California’s “Ethnic Studies” vs. Trump’s “Patriotic Education”
The English poet and literary critic Samuel Johnson is often remembered for his exclamation, “Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.” A Washington Post journalist recently channeled this sentiment in comparing President Trump’s proposal for a national patriotic education commission to authoritarian propaganda taught in China, Turkey and Hungary.
In fairness to patriots, Samuel Johnson was only criticizing false patriotism used to cover up for ulterior motives. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the lead behind the NY Times’ controversial 1619 Project, levies this accusation against the Founding Fathers. She claims the American Revolution was not really about independence, but rather slavery. This same narrative has been embraced in California’s new ethnic studies curriculum, but not everyone is having it.
Williamson M. Evers Ph.D is the Director of the Independent Institute’s Center on Educational Excellence. A founding member of the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, Evers has been warning about the watering down of educational standards in the name of diversity. Evers will join me this Sunday to explain the bewildering vocabulary being taught to schoolchildren, from “Hxrstory” to “Master narrative.” This is a must-listen for those who were perplexed during this week’s Presidential debate, when Biden claimed that “critical race theory” was really just another term for racial sensitivity training.
Trump’s “1776 Commission” represents a challenge to the apparent bias of the 1619 Project and related ethnic studies classes. Where the media sees signs of a spiral towards fascism in the attempt to dictate a national curriculum, conservatives see an effort to reverse decades of indoctrination by public schools.
The unpopularity of America’s founding ideals within academia has trickled down to the elementary and secondary school curricula, where students in California, for example, spend little time learning basic civics or American history. Meanwhile, the left seems to once again be rediscovering the principles of Federalism — arguing that the federal government should stay out of the business of local school districts.
To his credit, Governor Gavin Newsom recently vetoed the latest bill, which would have required all California high-schoolers to take an ethnic studies course to graduate.
Does the President’s commission represent the true patriotism of the American founders or is it, as Johnson put it, the last refuge of scoundrels?
Transcript:
Bob Zadek: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio.
I have to make a confession. Over the years I have been observing what is going on on college campuses. Why are they so unsupportive of the system of government and the economic system that has provided so much benefit to so many people? Why don’t they understand it? I was puzzled. I couldn’t really understand the reason until I started reading articles such as those written by this morning’s guest, discussing the dramatic change in the curriculum in the K - 12 educational system. And these articles started to answer the question for me. There is not something inherently wrong with them. They are victims of something somewhat below the surface and not so visible but very important changes in curriculum.
The values of our country are not inherent in people, they have to be taught and they have to be explained. There has to be an intellectual foundation. To help us understand what’s going on, I am happy to welcome the show Dr. Williamson M. Evers. Bill is a senior fellow and director at the Center of Educational Excellence and an assistant editor for the Independent Review. He works and studies and directs the independent Institute. Bill has studied educational reform for most of his adult life, he has advised Washington, he has been on various presidential commissions. He has published many books and even more articles.
Help us understand what is going on in the K - 12 curriculum? The curriculum is to enable youngsters to make their way in the world to understand critical thinking, the basic sciences and math and literature, so they can go out and be fully functioning and productive adults. And that’s it. But that is not it. So Bill, welcome to the show this morning.
Williamson Evers: Thank you for having me.
Bob Zadek: Let’s start with your clarion call article in the Wall Street Journal a year ago? What prompted you to write the article that you did with the attention-getting headline, “California wants to teach your kids that capitalism is racist.” So what is there that prompted you to write that article?
Williamson Evers: Earlier I had written an article about California’s history curriculum framework. They used to have a reasonable account of American history. It was drastically modified and filled with leftist jargon. I was talking to a bureaucrat in Sacramento, an education official. He said to me, “wait until you see the ethnic studies program.” So I knew to watch for this. Several friends of mine in the field of education, parents and scholars, alerted me that it was now ready.
So I printed the whole thing out. In July of 2019, I read the whole thing of 300–400 pages, and the ethnic studies curriculum is permeated with its interwoven with critical race theory. The headline is correct.
