The Anti-Reading Crowd Is Never Satisfied

At the heart of the raging controversy about reading restrictions, there are books about which reasonable adults can disagree, even books that the most ardent free speecher might not want their younger children to read. This is why one tactic of the reading restriction crowd is to shove the most extreme excerpts and pictures in front of audiences. If you aspire to being a reasonable person in these debates, you probably accept the premise that there are some books that do not belong in the middle school library.

But no matter how reasonable you want to be, you have to remember one thing.

The book banners, reading restrictors, censors, ultra-conservative crowd, whatever you want to call them--the people out in front of this drive-- are never going to be satisfied.

There will never, ever, be a day when they will say, "Well, I think that's it. We are perfectly happy that the truly objectionable stuff is out of the school library, and we're going to go home now because our work here is done."

The Moms for Liberty members who call the sheriff because a librarian let a 17-year-old check out a young adult fantasy novel that barely counts as PG-13 for its sexy content. The people who count victories in terms of total number of books removed. They're not going to be satisfied ever. Ever.

We've seen lots of questionable book challenges, like the classic overly-sexy seahorses, but to see how this really goes, look at Collier County Public Schools in (of course) Florida. They've yanked a reported 300+ books from shelves in attempting to follow HB 1069, the anti-sex talk law that was noted for probably forbidding telling young girls about periods.

One local agitator explained what the Collier County book vanishing act was all about, as reported by Ryan Arbogast for NBC-2

“They’re Just requiring school districts to not indoctrinate our kids on things that our sexually inappropriate,” added Keith Flaugh, of the grassroots political organization Florida Citizens Alliance. “I often say, to folks that call it book banning, so … are you ok with prohibiting guns and drugs in schools? The Role of the school districts is to provide a safe environment.”

So what books did Collier County find as dangerous as guns and drugs? The list is long, but PEN America is sharing it; here are some highlights. 

Some of the usuals are here-- Steven King, Ellen Hopkins, Toni Morrison. But Ernest Hemmingway? Three are on the list, including The Sun Also Rises which I taught for years and while, yes, sex is obliquely (really obliquely) an idea in the book, digging out sexual content would be a hopeless quest. 

Dune Chronicles? Steve Martin's novel Shopgirl? One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest? 2001: A Space Odyssey-- I mean, seriously, Clarke is one of the most asexual authors in all of SF. 

Many Waters??!! The Madeline L'Engle second sequel to Wrinkle in Time is, like the rest of the series, soaked hard in religious ideas, but Many Waters has for sexual content some heavy flirting. Flowers for Algernon, also regularly taught and unsexy. The Once and Future King, T. H. Whites four-book Arthurian doorstop that is the basis for both Disney's Sword in the Stone and the musical Camelot and, again, not very sexy. 

Man in the Iron Mask, the final of Dumas's three Three Musketeers novels published in the mid-nineteenth century, when no literary characters ever had sex at all. This is one of several items on the list that lead me to suspect that, in the time honored tradition of non-readers, the compilers of the list skipped the book and watched a movie version instead.

And, believe it or not, both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, the two Ayn Rand cornerstones. Granted, I agree that nobody ever needs to read Atlas Shrugged ever, but if you feel so compelled, go ahead. Both books, other than presenting Rand's bizarro notions about romance and some very ungraphic depictions of what appears to be angry sex, these are not ban-worthy books. I mean, I deeply dislike them for their blundering prose and teenaged sociopathic egoism promotion, but I wouldn't ban them.

My point is this-- we can mock districts like Collier County and their scattershot book restriction lists, bur the important point is that they are not going to stop, ever. Appeasement will not stop them. They will not at some future point run out of steam and consider their work done. They will never run out of books to be offended by, and even as they go even too farther and allies step away from them, they will not see that as a signal to maybe cool it.

It will never stop until someone (or maybe a bunch of someones) stands up to them, gets between them and the power to keep culling books, and makes it stop. I sure hope you voted today. 

Life Is Not A Cabaret, Old Chum

My wife, an enormously talented human being, performed in the local theater production of Cabaret last weekend. Of course, I went to see the show, despite the fact that it is a tough-edged piece of Kander-Ebb genius, a dark, hard show to watch, all the more so because it echoes the times we live in.

