U.S. History National Standards: America, the Colonial Imperial Oppressor

When my son came home from school yesterday asking about his history lesson on the "Philippine-American War," he explained the event as an example of American imperialist policies that denied independence to freedom fighters in the Philippines and caused the deaths of thousands of innocent natives. You can imagine that I needed to take some time to research the lesson from his text book and other sources in order to understand the frame with which this lesson had been taught. What I found did not surprise me at this point but I did begin to wonder how these history lessons will progress when America enters the world wars, for example. How will this curriculum continue the story of America in such a way as to disguise each and every event so that there is no virtue in the actions of our nation at any time in its history?

In my research to understand where this "telling" of the Spanish-American War and the subsequent American presence in the Philippines came from, I found that the National Standards for United States History sets these unit objectives for students in their study of the Philippine-American War:

• Students will explain the causes of American imperialist policies and values in the 1890's.
• Student will evaluate the arguments for and against the U.S. annexation and subjugation of the Philippine islands and their people.

What are the purposes of these objectives? What are the "values" the students will explain? Parents should examine the text books as well as the lesson plans created for these standards and their objectives. The lesson plans for this historical event teach that the U.S. victory over Spain in the Spanish American war made the U.S., the "New Spain", a imperial empire builder whose "values of assimilation" oppressed the native peoples. These lessons teach students to "examine" the American imperialist policies and values that stem from "the American people’s belief that they had a sacred obligation to spread their institutions and way of life." I have watched as this curriculum has progressed and it is clear to me that it is designed to convince students that America's "superpower" status was gained through religious oppression, capitalist greed, and "white" supremacy.

This characterization of America as an imperial colonial power steeped in hypocrisy starts early in history text books. The curriculum portrays westward expansion as American imperial designs on the globe and suggests that "American Values" were the height of arrogance and cultural insensitivity; that at best westward expansion was misguided and at worst it was a malicious destruction of cultures. These lessons have students evaluate America's past by asking students whether the U.S. was "justified" in settling Texas, the Southwest, Utah and the Great Basin, California, Oregon, and the Pacific Northwest; purchasing Alaska, annexing the islands of Santo Domingo in the Caribbean, and the "territorial expansion" involving Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, and the islands of the Philippines.

As we have daily discussed this series of lessons with my son and tried to provide more perspective and context that has been completely omitted in class, we have been receiving our own education in the political design behind this telling of our nation's history. Yesterday's lesson on the "Philippine-American War" was particularly interesting to me. How is it that in a discussion of international conflict the lesson contained no substantive discussion of the realities of international relations at the time? Britain and Germany had fleets in the region and McKinley realized the choice he faced was not whether or not to liberate the islands, but which of three nations -- the United States, Germany, or Britain -- would control them. Giving them back to Spain was ridiculous, turning them over to France and Germany (our commercial rivals in the Orient) was bad business, and even if they could be saved from the rule of a stronger nation they were in no state to be self governed.

The U.S. projected power in the Pacific as a reaction to the imperial designs of Japan and the other nations. In Hawaii for example, the Japanese were attempting to counter the American settlement in those islands by sending their own immigrants to the islands. The Hawaiians rejected these immigrants and as a result Japan sent war ships to the coast, not a fact you will find in my Son's history text book. My son was taught that capitalist interests in the Islands were the reason for the U.S. annexing Hawaii as well as the driving reason behind the entry into the War with Spain. There are many historical facts that were completely omitted that contradict that assertions. First, the Hawaii annexation was opposed by the business interests of the sugar beat farmers of the western continental United States and the southern Democrats who opposed it because of racial bigotry. These internal factions were the reason President McKinley couldn't get congressional support for the action. McKinley himself was not a fan of the idea of annexing Hawaii but felt pushed to by the presence of Japanese war ships in Hawaii and with the annexation of Hawaii, the Philippines as a military base seemed all the more logical.

