Civics 'education' in 2023 America
To educationists, our founding documents aren't worth the bother
The Friday Letter / No. 549 / July 14, 2023
Sometime around 1998 I had lunch with Charley Reese to discuss a book idea for my small publishing company. We met at a sandwich shop near the Tribune Company's Orlando Sentinel office, where he wrote his nationally syndicated column from 1971 to 2001.
My offer was open-ended. He got to choose the subject. It wasn't difficult for him: how far our nation has strayed from what the Founders intended in the Constitution.
Charley was a patriot and fierce defender of the Constitution. He was a Democrat in the day when a person could be both a patriot and a Democrat. It's amazing that his employer continued to distribute what today we would call an America First column even as the company flagship Chicago Tribune had abandoned its Midwest conservative roots and joined the rest of US media in carrying editorial water for the left.
Today I got a fascinating look at what Charley was talking about. It appeared unexpected in my research for a book on how parents can help steer their children through the public school propaganda minefield. In a search of politics and high school civics curricula, I found the Anti-Defamation League.
Turns out the ADL is knee-deep in the politics of middle and high school civics education.
Founded in 1913 following the lynching death of Atlanta pencil manufacturer Leo Frank, the ADL charted its mission to fight not just anti-Semitism but all acts of “bigotry and intolerance.” So far, so good.
At its website, the ADL says that in 2022 more than 58,000 students, educators, administrators and staff in K-12 schools participated in its anti-bias civics education programs.
Turns out further that what the ADL means by “bias” is any idea it finds offensive or disagreeable.
I looked at several of its lesson offerings. Some don't specifically identify as civics lessons, but about four years ago the ADL partnered with an organization called BitesMedia to offer civics curricula to any public, private, or homeschool that wants them. Links to the partnership have disappeared, which makes me suspect the program may have ended or perhaps never got started. Neither ADL nor BitesMedia responded to my request for more information.
But whether specific to civics lessons or to the general curriculum, the ADL continues to work at influencing how our children are indoctrinated.
When you send Junior off to East Undershirt High School, you might expect his civics course to include the study of our nation's foundational documents. The Constitution comes to mind. Thinking back to your own high school days, you may recall civics as an easy but dull course with the obligatory walk through the three branches of government, role of the courts, the Electoral College, and so forth.
Civics was dreadfully boring for many of us not because of its content but because of how it was taught: like high school history, full of dates and facts, lacking the color of storytelling which can bring these subjects alive.
If your budding scholar is one of the 58,000 stuck in the ADL curriculum, he might be treated to a lesson on – hold onto your hat – the evils of hair discrimination.
Just as an aside, this and other ADL-sponsored lessons are crafted to what we call the Common Core “standards.”
The lesson was made necessary, the ADL explains, because “For centuries, Black people, especially Black women and girls, have faced hair discrimination.” Just so you will be impressed with the ADL's meta analysis, you'll want to know that “Recent studies indicate that Black girls as young as five years old experience hair discrimination and Black women are 1.5 times more likely to be sent home or know of a Black woman sent home from the workplace due to hair discrimination.” Wouldn't John Dewey be proud.
So, at the dinner table you ask Junior how civics class went today. Did you discuss the Lincoln-Douglas debates or how a spending bill works its way through the state legislature? Nope. We learned all about hair discrimination.
Another lesson takes on “implicit bias.” The lesson plan explains: “Marginalized people who have experienced discrimination and unfair treatment historically, continue to do so in the present day. The current surge of stories in the news and social media seem to indicate that racism, sexism and other forms of bias and discrimination are becoming more pervasive.”
Why we Americans put up with this malarky is beyond explanation.
I looked around but couldn't find lessons on how the 17th Amendment came about, or what our nation's leaders learned about the futility of Prohibition, or how the states have gradually relinquished their 10th Amendment rights to the federal government.
I didn't discover a single lesson on the arguments for and against ratification of the Constitution, or the issues Jefferson decribes in the Declaration of Independence. I saw nothing about the Magna Carta's influence on our Bill of Rights, or how the federal courts rule on the constitutionality of state laws.
Is it any wonder that our young people know so little about this greatest society that ever existed in recorded history?
We could laugh about this if it were funny. But let's don't forget the purpose of this nonsense is to keep American school children ignorant of why this country was founded, why so many of our countrymen gave their lives to protect our childrens' right to be this ignorant.
And it helps explain why polls of young people show a majority in favor of speech censorship and other tyrannical government control of their lives. They learned it in school.