If you're only familiar with the movie version, well, that's a much gentler take on the stage show. In particular, it removes an entire subplot that makes the show's point far less subtle.

On stage, Sally Bowles is still there, wild and free and oblivious, somehow falling in with Cliff, also oblivious, but getting less so as the show progresses. He's American and she's British. When he arrives in Berlin at the show's opening, he's befriended by a pleasant German fellow, Ernst, who hooks Cliff up with an apartment in the building run by Fraulein Schneider. Missing from the film is the Fraulein's December-December romance with Herr Schulz, a businessman and a Jew. Their stories are interspersed with numbers in the Kit Kat Club, hosted by the Master of Ceremonies, who insures us that inside the club, everything is beautiful. 

Denial is a major theme of the work. Schneider deals with her prostitute boarder by just pretending that's not what's going on. Schulz insists that politics don't matter; it will all blow over. Cliff is smuggling contraband for Ernst, raising money for a good cause, and he doesn't ask what. The club is the heart of an endless wild party that ignores the outside world. And the audience is swept along--what fun songs! What delightful dancing!

But at the end of Act I, at Schneider and Schiltz's engagement party, Ernst stops by, takes off his overcoat, and we see that the good cause of this affable, friendly man is the Nazi party. He is happy to find his old friend about to be married late in her life--until he learns that Schultz is a Jew. "You must not marry him. It is for your own safety," he tells Schneider. And then the crowd signs "Tomorrow belongs to me," now clearly a Nazi anthem. End Act I.

Act II is brief and brutal. The engagement is broken, and while Cliff and Sally offer Fraulein Schneider cheery bromides about togetherness and standing up for what you believe, she asks them (and the audience) what would you do? Cliff, rocked by all of this, wants to take the now-pregnant Sally to America, but instead she retreats to the club. Introduced one last time by a Master of Ceremonies who is no longer saucy and confident, but is now hollowed out and resigned, introduces her one last time.

This is where the song "Cabaret" comes in, a song that is familiar as a happy upbeat piece--but only when taken wildly out of context. In context--well, this was the part in the show where I was almost brought to tears. It is an anthem to denial in the worst of times. "No use permitting some prophet of doom to wipe every smile away" sounds great, unless the prophet is correct. And the verse, about her old friend Elsie, outlines her aspiration to be a happy, young corpse who dies while the party is still going on. And then, after the last note, she collapses on stage.

It's downhill all the way. Sally gets an abortion. Schultz moves out to make things easier for Schneider. He's still confident that he will be fine because this will all boil over and her is, after all, a German himself; we know that he's wrong. Cliff leaves for America, alone and with a story about the end of the world and Sally Bowles (that is, of course, the novel on which the theater piece is based). The Master of Ceremonies ushers the characters into the mists of oblivion, the stage goes dark, and here, at the end of the show, nobody applauds.

Cabaret is a subversive work. It's about people who party and play and entertain themselves into denial while doom and destruction gather around them, and as we in the audience figure that out, we can say "These foolish people. Who just plays in the face of obvious evil," but then we have to confront our own hands, applauding the characters for those actions. And it becomes increasingly more difficult. There's a fun number with a dancing kick line that turns into a goose step. The Master of Ceremonies shares a cute song and dance with a gorilla that ends with an ugly gut punch of anti-semitism. Do we applaud, or not? 

When the show was developed in the mid-sixties, Producer Harold Prince was aiming for a show that would provide gritty moral dilemmas that evoked the moral struggles of the time. 

The song "Cabaret" joins the small group of misconstrued songs in musicals (see also "One" from Chorus Line and the finale to Kander and Ebb's other genius show, Chicago), songs that in context are about exactly the opposite idea that casual listeners ascribe to them. The real central song of the show, for my money (and not just because my wife sang the hell out of it every time) is Fraulein Schneider's "What Would You Do?"

With time rushing by,
What would you do?

With the clock running down,
What would you do?
The young always have the cure-
Being brave, being sure
And free,
But imagine if you were me.
Alone like me,
And this is the only world you know.
Some rooms to let?
The sum of a lifetime, even so.

I'll take your advice.
What would you do?

Would you pay the price?
What would you do?

Suppose simply keeping still
Means you manage until the end?
What would you do,
My brave young friend?

