“If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted and punished… Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes but that were villains… The radical view of American history is a web of lies, all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition.”
Donald Trump on American public education, Mt Rushmore, July 3rd
A godless public education is and was an anathema and morally corrupting to a seemingly constant evangelical constituency… where school prayer was banned and evolution was taught without reference to biblical creationism as an equally viable explanation of life. To most Americans, and the US Supreme Court (at least so far), that was an extreme and unsupportable view under the constitutional separate of church and state. There are, however, signs that this once bright line between church and states may be blurring.
On June 28th, in a 5-4 decision split along ideological lines, the U.S. Supreme Court decided (Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue) that state scholarships for private primary and secondary educations could not exclude support even where religious schools were beneficiaries. “The justices faulted the Montana Supreme Court for voiding a taxpayer program merely because it can be used to fund religious entities, saying such action violates the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment protection for the free exercise of religion… ‘A state need not subsidize private education,’ [Chief Justice] Roberts wrote. ‘But once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.’” Reuters, June 30th.
With approximately 13,000 separate public-school districts across the United States, it’s no surprise that Christian teachings are viewed as a necessary part of a solid, American education, to those in the deepest, reddest and most evangelically dominated states. What was once viewed as a fringe perspective, where Biblical teachings were considered far more important than traditional academic subjects, has gone mainstream under Donald Trump. Where science and history challenged those beliefs, these fringe adherents demanded that these statements that contradicted evangelical views be purged. Mainstream literature, deemed heretical, was also targeted. Their view is now official Trump administration policy.
If “loving” America means learning sanitized history (where racism just isn’t discussed) and religious substitutes for science and “hating” the United States is evidenced by learning hard facts and empirically supported science, Trump would be correct. Textbooks often delete, distort or otherwise “sanitize” unpleasant aspects of our history, a practice explained in greater detail in my June 15th Living with a Guilty Past blog. And while these anti-education, anti-science antagonists were once considered extremist outsiders, they are now completely supported by the Trump administration, to the exclusion of what used to be the mainstream reverence towards a mastery of “science, reading, writing and arithmetic.”
It was this way during Trump’s campaign, dramatically reinforced with his appointment of a Secretary of Education with no more than a third-rate bachelor’s business degree from a Michigan Bible college, a fierce critic of public education with no work experience at any educational institution. Betsy DeVos, an heir to the Amway fortune, expresses a powerful belief that Christian values must return to primary and secondary education. Fighting federal funds for all sorts of mainstream educational goals as well as student debt relief authorized by Congress for fraudulent for-profit trade schools, DeVos has become an evangelical darling and a champion of enabling charter and private schools where religious instruction is a priority.
Valarie Strauss, writing for the July 5th Washington Post, addressing the above Trump quote, states: “We will note that Trump is pushing a view of public education in the country that has long been espoused by many Republicans: that public K-12 schools and institutions of higher education are cauldrons of subversion where teachers mold children into being politically correct leftists.
“Over recent years, many state legislators have incorporated this line of thinking into their assault on public education and their funding cuts for public colleges and universities. “Meanwhile, Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, has made clear her disdain for public schools, once calling them ‘a dead end’ and making her No. 1 priority the expansion of alternatives to traditional public schools.” Our public schools remain, for the most part, underfunded, a legacy exacerbated by the austerity measures adopted during the Great Recession and mostly not restored. It gets worse.
Unwilling to fund the massive required costs of retrofitting public schools to make them safe for children in a surging pandemic and “Determined to reopen America’s schools despite coronavirus worries, President Trump threatened Wednesday [7/8] to hold back federal money if school districts don’t bring their students back in the fall [not virtually, in person!]. He complained that his own public health officials’ safety guidelines are impractical and too expensive.” Associated Press, July 8th. On July 4th, he made up a fact, immediately rejected by the head of the FDA, that 99% of CV-19 cases are harmless. Let the children get sick and then carry the disease to their parents and grandparents.
Our public schools fail on so many levels. By international testing standards (Programme for International Student Assessment), depending on subject matter, our former primacy in global education has fallen to somewhere between 19th to 38th, depending on subject matter. Mediocrity does not produce a high-value, competitive workforce. Bible quoting creationists who eschew scientific method aren’t a competitive threat. China is laughing, Russia is smiling, and much of Europe just looks at the United States in its rear-view mirror. If this malignancy is not corrected, we will watch the United States continue to lose its competitive advantage and plummet its claim to being a global economic leader. China’s new hard patent filings are rising as ours continue to fall.
I’m Peter Dekom, and if this anti-educational belief continues, Donald Trump will be the principal architect of precisely what will insure we will not “transition to greatness.”
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