Social Studies Standards Hearing Prepared Remarks of Donald Lee

Thank you for the opportunity to address these important issues.

It seems impossible to satisfy all the stakeholders. Some testimony heard today is from special interests seeking to add “one more thing” to the standard, believing that if not in the standard, it won’t be taught. Those who actually have to do the teaching complain that there is far too much in the standard to do a decent job of covering the material.  I respect the 40 people and their efforts, but their job is very difficult.

I’d like to step back and ask a vital question.  Why do we teach “social studies” – civics, geography, economics and history?  What is the purpose?

We teach our children these things in order to explain and inculcate the intellectual and ideological foundations on which our culture rests.

History is especially important because it gives to our young the wisdom of human experience. It tells where we’ve been, and how we came to be where we are, not just physically, but intellectually and spiritually. It tells our students what has worked, and what failed.  It inspires them with the amazing accomplishments of those who went before us, and cautions them against repeating old mistakes.  It provides perspective to help put new events in their proper place.  History reminds us that deceptively simple solutions to complex problems have been tried before, and are almost always wrong.

Civics is basic training in citizenship. Without instruction in how our republic works, and full understanding of what can go wrong, our republic will wither into the certain tyranny that marks the rest of human history.  Citizens need to understand their vital role. More importantly, they need motivation — reasons to care about doing the hard work of citizenship.

So, I come to this hearing asking a question: Do these proposed new standards enhance the effort to teach our children these absolutely essential things?

Unfortunately, the answer appears to be an emphatic “no”.

Do not misunderstand.  I recognize and appreciate all the work that has gone into these standards, and realize that the authors are every bit as dedicated to producing a good outcome as I am.  There is much to like in these new standards, but fatal flaws demand correction.

The flaws are not even directly in the text of the standards, but in the omissions and subtle ideological shifts that rob the subject matter of meaning. Take for example Standards 9 and 10 in the “World History” Substrand, which summarize the time-period from 600 AD to 1750 AD. These clinical descriptions are worded with all the warmth of an entomologist analyzing a colony of ants or a biologist dissecting a tissue sample. The writer is a disinterested observer, looking down on the human race, dispassionately enumerating causes and effects. No mention is made of key developments in western thought–developments which laid the foundation for the birth of our nation.

Similarly sterile, is the wording in Substrand 4: United States History, where we read that the American Revolution resulted from “The divergence of colonial interests from those of England.” Really? The heroes of our revolution fought and died over a divergence of interests?

These statements are not factually false, but they reveal a concerted effort by the writers to be culturally neutral–to treat history as an object of scientific curiosity, rather than a distillation of human experience and wisdom to be passed on to our descendants.

The proposed 2011 standards seem carefully worded to avoid any hint of ethnocentrism or nationalism. The writers seem to believe that the ability to draw your own historical conclusions can be taught apart from any suppositions about what is good, or virtuous or desirable. This is simply untrue. Like it or not, education is indoctrination. Teachers are authority figures. If a teacher presents the story of our past with the air of a detached observer, or a critical armchair quarterback, the students will absorb that attitude and carry it forward into their adult role as citizens. It is crucial that the narrative of our history be cast in a positive light.  Ours is a history rich in creativity, triumph, compassion and genius.  We have tamed a continent, fed the world, resisted and defeated tyranny.  The American revolution launched a system of government never-before-tried on the face of the earth. That system of ordered liberty, rule of law and personal freedom unleashed a torrent of creativity and productivity that triggered a technological revolution that transformed the world. The proposed Social Studies standards minimize and downplay this miracle, while opening the door to a much darker narrative about our role as a people and a nation.

In the darker narrative, America prospered only through imperialism and the exploitation of minorities. Humanity is now finally emerging from the oppression of white European ethnocentrism. The downtrodden, third-world peoples are finally coming to have an equal seat at the table, and we look forward to the dawn of a new era of peace as we finally free ourselves from the evils of nationalism, and stop the rape and pillage of resources from Mother Earth. There is truth in this dark narrative, but it is by no means the whole story, and if this is what we teach our school children, how can we expect them to take any pride in being Americans? Why should they serve in the army, or speak up in defense of the principles our country was founded on? Why should they devote themselves to hard work in productive industries, knowing that any success they might achieve rests on so disgraceful a foundation?

The proposed standards do not, of course, mandate this dark narrative. They provide a skeleton of broad ideas, which can be fleshed out by each school district as it sees fit. This skeleton is dramatically different than the standards of 2004, and I think incompatible with what is necessary to equip our students to be guardians of our republic.

The new standards remove heroic figures from the benchmarks by the dozen, and replace the positive and heroic portrayal of pivotal figures and events in our history with the obscure, the trivial, and the inoffensively mundane.

The standards ignore our uniqueness and the foundational ideas that enable self-government.  These core ideas must be understood as our founders understood them to achieve any comprehension of what they built.  Personal responsibility, natural inalienable rights and the Rule of Law are key concepts.  Without a proper understanding of these foundational ideas, there is little point in teaching the rest.  These are the self-evident truths in the Declaration of Independence that our founders fought and died for.

The new standards are simply wrong about the role of democracy in our history.  The standards make mention of this in many places, offering the idea that we have “democratic values” and live in “a democracy”.  Civics standard three makes mention of “majority rule”.

History and civics are taught of necessity, not for fun. We do it for survival, to impart the vital experience of those who went before us to those who follow us.  We do it to give our children context, and purpose, and perspective.  We do it to equip the next generation with the wisdom of the previous generations, and to help them avoid the mistakes of the past.

These proposed standards strip out what is important in a quest for some undefined ideal of cultural and ideological neutrality. They remove what is important in favor of the trivial.  They go in exactly the wrong direction.

I urge rejection of the standards as written, so as to allow time and energy to repair their flaws.  Failing that, our local schools would be far better off setting their own standards, as though they were actually run by the local school boards, and not mere agents of the state education establishment.

Thank you.