Grown old like me,
With neither the will nor wish to run;
Grown tired like me,
Who hurries for bed when day is done;
Grown wise like me,
Who isn't at war with anyone?
Not anyone!

With a storm in the wind,
What would you do?

Suppose you're one frightened voice
Being told what the choice must be.

Go on; tell me,
I will listen.
What would you do?
If you were me?

But Fraulein Schneider is not the hero of the story, either. What does one do, when evil comes in affable, friendly, familiar form, and your biggest impulse is to dance or hunker down, to try to hide from the storm and hope, somehow, that you are or those you love are not swept away in it. To try to party and sing loudly enough that you can ignore the other voices. To stay at the cabaret and leave the world outside to its own end, as if, somehow, that would not be your end as well.

We live through a many times and tides, and it sucks that right now the tides in education are dark and ugly, and it would be nice if we could all go hang out at some club somewhere and waited for the tide to shift. But there is one other notable feature of Cabaret the show-- everyone in it is on their own, with no ties, no other people depending on them. In fact the events show them unable to form those bonds even when they want to. But people who work in service fields--teachers, health care workers, etc--have those responsibilities, those ties, and so there is no retreating to the club without abandoning those who depend on us. Which doesn't mean we're called on to be superhuman, but we can't just check out, either. 

Nor should the club be shut down forever. There is always light in our lives, sometimes more than others. But there is a huge difference between celebrating life and hiding from it because it's ugly, because it demands something hard from us. There is a big difference between celebrating what is bright and good and pretending that the brightness is all there is, ignoring the darkness and letting it fester or grow. 

It's something to see a show like this brought to life by friends and family; it's a show that could easily be performed as so much less than what it is. Theater is supposed to hold the mirror up to nature, and sometimes in the mirror we see our best selves and sometimes we can see that we've got spinach in our teeth and schmutz on our foreheads, and both are ways to help us find our better natures. 

Some lessons framed in history are hard and uncomfortable and unpleasant, but there is no way to find our better selves without them. And sometimes the cabaret isn't a party or dancing or debauchery, but a happy fairy tale about a past that never was, a past in which we can hide (and encourage the next generation to also hide) from uncomfortable truths about our failures, even as we fail to confront those failures by hiding in the cabaret instead and insisting that our country has always been a bright, delightful party.

That's not the way forward. That's not the way up. Life is not a cabaret.

ICYMI: Fall Back Edition (11/5)

Enjoying your extra hour? Or is this just a sneaky plot to leave us groggy and disoriented when elections roll around on Tuesday (in PA, anyway). Either way, I have some reading for you from the previous week.

I've Been To Over 20 Homeschool Conferences. The Things I've Witnessed At Them Shocked Me.

Heather Stark has a girl empowerment book series that she pitches at homeschooling conferences. She writes for Huffpost about the stuff she has encountered ("I am 20 minutes into the presentation when a woman interrupts me. 'When are you going to talk about God in all of this?' she asks.")

Moms for Liberty and Bible “Porn”

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider takes a look at Moms for Liberty's relentless opposition to naughty books, and holds it up against one book with many naughty bits.

Moms for Liberty unexpectedly finds itself at the center of a heated suburban Indiana mayoral race

Speaking of the Moms, Isabella Volmert reports for the Associated Press on how they've turned up in a mayoral race. I'm not sure how unexpected it is, but the Democrat in the race is using his opposition to the Hitler-quoting chapter to improve his own chances.

School Choice is Becoming Involuntary Tithing

Anne Lutz Fernandez looks at how states have started to "separate taxpayers from more money on behalf of churches." I do like "involuntary tithing" as a way to describe it.

The Undead "Invest In Kids" Act Creeps Back into the Capitol

Illinois's voucher law is scheduled to lapse soon, and so lots of voucher fans are doing their best to keep it shambling about in undead form. Julie Vassilatos writes about it. 

What are "evidence mills?"

Let's say you need some evidence so you can call your new program product "evidence-based." Is there a handy place to order up some evidence? Why, yes, yes there is.

Neenah school district will raise taxes by nearly 4% as cost of voucher program jumps 44%

This particular example is from Wisconsin, but it's the same old story-- more vouchers = higher local taxes and/or fewer local services.

What Happens When Teachers Aren't Valued?

You already know, but Andy Spears lays it out here.

