I had never heard of the term “action civics” before I saw this post over at Powerline. Now, we see yet another word / idea being bastardized for use by the Left. I know what “direct action” is – the idea by Leftist groups that getting physical (e.g., Antifa, creating mobs, harassment, et al) is perfectly OK and legit. Now, as they are wont to do, they are extending adult activities and philosophies downward to our child in “their” schools and classrooms.
I’ve said that a large part of the problem that we find ourselves in is because the younger generations DON’T know real Civics – how our Constitution(s) and Government are to work, what are our governing Principles and Philosophies were at the time of our founding, and what our cut and dried American history is without the SJW attitudes applied to it. So anything, so I thought, that would elevate Civics within our educational system would be a good thing.
It’s just getting worse. The Left is eating us up from the inside out and this is just gong to make it worse. Mirengoff references a post I had already tabbed at The Corner that goes into a deeper look into this. It starts with this fearfully written paragraph (emphasis mine):
Americans dismayed by the mendacity and distortions of the 1619 Project are headed for a fall. A commendable desire to counter both civic illiteracy and the excesses of woke ideology has produced a new national movement to mandate history and civics standards. Unfortunately, that strategy will produce the very opposite of its intended effect. Far from restoring traditional understandings of American citizenship, the proposed history and civics mandates will entrench woke ideology nationally, imposing it on the reddest of red-state school-districts, and ultimately on private and religious schools as well.
I’ve sat here for a while trying to figure out if I could abstract that best bits to summarize what is going on – and concluded I can only fail at it. Mirengoff had his take on it and having just read Kurtz’s post, about the only thing to do is put up the entirety of Kurtz’s material – which I’m not going to do. Instead, go read it (and it is long, detailed, and very serious) after you’ve finished my post. So here is the “short” version (about as short as it can get):
The critical point is that final responsibility for setting the new history and civics curriculum will lie with state school boards and their attendant bureaucracy. These boards, and even more so the bureaucratic curriculum specialists upon whom they rely, are far more left-leaning than the legislators — or citizens — of their states.
Most come out of university schools of education, where “woke” curricula are generated to begin with. ALEC’s model bill [ALEC is the American Legislative Exchange Council] gives these left-leaning bureaucrats carte blanche to set state curricular standards. That means those standards will be a world apart from what parents in traditional and conservative-leaning school districts would choose.
Like the politicians who relied on teachers and college professors to devise the National History Standards in the 1990s, legislators will find their well-intentioned efforts captured by the very advocates they are hoping to counter.
What kind of Civics will leftist bureaucrats impose? They will impose “action civics.”The civics now recognized and promoted by America’s dominant, left-leaning education establishment is radically different from what conservatives or traditionalists think of when they hear the word civics. Not one in ten conservatives has even heard of “action civics” or “project-based civics,” but this is what professional educators now mean by civics.
Essentially, “action civics” trains students to protest on behalf of leftist political causes. The Parkland students who agitate for gun laws, as well as the seven- to-sixteen-year-old students who notoriously surrounded and harangued Sen. Dianne Feinstein about the Green New Deal, are considered models of action civics by the Left. Those students are notable for refusing even to consider opposing points of view. Anger is their currency. Action civics is the application of Alinsky-style political organizing tactics to school children.
So-called action civics is more like anti-civics. It pressures ill-prepared students to take up leftist causes, when educators dealing with policy controversies ought to be teaching students how to assess the strengths and weaknesses of conflicting viewpoints instead. Leftist action civics is already widespread in blue states, and activists hope to force it onto deep-dyed red-state school districts via statewide civics mandates. These activists hope to use the Biden administration to do it, but ALEC is about to beat them to the punch by having conservatives inadvertently impose action civics on themselves.
This is EXACTLY why I’ve joined the crowd that says Conservatives need to get back into the educational fields – to be that counterweight. That Parents need to go to the School Board meetings and demand that they be given the curriculum their kids are going to be using (after all, they’ve lost sight that THEY work for US), especially the “handouts” that don’t always make it home. If you can’t get elected to your School Board (that’s me!), help those conservatives that can. Get into the meetings and the policy committee decisions. Best thing? Record them, especially when they aren’t used to having cameras watching over them. Put webcams in the classrooms so we can monitor this kind of thing.
I’ve already started to see this indoctrination in my District and I’d quit GraniteGrok and homeschool the Grandson before I let this stuff gets into his soul.
This is a good way to end this (emphasis mine):
The best way to battle educational decline is a return to local control, which should never have been abandoned in the first place. Relying on our current education establishment to carry out reform is a fool’s errand. They are what got us into trouble to begin with. The real hope for improvement lies with parents. A grassroots movement to take back the curriculum from woke education bureaucrats could shift the composition of local school boards across the country. That is the level at which curricula recommended by places like Hillsdale College, ConSource, and 1776 Unites should be adopted.
