After decades of removing the Western canon from history, political science, and literature courses, some states are introducing bills to restore the teaching of civics in public college and university classrooms.
What a novel idea. Actually teaching civics to young American citizens.
It seems unimaginable that we’ve reached this point. For years, we’ve trusted teachers, professors, and school officials to provide our children with a solid background in civics. Instead, behind our backs, they’ve turned young minds into activists who hate and want to destroy the very society that gave them freedom and opportunity.
Maybe we’ve reached a turning point.
“New laws in Ohio, Utah, and Florida are reshaping general education, the core classes college students take to meet graduation requirements,” Danielle Douglas-Gabriel reports at The Washington Post. “The laws mandate that students take civics courses focused on Western civilization and bar classes centered on race or gender from counting toward core requirements.” She adds, “Lawmakers say it’s time to refocus unwieldy college course offerings on essential texts, not content steeped in identity politics. Faculty members argue that these laws promote a dangerously narrow perspective of what students should learn and undermine academics’ control over curricula.”
In Ohio, a proposed bill would eliminate mandatory DEI trainings and positions, strive for intellectual diversity among faculty, and create a three-credit civic literacy course to “include a study of the American economic system and capitalism and mandatory reading assignments.” A similar bill in Utah seeks to ensure that humanities courses “emphasize foundational thinking and communication skills through engagement with primary texts predominantly from Western civilization,” which are “organized around themes central to the preservation and flourishing of a free society, such as the moral life, happiness, liberty, equality and justice, and goodness and beauty.”
You know — the books and ideas that built our civilization and were a significant part of the foundational knowledge of schools and colleges for centuries, and are now collecting dust in university libraries. The books that Marxist professors and administrators removed from the curriculum because they preferred to advance a political and social revolution.
The American Association of University Professors issued a statement, complaining, “Right-wing lawmakers continue to wage a coordinated attack against public colleges and universities with legislation that would undermine academic freedom, chill classroom speech and impose partisan agendas on public higher education. Currently, at least 57 such bills have been introduced in 23 states.”
Chill classroom speech? Leftists have been chilling classroom speech since the 1960s, proclaiming America’s founding as racist and sexist, removing classic texts from courses, denouncing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and pushing radical Marxist theories that leave students hating their own country. Speaking out in class results in serious consequences, so most students (and many professors) remain silent.
The AAUP continued in its false statement, “The underlying narrative that universities are hostile to conservative speech has been manufactured over many years.”
The countless number of conservative speakers banned from college campuses or shouted down by protesters is not manufactured, nor is the fact that students are publicly shamed in class for offering different viewpoints. College students have long known that they must write papers that align with their professor’s political views to pass a course.
“Americans view college campuses as far friendlier to liberals than to conservatives when it comes to free speech, with adults across the political spectrum seeing less tolerance for those on the right” according to a poll conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Research. Researchers found that “47% of adults say liberals have ‘a lot’ of freedom to express their views on college campuses, while just 20% said the same of conservatives.” Even a majority of Democrats admit in the survey that liberals have more freedom to speak out in class.
Administrators and faculty used academic freedom as an excuse to dismantle the pillars of Western thought from college courses while indoctrinating young Americans to despise the very foundations of our system of government, societal values, and essential rights. It’s no surprise, then, how many graduates from elite universities enter politics, business, or education with contempt for America.
One of the issues is that the vast majority of professors are leftist ideologues who view teaching as an opportunity to train the next generation of freedom fighters. Few conservatives or nonpartisans seek jobs in the academic world, partly due to fear of bias and the result of hiring practices that favor special-interest groups. If you’re white, male, or don’t have a record supporting left-wing causes in your research or personal life, you’re not getting called in for an interview.
“That’s why,” writes Professor Rob Jenkins of Georgia State University, “if we’re going to reform the professoriate, we must start early, encouraging more conservative young people to pursue careers in academia, perhaps by appealing to their altruism and natural curiosity. Then we must continue working to remove barriers, first to graduate school and ultimately to faculty positions.”
Removing the barriers is a good beginning, and it appears we’re starting to course-correct. Students should be able to learn in an environment of genuine academic freedom, not one of indoctrination and discrimination. The Trump administration and some states are taking steps toward the goal of making classrooms a place where students feel comfortable engaging in meaningful discussions about Western and American intellectual and societal achievements. Hopefully, it’s not too late to turn the ship around.