I would have encouraged a robust evaluation of the decision to enter the Spanish-American War and a discussion of how history might have been impacted had America not projecting power in the Pacific at that time. Theodore Roosevelt saw the changing nature of the world, the fast pace of technological advancement, and the imperial designs of Japan and other nations and predicted an impending world conflict. It was his belief that America was not prepared for world conflict and needed to get prepared, that America needed to show those world powers that we could compete on the world stage. Those who shared this view sought to strengthen American Navel power, project navel power in the Pacific, and expand trade in our hemisphere. Certainly an examination of these ideas might contradict the idea that Americas designs were imperial. With proper context students might conclude that while the Spanish-American War was offensive the actions taken may indeed reveal a great foresight that contributed to a strong defense in a world quickly advancing toward world war.

While it is true that Americans believed that freedom was a gift from God and that their Republic was the most effective form of Government in preserving these God given rights, it is hardly "imperial" to want other nations to be as equally blessed by such freedoms. Among economic trade and military concerns about Spain's outpost in the western hemisphere, Americans were sympathetic to the plight of Cubans who struggled against a bloody military state only 60 miles from their shores. Wanting free trade with nations in our hemisphere and to extend greater freedom to those nations is hardly "imperial" either. Yet it is the effort to spread such freedom and prosperity that the curriculum portrays as arrogance and cultural insensitivity.

My husband asked my son if the lesson at school had taught them of the great strides America made to establish healthcare in the disease ridden island countries which reeled from epidemics of cholera, plague, smallpox, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and malaria? Or the conflicts the U.S. engaged in with Muslim raiders who exploited tribal warfare and took slaves from native and colonists populations? Of course any noble effort was omitted. The greatest omission being the fact that if America were truly set on imperial interests overseas their actions are puzzling. They limited their presence legally by setting target dates for their withdrawal and the independence of the territories and they kept to it. Never before in history had a nation so willingly and, in general, peacefully rescinded control over so much territory and so many conquered people as in the case of the possessions taken in the Spanish-American War.

What are students meant to conclude when the so called "American expansion" is attributed to motivations arising from "capitalist greed", "christian zealotry", and "a raw competitive drive for national power and prestige?" When students are asked to evaluate "American values" and then taught that those values were based on arrogant "white, Anglo-Saxon" notions that "western nations were superior to the 'inferior' peoples of the world," that the American desire to advance the progress of the world and spread "their principles, institutions, and religion" was self serving and imperialistic, students conclude that America's rise to world leadership was unjustified and that America is a great imperial oppressor.

*For an example of the lesson plans for the Philippine-American War provided to U.S. history teachers under the National History Standards, see this lesson plan from the National Center for History in the Schools, at UCLA.

The Parent/Teacher Relationship

Until education experts and policy makers accept that what children at home and school really need is that personal touch that inspires them to learn and love it, we will continue to make the mistake of trying to improve education through standardization and technology. If we want children to get the very best education, an education that will develop their natural abilities to think, reason, and create then we are going to have to focus our resources and ideas in the two most critical areas, parents and teachers. Parents and teachers are the most important factor in the success of a student and anything that impedes the mutual respect between the home and the school is detrimental to the educational progress of children.

It is simply intuitive that the family is the heart and driver of a child's education. In order to foster the best educational nurturing for children, families and communities must develop a real commitment to family centered education reforms. A couple weeks ago I was listening to a NPR program in my car when the reporter asked her guest which teacher made the most significant impact in his life, she meant a school teacher of course, but my immediate response to the question was, my father. My father and mother nurtured my talents, instilled confidence, encouraged diligence, and fostered a life-long love of learning. I can remember only a few of my elementary teacher’s names or faces. What I remember is the overall impressions leftover from those years in school. I remember my second grade year because my teacher really liked me, my fourth grade year when my teacher completely ignored me, and my sixth grade year when my teacher made me feel stupid. I remember a few more of my high school and collage teachers but in the balance the one teacher who had the greatest impact was and still is my father. Through it all I remember my father and mother were always there answering my questions and helping me make sense of what I was learning, something they continue to do even now.