The New Racist Curriculum: A Close Look at “Ethnic Studies”
Bob Zadek: Let’s do some definitional work so the audience can follow. What is “ethnic studies?” What does that subject matter include? And what is critical race theory?
Williamson Evers: Ethnic studies refers to studying the various ethnic groups in the United States. In the 1950s and 1960s we had some very serious social science scholars such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glaser, and Michael Novak write books about this, “Beyond the Melting Pot.” This is a serious subject of academic work in the field of sociology and political science and obviously history too. Critical race theory is a form of ethnic studies strangely like national socialism, like Hitler’s Nazism. Everything is about race and racial domination. So in politics and in history, everything is about the whites trying to dominate the blacks and other groups.
Everything having to do with individualism and with constitutional liberties and protections is just a smokescreen because all of it serves, according to these critical racial theorists, to perpetuate and put a cover over the white domination of blacks. If you’re a white, you can never get out of being a racist. If you do not think you are a racist, you are lying to yourself. The only thing you can possibly be is an ally of the critical race theory people or the Black Lives Matter people. You can be an ally, which means you have to support them.
It’s not just in K-12. And it’s not just in college. There are training sessions that go on in government, for government employees, and for corporations too. President Trump recently put out an executive order saying he didn’t want any more of this racially divisive critical race theory training done to federal employees. He was asked about this in a debate very misleadingly by the moderator, Chris Wallace.
Bob Zadek: What’s so interesting about this is that once you introduce critical race theory, it is contrary to every single founding principle in our country, right?
Williamson Evers: The 1619 project is a spin-off of this. This is an idea promoted by the New York Times that we should teach the history of the United States completely in terms of race and of white domination. Not only is this theory wrong… the American founding principles as found in the Declaration of Independence on the Constitution are very subversive of racism and of racial domination and of white supremacy.
“As American history unfolded, liberties and the protection of minorities have been protected.”
As American history unfolded, liberties and the protection of minorities have been protected. And that’s because of the follow-through on the principles of American founding, which have to do with human rights and the respect for the individual, and protection against progressive violence by either slave masters or government officials.
Bob Zadek: What strikes me as nothing short of astonishing is that they are celebrating racism. If you look at the definition of racism, it means primarily identifying someone with their race.
They want us to stop thinking of people as individuals. They want us to only be other people as members of a race. Indeed it is actually quite dangerous to people who are in racial minority, because governments, especially the bigger than government, do not like anything that’s unusual or homogeneous. They don’t like people with different languages or unusual religions, or whatever. And there’s a famous book by a man called James Scott called “Seeing like a State,” about how in modern history, governments repress minorities. These people, who think that by getting rid of universal notions of human rights and things like that are going to somehow bring about utopia are sending us on a very dangerous, horrifying, and totalitarian future.
I suspect that many of our listeners are sitting there getting a tiny bit angry and are rolling their eyes and are saying, “what a bunch of jerks and and how can they believe that how pathetic.” I need to remind our friends, the topic this morning is not about what some fringe movement may be thinking in some absurd view of the human experience. They are now dominating curriculum.
So when parents send their children to a school. They turn over their children’s mind to a bunch of strangers for 12 years. This is what those strangers are teaching your children. What got my attention was how insidious the movement is. By planting the seeds in K - 12, which then gets carried through to college courses, and then gets carried through to business and government.
These young adults carry through their lives what they are taught. It is almost as if we have several hundred million Manchurian candidates, to reference an old and quite interesting cold war movie starring Frank Sinatra. These seeds planted will someday take root. We have this curriculum being captured and being promoted under the surface and nobody is really aware of it. How does a model curriculum get to be compulsory? And how does it get to be widespread? What’s the process?
Williamson Evers: I think our listeners need to have a little more concrete examples because we’ve been talking very abstractly. So in this proposal in 2020 for a model curriculum, in California and coming to Oregon and Washington throughout the country. You have reliance on socialist historian Howard Zinn’s narrative of American history. It’s cited 19 times. It mentions Malcolm X twice as often as Martin Luther King. It recommends a students study as an exemplary philosophy, the Nation of Islam which is a racist and anti-semitic group headed by Louis Farrakhan. In one of its classes on “resistance,” so there is some kind of resistance to the American government, it lists “top killer media’’ website as a resource. This is very radical stuff that they are pushing.
