Ben Carson, retired neurosurgeon and author of Created Equal: The Painful Past, Confusing Present, and Hopeful Future of Race in America, told Breitbart News about a free-of-charge K-5 educational curriculum challenging conventional racial and ethnic agitation launched by his organization, the American Cornerstone Institute (ACI).
Little Patriots, an educational resource produced by ACI, counters neo-Marxist frameworks pushed on many students. Carson highlighted “critical race theory” and the “1619 Project” as examples of leftist content built upon false premises that his organization’s curriculum seeks to correct.
“We noticed — obviously, as many other people did last summer — that the things that were being taught to our kids were false,” Carson said in an interview included in Friday’s edition of the Breitbart News Daily podcast with host Alex Marlow.
Ignorance of national history disconnects people from their cultural heritage, Carson warned. He alluded to how poor quality education — combined with historical misinformation and disinformation disseminated via the machinery of culture — is uprooting Americans from their heritage and making them vulnerable to political demagoguery.
He continued, “I would see these interviews on television — man-on-the-street interviews — and how little our people knew about our history and our principles, and of course, that’s very dangerous, because your history gives you your identity and your identity gives you your beliefs, and if you interrupt that chain, you’re like a leaf blowing in the wind so easily swayed by anything that comes along, and that’s what’s happening to our country.”
“We decided to put together a learning program at American Cornerstone, which is a think-tank-slash-do-tank, that means we don’t just think about stuff, we actually do things to solve problems,” he added. We’ve created a beautiful learning program online called Little Patriots, the latest iteration of which is Star Spangled Adventures. It’s a free cartoon series, K through 5, and it’s perfect for private and public schools, and helps the kids to learn all about our history.”
Little Patriots teaches “the real history of America, warts and all,” Carson remarked. “We don’t hide anything, but it’s put into the proper perspective.”
Carson reflected on how reading about people’s achievements protected him from falling prey to leftist paradigms framing blacks as victims.
“We were very, very poor,” Carson recalled of his childhood and upbringing, “but between a couple of those books, I could go anywhere, I could be anybody, I could do anything, I could forget about the poverty and start thinking about what would happen with my life as I started reading about people of enormous accomplishment in all kinds of fields, and that told me that the person that has the most to do with what happens to you is you. It’s not somebody else, and I stopped listening to all the garbage around me, people saying, ‘You can’t succeed. Society’s stacked up against you.’ All that crap was going on way back then.”
Carson noted the left’s fomenting of ethnic and racial grievances.
He said, “[Created Equal addresses] “victimhood, critical race theory, 1619, all of those things which they say they are not teaching. They are teaching white kids that they’re oppressors and making them feel guilty, teaching black kids and minorities that they’re victims and that the system is stacked up against them, that no matter what you do, you’re going to be at a disadvantage.”
“All that does is create resentment and animosity between people,” he noted. “What is the end goal of that kind of teaching — which is absolutely false — anyway?”
Ethnic and racial agitation tears apart America’s cultural fabric and makes the nation vulnerable to internal collapse, Carson held.
“The United States of America is an incredibly powerful nation,” he said. “We can’t be brought down by China or Russia or North Korea or Iran, or any other place, but we can be brought down from inside. A house divided against itself cannot stand. That is what’s in the process of happening, right now, driving wedges between us on the basis of race, which is the easiest one, but also on the basis of income, age, political affiliation, religion, gender, you name it, people are driving those wedges and it is having the effect that they want. It is destroying our nation.”
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