The Trump administration is seeking to replace education with indoctrination in America’s K-12 public schools, demanding schools paint a fairy tale picture of the American story that focuses only on the good while ignoring the bad and the ugly. We owe our children better.
Alarmingly, the administration wants to withhold billions of dollars in federal aid to schools unless they bow to its dictatorial demands.
An executive order signed by President Trump, titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” says that schools must instill in students “a patriotic admiration for our incredible nation and the values for which we stand.” It denounces schools that teach “anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies.” The order gives the federal government dangerously wide latitude to censor what it considers impermissible educational content.
Another Trump executive order on schools denounces “gender ideology” and “the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa.” It is being used by the Trump administration to demand that transgender students be barred from athletic teams and restrooms that align with their gender identity.
In addition, a memo sent by the U.S. Education Department to state education officials in April threatened to cut off federal aid to public schools unless the schools end their diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI programs, which the memo claimed are illegal even though no court has issued such a ruling.
Republicans have long called for greater local and state control of public schools, and Trump signed an executive order in March claiming to “return authority over education to the states and local communities.” But the Trump administration is acting like a national school board, seeking to exercise unprecedented control over how and what students are taught in an effort to sweep our nation’s flaws under the rug.
Fortunately, three federal judges have ruled separately that the Education Department cannot block aid to schools, rulings the department is expected to appeal. Teachers unions, civil rights groups and 19 Democratic state attorneys general have all filed lawsuits seeking to stop the aid cuts.
Ironically, while denouncing indoctrination by the left, the Trump administration seeks to subject students to its own right-wing indoctrination, filled with false claims about an America without flaws — an America that has never existed. This propaganda amounts to educational child abuse and malpractice.
Reality can be disturbing. But schools need to teach students about the world as it really is, giving them a truthful accounting of the past and present to enable them to recognize the challenges America faces and learn from injustices and mistakes “in order to form a more perfect union,” as the Constitution puts it. Even our founders knew this union called America was flawed because it was formed by flawed men.
It is simply dishonest to whitewash America’s flaws, including slavery, the seizure of land from Native Americans, systemic racism and sexism, religious bigotry and anti-gay and anti-transgender bias. It is also dishonest to claim we live in a colorblind society where all forms of prejudice have disappeared and to deny that centuries of inequality still hold back marginalized groups.
It is equally false to claim that efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in workplaces and schools are an illegal racist attack on white Americans, as President Trump has repeatedly charged.
DEI programs do not tear anyone down — they simply open the door to the American Dream a little wider for groups shut out in the past and enable additional qualified people to compete for open positions. It is a blatant falsehood, perpetrated by those who claim to want to make our country “great again,” that DEI requires employers to hire unqualified people of color and women.
Germany and South Africa offer valuable lessons on teaching students ugly historical truths.
Rather than trying to cover up or distort the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, German schools are required to teach students an accurate account of this horror.
Similarly, South Africa requires schools to teach how European colonialists enslaved Black people there between 1652 and 1834 and how the white minority continued to oppress Blacks and deprive them of most human rights until the racist apartheid regime was replaced by democratic rule in 1994.
Some Nazi death camps and South African prisons have been preserved as museums, so that their existence will never be forgotten. Educating young people about these atrocities is vital, because as philosopher George Santayana wrote in 1905: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
We send our kids to school to be educated — not to be brainwashed with false and misleading lessons. Dictatorships like Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and Cuba infuse education with propaganda and indoctrination in schools, censoring content the government dislikes, limiting academic freedom and promoting a favored ideology. America should never emulate these totalitarian states.
The truth is not a partisan issue. No presidential administration should try to put a political spin on the way schools instruct students about our history and about life today. If the Republican-controlled Congress will not halt the Trump administration’s efforts to cut funding to schools that refuse to substitute propaganda for education, the courts should and probably will do so.
A. Scott Bolden is an attorney, NewsNation contributor and former chair of the Washington, D.C. Democratic Party.
