While Donald Trump’s effort to end the Department of Education is admirable, much else must be done to right the country’s wayward K-12 ship. One glaring issue that needs to be addressed is the ongoing far-left slant of school curricula.
A report by the Goldwater Institute released in late January shows how politically skewed our schools are. The policy organization’s Tyler Bonin states that Marxist Howard Zinn’s work is used in about 25% of American classrooms.
Zinn’s best-selling book, A People’s History of the United States, which is used in conjunction with the online “Zinn Education Project,” misinforms students and borrows from Karl Marx to present American history as a “conflict between capital and labor,” Goldwater discloses.
Zinn maintained that the teaching of history “should serve society in some way” and that “objectivity is impossible and it is also undesirable.” When called on the carpet for writing a history book that played very fast and loose with the facts, the author freely admitted it, saying that his hope in writing the book was to create a revolution.
Well, at least Zinn was honest enough to admit he was a liar.
Here are just a few of Zinn’s suppositions: He resents Abraham Lincoln and the people of the northern states during the Civil War for “insufficient opposition to the institution of slavery.” He has “condescension toward those opposed to the spread of communism.” He also maintains a belief that “civil rights reforms have amounted to little more than window dressing amid a backdrop of ongoing, intractable systemic oppression.”
While students may now be experts in Marxist dogma, they are ignorant of real history. In 2024, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) conducted a national survey of college students that delved into their basic knowledge of American history and government and found that significant numbers of college students graduate without a basic grasp of the nation’s history and political system.
For example, 60% of college students could not correctly identify the term lengths of members serving in U.S. Congress, and 63% could not identify the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Importantly, these were multiple-choice questions. Hence, students didn’t have to recall John Roberts’ name, only recognize it. A majority of students believe that the Constitution was written in 1776 rather than 1787.
While the above numbers are distressing, they are not surprising, as fewer than 20% of American colleges and universities require a traditional U.S. government or history course to graduate, according to ACTA.
The findings in the ACTA report are hardly unique. The latest Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey, released late last year, found that 35% of Americans could not name all three branches of government.
Additionally, when respondents were asked to name the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, 74% named freedom of speech, but just 39% knew that freedom of religion is included, 27% named the right to assembly, 29% knew freedom of the press, and a mere 11% mentioned the right to petition the government.
The results of the latest NAEP U.S. history and civics test, taken in 2022, are also telling. The test revealed that just 13% of eighth graders met proficiency standards for U.S. history, meaning they could “explain major themes, periods, events, people, ideas and turning points in the country’s history.” Also, only about 20% of students scored at or above the proficient level in civics. Both scores represent all-time lows on these two tests.
Ignorance and indoctrination have consequences. A 2024 Gallup poll found the number of Americans who are extremely or very proud to be Americans has fallen from 90% to 67% since 2004.
The good news is that there is rising resistance to the advancing Marxism. As Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, writes, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds recently announced a bill that would require high school students to “pass the citizenship test to graduate; if it passes, Iowa will become the 14th state to adopt such a measure.”
Various major universities have also launched independent institutes, sometimes called “schools of civic thought,” dedicated to the in-depth exploration of an American political tradition that goes beyond partisan politics. These institutes have independent hiring authority and significant state funding. Thus far, about a dozen civic institutes have sprung up in Arizona, Texas, Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, Ohio, etc., with more on the way.
It’s important to note that private school students have better civic outcomes than public school students, according to a new statistical meta-analysis published in Educational Psychology Review.
Former talk show host Jay Leno aired many classic segments over the years in which he’d ask random people questions you would think they’d know, but these citizens were, in fact, clueless. During a typical “Jay Walking” Q&A, he’d pose questions such as, “What are the three branches of government?” Or, “What is the Bill of Rights?” Or, “What does ‘Take the Fifth’ mean?” Amazingly, many people did not know these basic things. It’s worth noting that several inside sources have disclosed that the uneducated people Leno talked to were very easy to find.
The segment was always humorous, but when the laughing stopped, you came to realize that a profound number of Americans are just plain ignorant of the nation’s history, and it starts with wayward public schooling.
We are one year away from the 250th anniversary of our country’s founding. It’s about time that government-run schools get back to basics and drop the Marxist propaganda that still permeates too many of them. Getting rid of the Department of Education is certainly a step in the right direction, but We The People must rise up. Parents and concerned citizens must be much more vigilant, closely watching state legislators and school board members. Those who favor indoctrination must be voted out of office.
Larry Sand, a retired 28-year classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network, a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.