Being a mother and working in a 3rd grade classroom, I realize that more than my particular relationships with my teachers, it was my parent’s attitudes towards my education that had the greatest impact on my success in any given school year. Teachers should be able to count on the role of parents as the foundation for her students success and they should reverence this truth. Good parents work with their children's teachers, as mine did. Parents support the teacher in enforcement of standards, allowing discipline to take place, addressing at home with their children the issues teachers raise, and raising concerns with the occasional problem in a professional manner. Like two parents who are back each other up in parenting, parents who back up their kid’s teacher and work with them when problems arise, build a firm foundation for their child’s development.

Next to mom and dad, it is common today that children will spend a great deal of their time with their classroom teacher, and for this reason it is in quality teachers that education dollars should be most heavily invested in. Certainly the totally uninvolved parent or the "helicopter" parent who belligerently hovers undermine the efforts of their child’s teacher, but these bad examples don’t excuse teachers from their responsibility to work for the respect of parents. Having worked with many teachers, as a parents and an Para-educator, I have meant plenty of dedicated teachers who love their students and earn the respect of their parents. Unfortunately, I have also met too many teachers who speak with arrogant condescension of their students’ parents. One day during a teachers lunch I listened to several teachers talk derisively of the “stay-at-home” mom of one of their students, a mother that earned their derision for choosing to stay at home and care for her children and lacking a “higher education.” One teacher actually said “I can't listen to all parents.... sometimes my soon to be TWO Master's Degree's outweigh your thoughts as a parent”

I believe the most common reason that mutual respect between parents and teachers is suffering is that a family centered educational philosophy has been undermined by education policy that is shifting responsibility for a child's future destiny from parents to the state, and the purpose of public education from providing equal opportunity to guaranteeing equal outcomes. This shift is making parents feel less connected to their schools and a less valued participant in their child's education. It has angered some parents as they feel their influence diminished. This shift is making it more difficult for teachers to please parents as they have unmanageable pressures and burdens placed on them. It is systematically diluting the art of teaching, turning teachers into technocrats, and making parents inferior to experts. Teachers and students are being drowned in targets, testing, and technology. They are continually at the whim of the latest "educational trend" and the next technology. If only technocrats would leave the schools alone, teachers might be able to get on with teaching and parents may develop more natural bonds with their children’s teachers.

The attitudes of derision that an ever expanding technocrat class have for parents, and the mistrust they have for teachers who want to practice their art, is negatively impacting the extremely important bonds between parents and teachers. What we need to turn it around is a mutual recognition by teacher and parent that far off agendas are pitting us against each other, and that children are caught in the cross fire. Our mutual love for the children in our care is a strong foundation to develop an alliance of mutual respect. To build the education we want for our children and students we must set teachers free to creatively practice their profession in concert with parents in school districts whose policies are family centered and invest heavily in our quality teachers.

Elitism in Education: Parents are Belittled and Disrespected by Educrats

Maryland father, Robert Small, was dragged out of a Baltimore Public School Common Core Town Hall, because he had the audacity to ask an unscripted question about the new Federal education agenda, the Common Core State Standards Initiative. After he was shoved out of the meeting he was arrested and charged with second degree assault of a police officer and disturbing a school function, which charges carry $5000 in fines and up to 10 years in prison. We might never have known of this audacious abuse of power were it not for another parent who's YouTube video hit the Stop Common Core network online and went viral within hours. Within a few days the story went national.

Governments, and the elites, at every level in this nation have forgotten that they derive their power from the governed. School boards have forgotten that tax payers pay their salaries and they work for the people not the other way around. When schools say they want parental involvement it has come to mean they want parents to surrender their natural rights to direct the education of their children and offer their drone like compliance to any decisions the elitist experts deem worthy and appropriate. When will parents stand up in mass and remind them what it means to be a parent and to exercise that God given right to direct the education and upbringing of their children.

