Friday, July 1, 2022

The Christian nationalist assault on secular public education and inconvenient historical facts



A key target for Christian nationalist (CN) social engineering is secular public education. CNs need to push secular education aside to establish the myth (lie) in public education that America was founded as a White, Christian country with a Christian constitution. 

The contempt and resentment that CNs have toward secular school teachers is intense. A local news report from Tennessee makes this clear. That report comments:
Hidden-camera video obtained by NewsChannel 5 Investigates reveals a recent closed-door reception with Tennessee’s governor and a key education ally who repeatedly mocks the intelligence of public school teachers and questions whether they really care about what is best for their students.

That ally, Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Michigan’s ultra-conservative Hillsdale College, also takes aim at diversity efforts in higher education, claiming people in those positions have education degrees because they are “easy” and “you don’t have to know anything.”

Throughout the nearly two-hour video, Gov. Bill Lee offers only praise for Arnn, who Lee has invited to set up charter schools across Tennessee. The Republican governor never takes issue with the Hillsdale president’s remarks, nor does he defend the state’s 80,000 public school teachers or the stat’s teacher training programs.

Among Arnn’s provocative remarks:
  • “The teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”
  • “They are taught that they are going to go and do something to those kids.... Do they ever talk about anything except what they are going to do to these kids?”
  • “In colleges, what you hire now is administrators…. Now, because they are appointing all these diversity officers, what are their degrees in? Education. It’s easy. You don’t have to know anything.”
  • “The philosophic understanding at the heart of modern education is enslavement…. They’re messing with people’s children, and they feel entitled to do anything to them.”
  • “You will see how education destroys generations of people. It’s devastating. It’s like the plague.”
  • “Here’s a key thing that we’re going to try to do. We are going to try to demonstrate that you don’t have to be an expert to educate a child because basically anybody can do it.”
Arnn’s curriculum in Michigan is based on the 1776 Project, the radical right’s and CN response to the 1619 Project that liberals produced. Historians have criticized both 1776 and 1619 as flawed with important errors in historical facts.[1] Currently, Arnn plans to open 50 CN religious charter schools in Tennessee to teach the 1776 version of American history. According to the news report, Governor Lee wants 100 of them. The flaws in the 1776 version of history are of no concern to the CN movement, because that is the version they choose to believe is real.

Note the incoherent irrationality in the CN attacks on secular education teachers. On the one hand CN extremists say secular teachers are ignorant. On the other hand, they say that anyone can teach and no expertise is needed to teach K-12 education. 

One cannot be rational when facts, truths and sound reasoning contradict an agenda based on lies, a false version of reality and crackpot motivated reasoning.

Yes, not all public education teachers are great. Some are undoubtedly incompetent. But that is no excuse for CN elimination of secular education in favor of Dark Ages Christian Sharia and Christian Taliban. We are in the middle of a vicious, brass knuckles culture war. For the most part, it is radical right lies, fundamentalist Christianity and unrestrained capitalism fighting hard and dirty against truth, democracy and civil liberties.


Footnote: 
On August 19 of last year I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for the New York Times, repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact-checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America.  
I vigorously disputed the claim. Although slavery was certainly an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war.  
Despite my advice, the Times published the incorrect statement about the American Revolution anyway, in Hannah-Jones’ introductory essay. In addition, the paper’s characterizations of slavery in early America reflected laws and practices more common in the antebellum era than in Colonial times, and did not accurately illustrate the varied experiences of the first generation of enslaved people that arrived in Virginia in 1619.
The report, commissioned by the Donald Trump administration, urged America to return to an era of “patriotic education” amid what it called “reckless ‘re-education’ attempts that seek to reframe American history around the idea that the United States is not an exceptional country but an evil one”.

But historians saw it differently.

“The 1776 report is a puerile, politically reactionary document,” stated David Blight, author of the biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. He tweeted: “It doesn’t really use evidence except to employ founding documents and too many quotations out of context.”

Blight wrote that the report’s use of the abolitionist’s historic quote from a 4 July speech on the complications of its celebration for Black people was “so mis-used [he couldn’t] stop laughing.

“Trumpians will eat it up as may Fox News,” he wrote to the Guardian. “No legitimately trained historian or teacher will even be able to read through it all without nausea.”

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Peach Freeze for bringing this news story to my attention 

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