Texas tried to fix its teacher shortage by lowering requirements − the result was more new teachers, but at lower salaries

At the Conversation, the unsurprising news that when you lower standards, pay goes down, and when pay goes down, people don't to meet rigorous standards, and your clever solution to a teacher :shortage" just makes things worse.

How Teacher Apprenticeship is Changing Teacher Preparation

Here's a thing they're trying in some places.

A Texas Billionaire’s Associates Are Trying to Sink a School Tax Election via Their Dark Money Nonprofit

Your list of rich guys trying to mess with education should include Tim Dunn of Texas. Here's just one example of his special brand of shenanigans, from ProPublica

Mike Miles has some explaining to do. Great teachers HISD shouldn't be afraid.

The editors of the Houston Chronicle like some of Mike Miles moves for his school takeover, but even they have noticed there are problems when you install a culture of fear.

School Board Elections Could Make (or Break) Our Democracy

From The Progressive, a reminder that elections have consequences--even school board elections. Please pay attention.

Truth & Liberty Coalition expands culture war to 30 Colorado school boards

Steve Ravey at Religion News reports on the advance of Christian Nationalism in Colorado.

This Extremist Group Calls Itself A 'Parental Rights' Org. Now It's Targeting School Boards In 1 Key State.

Nathalie Baptiste breaks down Moms for Liberty's attempt to get a foothold in Pennsylvania. (I'm sure it has nothing to do with Pennsylvania's being a swing state for 2024.) I hope people are paying attention next Tuesday.

Will Adding Even More Vouchers Improve SUFS’s Customer Service?

Florida's voucher program is starting to collapse under its own weight. Sue Kingery Woltanski doubts that adding more weight will be a big help. 

Same Monkeys At the Wheel

TC Weber breaks down the latest school evaluation monkeyshines in Tennessee.

A Reflection on the Network for Public Education’s 10th Anniversary Conference

Jan Resseger presents some highlights from the Network for Public Education conference.

Grade Retention is Unnecessary!

Nancy Bailey looks at the ever-popular bad policy of retention for students who fail a reading test.

SC Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver Addresses School Librarians

Steve Nuzum looks at South Carolina's ed chief's address to school librarians, in all its counterfactual threatening awfulness.

A Tennessee high school let a Christian preacher lead the basketball team in foot-washing

Oh boy.

What Happens When Young People Actually Read “Disturbing” Books

A new study (admittedly a bit narrow) sees what happens if you just let middle schoolers just pick whatever they want to read.

Right-wing fake history is making a big comeback — but it never went away

A quick guide to some of the common themes of fake history.

The Great Social Media–News Collapse

At the Atlantic (beware the paywall) an analysis of what readers and big tech have done to news reporting.

At Forbes this week, I looked at a really interesting free market argument against vouchers, and a group out there trying to combat Moms for Liberty. 

Sign up for substack, and get all my education stuff for free in your inbox. 

Rules and Charter Innovation (A Paired Text Exercise)

It's an ordinary day when a pair of charter school boosters conclude that charters work best when mean old government doesn't make them follow a bunch of rules and stuff. It is an ordinary day when someone points out they're full of regular non-innovative baloney. It is a less ordinary day when the baloney is being called out by a piece in the house organ of the Thomas Fordham Institute.

So let's pretend for a moment that the question of regulations vs. charter innovation is a real question. David Griffith, the Fordham Associate Director of Research, frames this as the old tension between autonomy and accountability, which makes more sense than talking about charter school innovation, because after a few decades of charter proliferation, the amount of innovation they have produced is somewhere between jack and squat. Despite being billed as "laboratories of innovation," charter schools haven't come up with much of anything that public schools were not already well aware of. 

But the "study" of the relationship between innovation and regulation comes from two guys who are not exactly unbiased. Jay Greene was previously of the University of Arkansas, where he was occasionally willing to hit reformsters with uncomfortable truths; nowadays he's at the Heritage Foundation, where his job is to push preferred policies. Joining him is Corey DeAngelis, the education dudebro logging many miles across the country as he lobbies hard for Bety DeVos's American Federation for Children. I'm old enough to remember when someone could have a civil conversation with DeAngelis on line, but these days "attack dog" and "unleasher of troll pack" seems to be part of his job description. Ian Kingsbury is also in on this; he previously worked for cyber school giant Stride (formerly K12) and the Empire Center; these days he's a senior fellow at the Education Freedom Institute ("Protecting and promoting school choice"). DeAngelis is the EFI executive director, and Greene is the Managing Senior Fellow. 

In short, this is a trio of people whose profession is pushing school choice.

A caveat here--the article is in Educational Research and Evaluation, part of the family of Taylor and Francis journals, and if I want to read the whole article, it'll cost me $50. That is far outside the Institute's budget of $0.00, so I'll be working strictly second hand here.

To "study" the relationship between regulations and innovation, they had to come up with a way to quantify innovatiness, so this is what they did. They considered five factors: the pedagogical approaches used to teach that academic content; the types of students they sought to serve; whether they delivered that education in person, virtually, or with a mixed approach; and whether they had a specialized theme, such as technology, art, or the environment. The judged 1,261 charter schools by cruising their websites and seeing how they stacked up on those five dimensions. That gave each school an innovation rating.

Having manufactured the innovation rating, they stacked those up beside state ratings from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), which the researchers see as based on how heavily regulated charters are in the state. 

Aha! they declared. The more regulation, the less innovatiness in charter schools. For charter fans, it's simple--more options means they can move more product, and while I get their point, it is also true that we would have far more innovation in the food industry without all those government regulations about poison and stuff.

Griffith makes a similar observation. Their technique of quantifying "innovation" gives the charter points for being unusual, and that's problematic:

From a purely normative perspective, an obvious problem with the authors’ approach is that it is content neutral. So, for example, a school that was grounded in Satan Worship would count as highly innovative (provided it didn’t start a movement), as would one that imparted no knowledge whatsoever (as seems to be the case for many virtual schools).

And he doesn't think "innovation" means what they think it means either, noting that many of their "innovations" aren't particularly new but instead include "longstanding programs such as Core Knowledge (est. 1986), Waldorf (1919), and Montessori (1907), not to mention “single-sex” education (Harvard, circa 1636) and “project-based” learning (the Pleistocene)." (That is Griffith's snark there, not mine).

So do they really mean "programmatic diversity"? Griffith says no, because their system really measures

how similar a particular state’s charter sector is to the national charter sector (rather than how many different types of schools a state’s charter sector includes). Which simply isn’t the same thing as diversity or innovation, no matter how much the authors may want it to be.

And some of that variation, he points out, can simply be a factor of location or the student population being served. New Jersey will not have the kind of rural-serving charters that Idaho might have, for reasons having nothing to do with regulation.

In short, Griffith finds their whole design junk.

All of which makes it hard to swallow the authors’ claim in a recent National Review article that “we know heavy charter regulation has this negative effect on diversity and innovation in the charter sector because we actually measured it in our new peer-reviewed study.”

No, we don’t. No, they didn’t. And the mere fact that a study is “peer reviewed” doesn’t mean it should be taken seriously.

All of which I agree with wholeheartedly. And it's a special day when I don't have to dismantle a reformster "study" because a Fordham guy gets there first. 

OK: Walters Itching For National Stage

Oklahoma's Education Dudebro-in-Chief Ryan Walters was always a bad choice for the office, wearing out the patience of even his fellow GOP officials with his theorcratic bluster and anti-teacher grandstanding even as he displays little interest in doing his actual job. There has been suspicion all along that Walters just sees his current job as a stepping stone, a chance to audition for the national stage. And this week, not even a full year in office behind him, he's been offering further proof.

This week news broke that the Oklahoma Education Department is looking to hire a PR firm to provide print and digital op-eds to national outlets, provide national bookings, coordinate national events and appearances for executive staff, write speeches and handle some communications. That includes a minimum of three op-eds, two speeches and 10 media bookings per month. The department already has its own comms people, so this would apparently involve a whole new batch of work, aimed, one guesses, at raising Walters' national profile.

Or, as Oklahoma Watch reported:

“Why would an Oklahoma elected official need a paid staff person to arrange national media appearances in order to do their job in the state of Oklahoma?” said Erin Brewer, communications chair for Oklahoma Parent Legislative Advocacy Coalition, a grassroots education advocacy group. “It sounds like campaigning to me.”

Meanwhile, Walters had Big News to announce on Wednesday--from his car, as usual, because, as frequent Walters critic Clay Horning put it, "the guy won’t be caught dead at his state department of public education office."