Today I interviewed with the local CBS station in Baltimore as just one more parent like Robert who is seriously concerned about the stealth implementation of Common Core. A half hour before this story aired the Baltimore police department dropped the charges against Mr. Small. In my work advocating for parents and families I have seen this kind of scenario play out over and over. The law is too often used to intimidate parents into being quiet and compliant to the agendas of public education systems. In my experience it is only when they (state officials) get caught that they drop the charges and run. Parents, don't be fooled. This abuse is common place not a once in a while thing. It only gets attention when someone faces the intimidation that keeps everyone else quiet and speaks up, and only when there act of bravery happens to find it's way to YouTube.

Parents have a right to be involved in decision making at the local school level. Common Core threatens local governance of schools and threatens to be the final step in pushing parents out. We could learn something from this father, do we have his courage to stop following like cattle. He challenged parents to do their own research of Common Core and to ask the tough questions. He asks us not to allow ourselves be silenced or our constitutional rights to be trampled on. We better heed his warning and meet his challenge or there will come a day when we will lose all our innate rights as parents to direct the education and upbringing of our children.

When I posted similar comments about the CBS story on the Stop Common Core in Maryland page a teacher commented in a way that I believe sheds profound light on just why a Superintendent feels himself justified in having a father removed and arrested: "While I agree with parents having a right to have a say in education... it has to be an educated right... I can't listen to all parents.... sometimes my soon to be TWO Master's Degree's outweigh your thoughts as a parent." -- AN EDUCATED RIGHT -- Are those rights you only get if you're educated? And who "educates" you and "tests" you to determine your fitness for that right? The government? Sometimes I am just appalled at how some people think.

Even ignorant parents have a constitutional right to direct the education of their children. This is well established. I think it is a dangerous line of thinking to doubt whether one parent is less worthy of this right than another. And what of the one less worthy? Should they then be denied this right which is not only a natural God given right but a Constitutional right? I understand that public school teachers often struggle with absent parents, belligerently involved parents, and yes, even ignorant parents, but I am dismayed how often the existence of so called "bad parents" are used as an excuse to limit or even eliminate the rights of ALL parents. We must not be tempted by this excuse, to say that because some people abuse their human rights, their God given responsibilities, we should divest everyone from them.

One thing is certain, if parents feel belittled and disrespected by the teachers who serve their children, if parents are expelled from the decision making process within their school districts, we will NEVER solve the problems we face. No matter how humble, or ignorant, or how poor a parent may be, the attitude that dismisses parents because they don't hold masters degrees -- or even collage degrees -- the attitude that has a parent expelled and arrested for demanding answers of those he has elected to run his children's school (those he pays to run it), is an elitist attitude that doesn't respect anything but accredited learning. It dismisses the wisdom of life long learning, of experience, of intuition, creativity, the intrinsic wisdom that is born of love for your child. This elitism throughout history has proven dangerous to freedom, it has proven to seed tyranny in society, a tyranny of the type C.S. Lewis wrote of when he said:

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies [I would substitute accredited elitist experts]. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

This "torment without end" is exhausting, and more so because those of us who stand against it are so few. Those of us in the ring, those of us who have taken up the fight in our little corners of the world can't hold on forever unsupported. We are getting tired and we need reinforcements. It will take a volunteer army of parents, in numbers much larger than the elitist oppressors. So, If you have casually followed but haven't put your hat in the ring, now is the time.

Our American Story: How Will our Children Discover the Truth?

"At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a vision of history. To human nature (of the sort concieved), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply." -- Walter Lippmann

There may be few things as perplexing as the seemingly opposite versions of America's past that have formed between the political left and right in our nation. It represents as Thomas Sowell has written an abject conflict of visions. With such stark differences between the visions that have emerged from our political struggles and how completely they color the telling of our American story, how will our children discover the truth?