How does the curriculum and teaching materials come into existence? Publishers write what they think public schools want. So they are creating a product; it might be a textbook, and it might be some kind of online teaching material. They have development projects. Little units within their companies. And they say what will sell the California history market? Their buyers are government entities. It is not like individual parents are going out and buying these textbooks. Because of the heavy burden of government regulation, there’s only a few companies.
Most independent companies that used to do this 20 years ago are gone. We have a sort of cartelizing of the textbook publishing industry. It is not like some kind of natural process. It is because of government regulation. Developers need to meet testing? So progressive educators have taken over the testing. What’s on the test? What kind of problems are on the test and what kind of questions are asked. They’re looking at what competing companies are doing, they’re looking at academic content standards in the different states. Those are lists of topics that are expected to be learned. They’re looking at curriculum frameworks in the different states. So those are elaborations on the topics, including how to teach it. So for instance, in California, the history curriculum framework is riddled with all the same stuff. Capitalism is oppressing everybody, racial theories. America is nothing but a country of conquest.
Well, you know, there’s nothing wrong with critical things about the United States government. I mean, it’s hardly even been only benign. I don’t pretend that. But this is a very doctrinaire ideological view and it goes down to the lowest grades. It is not that somehow they are learning the basics and the younger grades and then in high school and college and then they may get more and more criticism. No, the criticism begins as early as possible. These textbooks are out there. You have different kinds of states, some are statewide adoption and some are local school district adoption. So California is a mixture. From kindergarten through eighth grade, it’s a statewide adoption, and high school is district adoption.
Just to give you two other examples. Oregon has state level adoption through all grades, and Washington State has local adoption throughout all the grades. So what then happens is that at the state level adoption, the State Board of Education makes a decision, and it may delegate some aspects of that to a curriculum commission as was done in California. When the local districts are making decisions, they put together a textbook review committee of administrators, teachers, and usually some parents or community leaders or something like that.
This isn’t so much done in the math textbook, but particularly it is watched for in a history textbook. So that’s kind of what the process is. The people that believe in these radical political views make an effort to capture this at each level. It’s kind of complicated.
Bob Zadek: I think it’s a perfect description, Bill. And it’s not that complicated. What you learn is how few people get to make the most profound decisions about what the children of parents will learn.
A National Takeover of American Values
Williamson Evers: What is particularly important for our topic and for the listeners to understand. At every level, there is “sensitivity review.” This is explicit political direction. You see somebody’s name on it as the textbook author, that writer probably didn’t write even that much of it. A lot of it was commissioned in-house by this development group within the company. The sales rep for the companies have a big influence on telling the development group what we think the states will adopt or what the local districts will adopt.
Let’s say there’s a big push to have women as firefighters. Well, we have to put in all the textbooks pictures of women firefighters. They’ll do things like this. Whatever political favorite topics are, they will deliberately put in. Not only the publishers do this in-house, but the state has a sensitivity review. They don’t just do it in the textbooks, they do it on a test they do and all sorts of things. And then if it was a local adoption they will probably have a separate committee for this.
Bob Zadek: What strikes me is how little understanding parents have as to what goes on what goes on when their child gets into the yellow bus and the parent has lost control of their child for a high percentage of that child’s awake hours. The child comes home with a school book and does homework and things seem to be ok, until you see what is being written on his iPad or whatever.
Williamson Evers: One of the problems is when these documents are originally created, this is an arcane thing that is going on way behind the scenes. Unless some interest group finds a problem with it, no one hears about it. They often do this in the summertime as well. So the Common Core was pushed through across the nation in the summertime, when no one was around. So this is a national curriculum standard and in English and Math and the English part has political stuff in it also. It’s very hard to get out. One reason why it is hard is that there’s a sunk cost problem.
Once you buy these textbooks, you have them for seven years in most states, and they don’t want to admit they made a mistake. Politicians don’t want to be embarrassed, they don’t want to ever admit they did anything wrong. Because they have a captive audience in these public schools, they don’t want to admit they wasted all this money and bought a bad product.
Bob Zadek: We have many states in our country that are either two-party government, or are more conservative. So what do they do? They’re not buying into the theory of the textbook. So is that a big enough market for publishers to cater to that market?
Williamson Evers: One of the advantages of having multiple states and having a federal system in the United States is that we want to have a competitive federal. In other words, we ought to have different states doing different things. And then states could emulate things that work well or shy away from doing things that don’t work well. But because of several things, one is a domination of the thinking of teachers by what’s taught in education schools, where there is an ideological domination of progressivism in education.
In states like mountain states and southern states, that tend to be more culturally conservative, the people who are not culturally conservative go and find a harbor in the education field. So if you’re an Alabama, and you’re looking for where the liberals are, they’re not in the police department, right? They are in the public schools. In Alabama or Montana, they are concentrated dramatically in the schools. So the answer is no. There are only these few publishing houses. They’ll insert in your textbook a South Dakota history section that they’ll bind in the book or something like that, which might cater more to this state’s needs, but they’re basically getting the same American history books as California or New York students.
Bob Zadek: The books have a very strange way of teaching capitalism. They teach capitalism as both a political and economic system which is kind of bizarre because it has nothing to do with a political system whatsoever in the Constitution. Tell us what critical race theory and ethnic studies has to say about capitalism, which is the bedrock of how the world has escaped a universal poverty in just 200 years.
Williamson Evers: There was racial oppression around the world before there was capitalism. There were tribal oppressors. These people don’t have any new ideas on race, they just take the kind of Marxism or vulgar socialism and put a racial patina on top. So in California’s ethnic studies model curriculum, they say that capitalism is a way of exploiting people. Right out of Marx, it captures the surplus labor value of work. And, it particularly oppresses racial minorities. That’s their whole theory. It’s just imported from Marxism, and then given a slight racial task to it. So it’s not an understanding of capitalism as entrepreneurship, as trading between parties as investment, as economic growth as wealth builds up in the society, and in essence trading between individuals. It’s all this hierarchical thing where the big bad capitalist boss is exploiting the worker, and making profits he or she is not entitled to. That is the whole picture in there.
Jim Crow: A Socialist Phenomena
Bob Zadek: What is so painfully wrong about it is that in the ugly, racist history of our country, the Jim Crow South, when the government was itself racist, the Jim Crow laws were to fight capitalism, because capitalism would allow blacks to open stores.
Williamson Evers: The Jim Crow laws and segregation laws in the South were to prevent up and coming striving blacks from competing against entrenched white interests, whether they were workers or companies. That’s what racism was. It was blocking capitalism and competition. The South had an anti-immigrant labor law. So if you were black, and you were in some place in the countryside, and there was a job somewhere else, maybe working on a railroad that was being built or a new light industry factory that was being built in the south after the Civil War, these immigrant labor contractors would try and seek you out, provide a railroad ticket or carting money or something to get to your new job. So they were like a platform.
“The Jim Crow laws [were] blocking capitalism and competition.”
So these electronic platforms that help Uber drivers meet Uber customers. So the Jim Crow laws outlawed these labor contractors. It is the same mentality to stop the productive middleman in order to have racial privilege in place.
Bob Zadek: Look at licensing laws, those are anti-capitalist. Those are the absolute opposite of capitalism. Most of those laws prevent lower income people and minorities from entering gainful employment. So capitalism is begging, as a system, to free up these people so they can participate in the economy. It is the anti-capitalist laws that prevent it. So to target capitalism as racist is absurd. Any participant in a capitalist economy, which is racist, is doomed to fail, or at least have inferior performance, because they are not hiring the best person for the job. They’re not selling to customers who want to buy their product.
The marketplace will punish you for any semblance of irrational racist behavior. So capitalism is the perfect antidote for racism. People’s self interest, will require them to not be racist.
When blacks were doing sit-ins, Woolworth wanted to feed them. Woolworths wasn’t begging for the cops to come in and get the blacks out of the lunch counter. It was the government who was preventing Woolworth from selling to a customer who had money and wanted to buy lunch. So capitalism is never racist. It is the perfect antidote. Yet here we have a generation of children across the country, being taught that capitalism is to be despised as being racist, when it is the exact opposite. But it’s scary when you realize that this is what the children of the parents of our country are being taught. And it’s all happening without any input from the parents.