I received a call from President Trump this week, and I'm proud to announce that I'm going to join his team for reelect. I fully and totally endorse President Trump.

It's not a huge surprise. Walters has been going full MAGA for a while now. His brief announcement played all the hits:

President Trump will be able to end radical indoctrination in our schools. This woke ideology will be driven out of our schools. The cancer that is the teachers’ union will be driven out of our schools and parents will be put in charge of their kids education. We will move from teaching kids to hate this country. We will teach kids the basics to understand how to be successful and to love this country and what makes America great.

Also, Trump's going to dismantle the Department of Education. Just like he did the last time, I guess. 

Does Walters smell a US Secretary of Education post in his future? He'd probably be best to skip trying for governor, since he underperformed the other big GOP candidates in the last election. He certainly has the rhetorical bona fides to serve as a successor to Betsy DeVos, which is more than enough reason to vote against Trump in 2024 (if you needed one more reason). 

He's got three more years in his current office, which is probably enough time to build himself a national platform so that he doesn't need to worry about actually doing the job that Oklahomans elected him to do. Which is too bad for Oklahoma and also too bad for the rest of us. Here's hoping that Oklahoma keeps him and ends his fifteen minutes of MAGA fame. 

M4L School Board Candidate Is A Big Fat Liar

A Moms for Liberty backed school board candidate for Downington Area School Board in Pennsylvania turns out to have a George Santos-sized fabulist streak.

Maddie Hanna of the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on this story, which is now out from behind a paywall, and as always, she did a hell of a job. I'm just going to whet your appetite--go read the whole thing.

This guy

Back in 2021 the district started getting formal-sounding challenges to books in its library from the Society of College Medicine Violations Department. Except there's no such society, and so there's no such department. 

It has come to our attention that a ‘Red Flagged’ book has appeared on your DEI Reading List. We recommend this being removed immediately, and sensitivity counseling/training administered to whomever recommended/allowed this book to a school population.

The e-mails even referenced things like "tier-1" and "tier-2" violations. 

But this is all made-up baloney from Christopher Bressi, who has (well, had, because Hanna's reporting seems to have prompted some erasures) a whole web of interlocking made-up BS websites. This goes with a host of jobs that he may or may not have actually had in IT and consulting and higher ed. And he also tried to get himself some juice in right wing reading restriction circles. As Hanna reports:

In a “No Left Turn in Education” group, Bressi — using the name Christopher Bre — shared an email from the Society for College Medicine notifying Downingtown of “Red Flag” violations, and referred to “pressure from the Society of College Medicine” that he suggested was having an impact.

But district administrators had already disregarded the messages. “There is no Society of College Medicine, let alone a violations department,” Justin Brown, Downingtown’s director of diversity, equity and inclusion, wrote in an email to school board members. “This is simply someone trying to troll the district.”

This guy is a hoot. Hanna also found him, through Bressi LLC, operating a Space Tourism website. On LinkedIn she found his group “Global Education Executives (No Politics in School) Global Academic Network!”

Bressi referred to that LinkedIn group while addressing the Downingtown board in March 2022, opposing a contract with the American School Counselor Association that he said would promote “divisive ideologies.”

Bressi informed the board that “the largest educational management group on LinkedIn” had “recommended collectively that K-12 schools adopt a no-politics-in-the-classroom pledge” — advising the district to “follow suit.”

You can read his website here (for now) and check out an interview he did as a candidate on a conservative website (don't miss the comments) or this site where you can...take a course about him? He's got a long list of alleged academic credentials. What appears to be his LinkedIn page lists his current job as Executive Director of Higher Education - Global ACI. Hanna tracked that to Aspect Consulting, an IT consulting group. A former colleague says he's inflating a bit and simply functions as a go-between to connect educational institutions with software consultants.

This guy is running for school board in Downington. Elections are next Tuesday; may many people get a chance to see what a shady piece of work he is before then. Read the whole story, and if you're in Downington, spread it.  And if you’re somewhere with Moms for Liberty endorsing school board candidates, take it as a lesson.

