Last Thursday, the Minnesota Department of Education held public hearings to approve its new social studies education curriculum that leaves out “patriotism” as a civic virtue and teaches that America’s rise as a global power from its agrarian roots led to “institutionalized racism.”
History Standard 20 for the period 1870-1920, in the new social studies/history standards, says:
“The student will understand that as the United States shifted from its agrarian roots into an industrial and global power, the rise of big business, urbanization, and immigration led to institutionalized racism, ethnic and class conflict, and new efforts at reform.”
John Fonte, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, wrote that “nine years ago a group of history professors from the University of Minnesota sent a letter to the state’s education department” complaining that Minnesota’s social studies standards “presented American history too positively.”
These academics wanted Minnesota’s children to learn that the story of American “primarily meant slavery for African Americans, genocide for American Indians, subjugation for women, xenophobia for immigrants, and exploitation for poor people.”
The 2012 standards also include “no references to 9/11, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, the Iraq War, the war in Afghanistan, the Gulf War of 1991, or terrorism itself.”
In addition, the Minnesota education standards no longer list “patriotism” in the list of “civic values.” As Fonte notes, Loyola University, Baltimore Professor Diana Schaub has described this deemphasizing of “patriotism” in the schools as “civics without a country.”
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