As America looks back on the September 11 terrorist attack that changed the nation, the direction of education in the country seems on track to ensure that U.S. students either forget that day entirely or view it as a result of America’s own failure to be open and accepting of other cultures.
Signs of the promotion of a “borderless” country that fosters unfettered multiculturalism could be seen decades ago in progressive school textbooks read daily by American students.
“Culture war” commentator Stanley Kurtz tells Breitbart News that the situation is likely only to grow worse with the left-leaning Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History and European History frameworks shaping the minds of current-day American students.
Kurtz cites a piece by New America fellow Michael Lind, who wrote at Politico Magazine in May that the 2016 election has seen the near completion of “the reassembling of new Democratic and Republican coalitions.” Lind went on to describe his view of the future of the Democrat Party:
The Democrats of the next generation will be even more of an alliance of upscale, progressive whites with blacks and Latinos, based in large and diverse cities. They will think of the U.S. as a version of their multicultural coalition of distinct racial and ethnic identity groups writ large. Many younger progressives will take it for granted that moral people are citizens of the world, equating nationalism and patriotism with racism and fascism.
Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., says he was “taken aback” by Lind’s prediction of the future of the Democrat Party.
“When I read that I thought to myself, he’s right; in fact it’s already happening,” he observes. “This is what students are taught in college today, and the new AP U.S. history and AP European history frameworks extend those same ideas into our high schools.”
He explains further:
There’s virtually nothing in the College Board’s new frameworks about the dangers of terrorism or the historical clash of European and Middle Eastern culture. The underlying message is that patriotism is bad, America and the West have been oppressors, and true history is world history.
In October 2015, Kurtz told attendees of a New Hampshire forum on federalism that the battle over the AP U.S. History (APUSH) framework would be worse than that over the Common Core standards.
He spoke to Breitbart News at that time:
The APUSH battle is the leading edge of what is rapidly becoming a national curriculum controlled by the left. The reason why APUSH is the tip of the iceberg on this is because the AP program is run by the College Board and that program is now expanded to cover about one-third of America’s students. However, the College Board — and some of the government folks who subsidize the College Board — want to expand it even further. They’d like to see it move up to maybe 40 percent, 50 percent of American students.
The AP program covers every single subject in the curriculum, and we’re talking about one-third, and maybe 40 percent, 50 percent of American students, perhaps more. So, if you control the curriculum for every single AP course, you have in effect created a national curriculum. You have made an “end run” around the states and the districts and, of course, the voters and parents they represent, and you have literally handed control of America’s curriculum to the leftist college professors who advise the College Board.
Kurtz believes that competition for the College Board is essential to countering the monopoly over the AP program.
“If you’re going to hold the AP program, and there’s no competition, and you set the curriculum, you have just set the curriculum for the entire country,” he said. “And you can push it down to grade levels. So, even the Common Core doesn’t go quite this far.”
Kurtz now cautions that the problem of radical progressive indoctrination of America’s young people is immediate and dire.
“This isn’t a problem that’s going to arrive in the distant future,” he warns. “The millennial generation is already being pulled toward the radical left by young people educated in totally politicized universities.”
He concludes, “If we don’t create a real choice for our high schools, the takeover of our culture by people who want to forget 9/11 or blame it on America will be complete.”
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