General Discussion

avebury

(10,952 posts) Fri Sep 18, 2020, 11:03 AM Sep 2020

Trump to sign executive order calling for patriotic education

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-calls-patriotic-eduction-says-anti-racism-teachings-are-child-n1240372

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump accused schools of teaching students "hateful lies about this country" and said he would be taking steps to "restore patriotic education" as he continued his opposition to efforts to raise awareness about racial inequalities.

Speaking at what the White House described as a "conference on American history," Trump said that he plans to sign an executive order soon to create a "national commission to support patriotic education" called the 1776 Commission and that he is directing funding to create a patriotic curriculum for schools.

"Our youth will be taught to love America with all of their heart and all of their souls," Trump said. The White House declined to say when Trump would sign the executive order.

Trump said the framing of history around race was "toxic propaganda" and "a form of child abuse in the truest sense of those words" — specifically calling out critical race theory, a concept that was started around the idea that the law and legal institutions are inherently racist. He accused Democrats of pushing education that makes students "ashamed" of America's history.

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https://time.com/5889907/trump-patriotic-education/

Amid the ongoing national crisis over the deadly COVID-19 virus, the President of the United States warned of another national crisis on Thursday: the “ideological poison” of “radical” history education.

Speaking on Constitution Day from the National Archives—where original copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights are on display—during a White House conference on American History, President Donald Trump announced that he was signing an executive order to establish the “1776 Commission,” a group that would “promote patriotic education,” and that the National Endowment for the Humanities would be awarding a grant to support the development of a “pro-American curriculum that celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history.”

In the course of his announcement, Trump claimed that people on the left want to “bully Americans into abandoning their values, their heritage and their very way of life,” and denounced the forces that he blamed for propagating that view in history classes. He called the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which reframes the story of nation’s founding around the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia, “toxic propaganda,” and he also singled out the late Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States. Zinn’s book, widely used in schools since it was published in 1980, is credited for helping popularize a bottom-up approach to history, as an alternative to telling the story of the U.S. via the top-down achievements of elite white men.

Such approaches to history, which encourage students to challenge long-standing narratives about national heroes, are “ideological poison, that if not removed will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together,” Trump said. Under his plan, he said, “Our youth will be taught to love America with all of their heart and all of their soul.”