The Friday Letter civics test (continued)
We could write a narrative on the following story but think it's more fun to present it under our wildly growing-in-popularity Friday Letter civics quiz.
Question 1. A governor is considering allowing law enforcement departments in his/her/ciz state to hire illegal aliens as police officers. Which state would this be?
A Utah
B Wyoming
C Alabama
D Illinois
Question 2. Of which party is this governor a member?
A Bull Moose
B Republican
C Whig
D Democrat
If you chose D on both questions, you are simply brilliant, although this doesn't qualify you to teach civics in one of our nation's government high schools. We have one other question but little confidence in our preferred answer: Will an American citizen pulled over on a traffic stop be able to make a citizen's arrest of the officer for being a fugitive under US immigration law, and have him/her/ze/zer deported? Just asking.
Short takes on the news
Breitbart
Biden moves to push US military weakness further into the danger zone with his choice of Air Force Gen. Charles Brown, Jr. as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Brown will replace Gen. Mark Milley. In a memo last year, Brown said officer promotions must follow racial quotas: 67.5% white, 15% Latino, 13% black, 10% Asian, 1% American Indian and Native Alaskans, and 1% Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, without regard to combat experience or leadership performance.
Brown may be no worse than his predecessor, who has never been court martialled for treason for assuring Communist China that he would tip them off about any military threats by President Trump.
The Navy expects to miss its 2023 goal by 6,000 recruits despite raising the enlistment age to 41, lowering entrance standards, and assigning a drag queen sailor to attract reprobates and sexual deviants. Potential recruits are seeing our military services for the social engineering experiments they have become.
See another story on this at The Federalist.
Red State
Thanks for the reminder. Shelia Jackson Lee, who competes with Maxine Waters and Sandi Cortez for the title of dumbest Member of Congress, gave a rousing endorsement of affirmative action during a floor speech opposing the SCOTUS ruling on racial preferences in college admissions. In open session, she admitted that she was an affirmative action admission. This is the congresswoman who once celebrated the planting of the US flag – on Mars.
Townhall
Stop the presses. Kamala Harris, the vice president, held a meeting with civil rights leaders and consumer protection experts on the effects of artificial intelligence. “AI is kind of a fancy thing,” Kammy explained. “First of all, it's two letters. It means artificial intelligence.”
And now we know just how artificial some intelligence can be.
Wired
We can't keep up with all the leftwing internet magazines and so were not familiar with Wired. It advises readers not to buy Amazon's Ring doorbell because its video recorder might catch black people committing crimes, a racist act indeed. We have our own advice for Wired. Don't you know your buddies at Amazon use Ring to spy on its own customers and lock them out of their homes if they are suspected of anti-woke behavior? Just asking.
Breitbart
Rep. Pramila Jayapal was the only Democrat to grill FBI chief Christopher Wray on the bureau's purchase of personal information about American citizens from data brokers including Bank of America. The government can't legally collect this information but may buy it on the open market.
Jayapal, a congresswoman from Washington State, said Bank of America willingly provided such information about US citizens to include health matters, their location, and even what they are looking at online. . . .
Mesha Mainor, a black Democrat who represents Atlanta-area district 56 in the Georgia House, switches parties to Republican. The crime that raised her former party's ire was her support of school choice. “For decades, the Democrat Party has received the support of more than 90 percent of the black community,” she said. “And what do we have to show for it? I represent a solidly blue district in the city of Atlanta. This isn’t a political decision for me. It’s a moral one.”
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
Citing precedent of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, a Clinton-appointed federal judge blocked a Wisconsin school district's policy that requires children to use the restrooms of their sex. Judge Lynn Adelman said the Mukwonago Area School District may not enforce its policy during an active lawsuit. An 11-year-old boy with sexual dysphoria is allowed to use the girls' bathroom.
Recommended
“If You Think All Teachers Are 'Heroes' You're Part of the Problem”
B.L. Hahn at The Federalist
“Day One for Our Next GOP President”
Kurt Schlichter at townhall
Headlines of the week
Babylon Bee
“Satan Miraculously Turns Water into Bud Light”
Dear Readers: I will be taking a break for a couple of weeks to visit my ancestral homeland, an area far north of here called Indiana. Although I now live in Alabama, we semi-native Floridians consider Tallahassee Up North, Atlanta Way Up North, and Indiana part of the Yukon Territory. The Friday Letter will return Sept. 4. Thanks!