of demoniac creation from the Prince of Darkness, and Rhode Island children will learn that transgender people are people...which is basically how the first Civil War started.

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