Donald Trump’s “Patriotic Education”
Bob Zadek: You mentioned Donald Trump and his 1776 patriotism federal government intruding through executive order into the curriculum. That of course is painful to you and I, because we do not want the federal government dictating school curriculum. What would be your recommended solution? If people are listening to this show, and they are starting to get worked up and a little bit concerned and frightened? What is the structural solution to this?
Williamson Evers: President Trump’s getting rid of critical racial theory based training to federal employees is a very good thing for him to do. And the second thing is, in response to things like the ethnic studies programs and the 1619 project, which wants to put this racial antagonism into the curriculum, the President has proposed a 1776 Commission and the National Institutes of Humanities has given out a contract to come up with a patriotic curriculum.
And there I think your point is very well taken that we don’t want the federal government dictating or even strongly promoting a curriculum. So we want to have pluralism in states, we want to have competitive federalism. So that means you have to look to your government officials. You have to push your school board candidates to pledge not to accept textbooks that have this stuff in it.
Bob Zadek: What about the role of charter schools? How does that change the dynamics of all of this? They are outside of direct government control right?
Williamson Evers: Well, in principle, they can do this, but they’re still pretty small. Private schools are less than 10% of the school age population. Charter schools are very small, but they’re growing and they could become an independent market for this kind of thing. At the college level, the private sector is big enough. The whole system, if you want to even call it that, of higher education has much many more centers of activity and decision makers. Right now the charter schools and the private schools are stuck with the existing textbooks.
Bob Zadek: One of the things that I’ve learned from you that I find counterintuitive and scary, is how this curriculum underplays the success story of minorities who have succeeded despite being held back. How are these stories suppressed?
They don’t want to have people talking about George Washington Carver, who was a scientist and inventor and a black man. We have all sorts of minorities. Koreans are famous for having a kind of finance system and kinship base rotating credit associations, where they start new businesses by pooling their money. We know that students will stay in school for more years, get slightly better grades if they’re taught that people of every sort can rise, including people from racial minorities like Irish or Jew. They leave it out on purpose because they don’t want people to think this is possible.
Only through revolutions will there be a change.
It tells the story of an individual who can triumph, and any concept of individualism as opposed to part of a group is contrary to the narrative. Thank you so much for drawing our attention to this very important issue. How can our friends follow your writings?
Williamson Evers: Independent.org. You can also donate to support the work at the independent Institute, but they can find mine and other scholars who have similar approaches on independence.org.
Bob Zadek: Thank you so much, Bill.
Originally published at http://www.bobzadek.com on October 1, 2020.
Related Shows:
- Jonathan Haidt on *The Coddling of the American Mind* — 9/8/18
- Whose Free Speech? Our Free Speech! Marieke Tuthill-Beck Coon, 4/16/17
- Freedom *From* Speech? The New Face of Censorship Greg Lukianoff, 11/2/14
- Free Speech — There is No America Without It Greg Lukianoff, 12/9/12
- Is Your Alma Mater a Soviet Gulag? Harvey Silverglate, 9/18/11
Links:
- Williamson M. Evers: The Independent Institute
- California Wants to Teach Your Kids That Capitalism Is Racist — WSJ July 29, 2019, by Bill Evers
- ‘Critical’ Ethnic Studies Returns to California: News: The Independent Institute , Aug. 29, 2020 by Bill Evers
- Is it Time for a “490 B.C. Project”? High Schoolers Need to Know Our Classical Heritage Bill Evers, Victor Davis Hanson, and Morgan Hunter.
- VIDEO — Ethnic Studies, Identity Politics, Racism, Riots, and the Police | Independent Outlook Episode 3 Sept. 24, 2020 featuring Bill Evers and David Theroux
- The Fatal Flaw of the 1619 Project Curriculum — The American Revolution Institute
- Trump’s ‘patriotic education’ campaign aligns with autocrats like China’s Xi Jinping and Hungary’s Viktor Orban — The Washington Post