[Update: He lost]

The History Christian Nationalists Want

Recently Oklahoma's education Dudebro-in-Chief Ryan Walters went on another tear, this time warning textbook publishers that they'd better not try to sell any wokified textbooks in Oklahoma. "If you can't teach math without talking about transgenderism, go to California, go to New York," he told Fox News Digital. He even sent out a letter, just so they'd know. "Listen, we will be checking for these things now. Do not give us textbooks that have critical race theory in them."

Walters said lots of things. Maybe he's auditioning for a media spot. Maybe he wants to be governor. Maybe he's just a tool. But he says all sorts of things like "In Oklahoma, our kids are going to know the basics. We want them to master it. We want them to do exceptionally well academically. We're not here for any kind of Joe Biden's socialist Marxist training ground."

But somewhere in this conversation, Walters lays out a succinct summary of our nation's history as he believes it should be taught.

So as you go through, you talk about the times that America has led the free world, that we have continued to be that light. We've done more for individual liberty than any other country in the history of the world. And those belief systems that were there in place, it allowed us to do it. You've got to talk about our Judeo-Christian values. The founders were very clear that that was a crucial part of our success. Then you go through and you evaluate. Are these times we lived up to our core principles? You've got to be honest with kids about our history. So you talk about all of it, but you evaluate it through the prism of our founding principles. Is this a time we lived up to those principles?

Most of the elements of the christianist nationalist version of US history are here. American exceptionalism-- the light that led the free world, the very most ever done for individual liberty. A nation founded on Judeo-Christian values. 

With that as a foundation, it's safe to note some of the lapses, all of which are framed as an aberration, a lapse from our foundation and certainly not part of it (take that, you 1619 project-reading CRTers). In the CN view, every good thing that ever happened is because of our God-aligned nature, and every bad thing is in spite of it, quite possibly because Wrong People were allowed to get their hands on some power. 

There are plenty of implications for this view of history. One of the biggest is that these folks simply don't believe in democracy, because democracy allows too many of the Wrong People to get their hands on power. As Katherin Stewart puts it in her must-read The Power Worshippers--

It [Christian nationalism] asserts that legitimate government rests not on the consent of the governed but adherence to the doctrines of a specific religious, ethnic, and cultural heritage.

Or, as she quotes Gary North, a radical free-market libertarian christianist who developed the Ron Paul Curriculum,

Let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then we will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.

The idea of individualism is also important in the CN view of US history. There's no systemic anything--just the work of either good or bad, Right or Wrong individuals. And if everything is about the individual, then your problems are strictly your problems; your failures are all on you, not on society or community (the village has no responsibility to raise your child). That emphasis on the individual runs all through the Hillsdale 1776 curriculum, both original flavor and the Jordan Adams stealth version. 

The rejection of systemic views of society and history matters. It goes along with the view that we pretty much fixed racism in the 1960s (even we got a little too socialist in the process). From which we can conclude that all attempts to talk racism now are just attempts to grab power with made-up grievances. 

To take another angle-- the underlying idea of the Classical Education that is so popular with the CN crowd is that there is One Objective Truth. Back in classical times, great thinkers understood this Truth, but the 20th century brought a bunch of relativistic thought and the evil notion that there are different, subjective truths. But our Founding Fathers knew the Truth and encoded it into the Constitution and our founding principles, and as long as we are led by people who follow that Truth, which is somehow both a Christian Truth and an American Truth, we are okay. People who don't follow that Truth are a threat to the integrity and fiber of our country; consequently, they have to be stopped. 

People who claim that history is complicated, that our founders were complicated, that humans are complicated--those people are just trying to confuse the issue, to draw others away from understanding The Truth. 

So we counter that confusion with history like Walters'-- a history that is clear that our country is exceptional, its foundation fused with God's Objective Truth by men who were Good and Righteous. Some people have strayed from that path and tricked others into straying with them (just as today that evil axis of Biden, Democrats, unions and socialists are still trying). Extremism in the defense of God's given order (which includes keeping people in their proper place in the social order) is not only allowed, but is required.

You'll find some version of this everywhere you find christianist nationalists trying properly bring up the next generation to believe the Truth (it's only indoctrination when you try to lead people off the True Path--when you try to convince people to stay on that path, you're just standing up for what is Righteous and True). Where you find this, you'll find people who don't understand that when you mix religion and politics, you get politics. And you'll find some other people who understand that all too well, and who understand that religion-flavored politics can be an excellent path to power.