Nearly all American history text books in schools today weave a tale of America's past as the expression of racism, sexism, and bigotry. The tales of the Founders as self interested politicians, brutal white slave owners as the common white man, American industry as robber-baron oppressors, and American foreign policy as imperialistic. Over the past 40 years, people have told the story of this country's past dishonestly and we can no longer afford to ignore this reality. We are reaping what we have sown, for "the classroom in one generation becomes the government in the next." -- Abraham Lincoln

As a parent I teach my children the story of America in a way that is almost completely contrary to what they are being taught at school. I teach them that compared to other nations, America's past is a bright and shinning light. America was and is, the city on the hill, the foundation of hope, the beacon of liberty. It is terribly confusing as they get older, they wonder how can their teachers teach what is so terribly wrong? They begin to doubt whether they will ever know who is right and who is wrong, because one thing they sense all too keenly, they can't both be right.

Thomas Sowell proposes in his book "A Conflict of Visions", that the scientific method might be applied to measure the validity of two very different ideological visions of the world being contested in modern times. He explains how "vision" begets "theory" and theory can be tested by evidence. "What empirical verification can do is to reveal which of the competing theories currently being considered is more consistent with what is known factually." The key is for our children to be presented with all the facts. This of course is impossible if a parent relies solely on the public education (or even collegiate education) system to provide a full pucture.

How often we hear, "history is subjective," as if to dismiss the notion that one vision isn't more correct than the other. It is true that visions are subjective and by extension the teaching of history is subjected to the vision with which is is colored, but this does not leave the truth up in the air. We can judge whether one vision or the other is a more correct "theory". We must judge which is truth and which is error, for they cannot both be truth.

The social vision our children choose to accept as truth is vitally important to the future of our nation and world. "Policies based on certain visions of the world have consequences that spread throughout society and reverberate across the years, or even across generations or centuries. Visions set the agenda of both thought and action." For this reason our children must learn the History they don't teach in school at home, they must be vested with all the facts. They must come to understand the very different social visions and moral codes that have led to these two diametrically opposite views of American history. Only then can they apply the evidence to reveal which vision and moral code is more consistent, which is rooted in truth.

Join me and other parents in our study of an America that was committed to both personal freedom and public virtue, to human achievement and respect for the Almighty God. The history that admits what every Founder, pioneer, cowboy, and business man knew; that freedom alone was not enough, that without responsibility and virtue, freedom would become a soggy anarchy, an incomplete licentiousness.

Join me at “American History They Don’t Teach in School” and join the discussions about our history that they aren’t having in American education today.

My Summer Project: Left-Right Alliance for Education

My summer project has been working with a group of education advocates across the country to construct a multi-partisan outline of common opposition to the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Today we completed the project and published an excellent resource for the Stop Common Core movement nationwide.

Last spring I came away from a Hillsdale collage lecture on the Common Core with a deep concern that the Stop Common Core movements developing throughout the nation were not coalescing around one central message that had the power to cut across the political spectrum and that the opposition to CCSSI was being widely mischaracterized as limited to only one side of the political spectrum, which is hindering the effort to get the opposing message a fair hearing in the public discourse. I was convinced that we needed a serious effort to construct a concise message that would navigate the movement out of the partisan weeds.

The next day I had a discussion with a close friend tied to the Stop Common Core movement in another state who had just that afternoon had a similar discussion with a group of advocates on her side of the country. Within a few hours the Left-Right Alliance for Education was formed to bring together advocates from across the political spectrum, and across the nation, to determine if it is possible to form a multi-partisan alliance for countering the current federal/corporate power driving education reform policy.

After weeks of deliberate, methodical discussions on key points of current education reforms in the U.S. we have finally completed the project we began three months ago. I believe the work we constructed shows that there is a wide spectrum of common political opposition to the CCSSI and I believe we can work together if we stick to those points upon which we agree. The Left-Right Alliance has developed a message as succinct as the CCSSI's own and is a resource that has the potential to be very valuable in shaping the opposition's message.

You can read the document at the Left-Right Alliance for Education but I have also included the report below: