Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship, which hard-right activist Ginni Thomas helped establish and in teacher-training seminars, a nationwide network of charter schools, and close ties with red-state governors and education departments.

It is known for its deeply conservative worldview, expressed in online courses that it claims 3.5 million students have taken in a Washington outpost, the Allan P. Hillsdale is a small Christian school in Michigan whose campus has a shooting range and statues of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. But a fascinating, detailed picture of their dream educational agenda is there for the downloading from the website of Hillsdale College. The Florida legislature has passed the Stop WOKE Act, which forbids instruction that could make someone feel guilty or ashamed about past actions by “other members of the same race, color, sex or national origin.” Idaho has banned schools from claiming that any people “by virtue of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin, are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past.” Iowa now forbids teaching “that the United States of America and the state of Iowa are fundamentally or systemically racist or sexist.” Other red states are rushing down the same path, seeing political gold in denunciations of shaming.įor all their thunder about how schools should not make us ashamed of our history, Republican politicians have said far less about what should be taught. Meanwhile Florida governor Ron DeSantis has gotten far more attention for forbidding the state’s high schools from offering the Advanced Placement course in African American history, which he criticized as “woke” and “indoctrination”-a ban that stood even after the College Board timidly watered down the course’s content. But have the divisions over how we recount our history ever been so deep? Following the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the country in 2020, at least four states, three of them in New England, have required Black history to be part of school curriculums seven more have established new courses on Native American or Asian American history.

Americans have often been politically divided, never more so than during the Civil War, in which we managed to kill more than 600,000 of each other.

Bluets book review