New standards proposed by the Minnesota Department of Education would banish lessons about World War I, World War II, the Holocaust, the Civil War, the American Revolution, communism, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
Replacing those significant history topics will be “systemic racism,” how democracy has “excluded certain groups,” an “awareness” of “the LGBTQ+ community” and how the disenfranchisement of freed blacks during Reconstruction connects to “persistent discrimination and inequity” today.
John Hinderaker at the Powerline blog explained that under Minnesota law, the state’s Department of Education establishes standards for K-12 public schools in a number of categories.
“The benchmarks for each category are revised by committee every 10 years,” he wrote. “This year, the Social Studies standard is being revised. The committee undertaking the revision, as you would expect in the Tim Walz administration, is hard left.”
He said the first draft was “shocking” and thousands of comments from citizens expressing concern have been dismissed out of hand.
The new standards call for students to describe “the tactics used by the United States government to claim indigenous and Mexican land, including but not limited to an analysis of the ideology of Manifest Destiny and its relationship to whiteness, Christianity, and capitalism; and analyze the strategies used by Native Americans and Mexicans to respond to U.S. settler colonialism.”
Hinderaker said there are “an extraordinary number of benchmarks devoted to the history of Native Americans, who comprise between 1 and 2 percent of Minnesota’s population.”
“So, under the Walz administration and for years to come, school children will be kept in ignorance of our history, and taught to hate America.”
He noted “thousands of normal Minnesotans registered their opposition to this hijacking of American history.”
“More than 5,000 used Raise Our Standards MN to send a letter to the committee, objecting to these anti-American features of the draft standards. As it turned out, this represented more than 80% of the comments the committee received.”
The state committee, however, allowed no substantive discussion of the objections.
Doug Paulson, the state’s director of academic standards accused citizens who expressed opposition of using “white supremacy language.”
Hinderaker said it’s “classic of leftist bureaucratic arrogance: they undertake to promulgate a new set of benchmarks pursuant to a statute, they solicit public comments per the statutory requirement, and then ignore the public’s views and proceed with their far-left agenda.”
A second draft of the proposal is scheduled to be released by Feb. 17.
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