schoolinfosystem.org
Christopher Rufo: Next week, the California Department of Education will vote on a new statewide ethnic studies curriculum that advocates for the “decolonization” of American society and elevates Aztec religious symbolism—all in the service of a left-wing political ideology. The new program, called the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, seeks to extend the Left’s cultural dominance […]
Dave Cieslewicz: The audit did find what I suspected: DEI is most charitably described as complex. It’s less charitably described as a mess. State government provides no clear guidance from the top about what DEI should be. The UW is so loosely managed that each campus and department could define it anyway it wanted. On the Madison […]
Kimberly Wethal: The Universities of Wisconsin spent $40.2 million on offices that relate in some way to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts during the 2023-24 school year, the Legislature’s Audit Bureau said Friday. But UW system leaders say those numbers are not only “old and cold,” since they’re based on May 2024 statistics, but they […]
Paul Caron summary: The University of Minnesota Law School is halting the hiring of a new assistant dean of diversity, equity and inclusion as President Donald Trump continues to crack down on DEI in federal programs. Dean William McGeveran said he “had no choice but to pause the search” for an assistant dean of DEI. […]
NCRI: DEI programs purport to cultivate inclusive environments for people from diverse backgrounds and encourage greater empathy in interpersonal interactions. A key component of DEI offerings lies in diversity pedagogy: Lectures, trainings and educational resources ostensibly designed to educate participants about their prejudice and bias in order to eliminate discrimination 1 (Iyer, 2022). As institutions […]
Christopher Rufo: With the help of Open the Books, a nonprofit research organization, we have obtained documents detailing the NIH’s descent into left-wing racialism. The agency, which is supposed to prioritize hard science, has made DEI a top priority, shelling out millions on “diversity” initiatives that do nothing to advance medical research. At the beginning […]
John Sexton It turns out that putting Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi in charge of the nation’s collective HR programs hasn’t gone smoothly in all cases. Who would have guessed? Today the Washington Post has a story about the legal backlash that ubiquitous anti-racism training has created. There are at least 59 current lawsuits […]
Glenn Reynolds They want to include everyone — except the people they don’t like. For a while we were told that DEI was good for business, and good for encouraging people to get along. But in fact there’s no evidence that corporate DEI efforts help the bottom line: The chief support for that notion was a McKinsey […]
Ellie Cameron: The DEI mandate is part of a general education curriculum update at the University of Arizona and takes effect in fall 2026. In the meantime, it has prompted criticisms from a high-profile conservative think tank in the state. Students “will be forced to take courses with academically unserious content that adds nothing to their education,” […]
Dan Lennington: Dei is on the ropes. Or at least it seems so from recent headlines. Universities across America have grudgingly removed race as a factor in college admissions, with some statewideuniversitysystems swearing off “diversity, equity, and inclusion” altogether. In corporate America, many corporations have softened or at least adjusted their DEI policies, while institutional investors now face significant legal liability for investing […]
Mike Damiano Less than five years ago, Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences followed a trend that was then sweeping across American higher education. It instituted a requirement that professors who wished to work at Harvard submit an essay explaining how they would advance “diversity, inclusion, and belonging” in their work. On Monday, the […]
John Sailer: Yale University’s department of molecular biophysics and biochemistry requires all job applicants to submit a DEI statement. Here’s the evaluation rubric, which shows the exhaustive DEI criteria for assessing any scientist hoping to work in the Yale department. —— More.
Aaron Sibarium In June 2021, a year into the cultural aftershocks of George Floyd’s death, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology set out to meet the moment, as so many other schools had, by hiring more diversity officers. MIT welcomed six new deans of diversity, equity, and inclusion, one for each of the institute’s main schools, as part of […]
Mitchell Schmidt: It’s unclear what the audit will ultimately find, but Legislative Audit Bureau Director Joe Chrisman said a final report with recommendations could be completed sometime next year. “Providing opportunities for all is important to the success of state government institutions, but to create more unaccountable bureaucracy in the name of DEI is a […]
Luke Rosiak and Christopher F. Rufo: Recent headlines about UCLA School of Medicine suggest that the institution has lost its focus. Instead of brushing up on organic chemistry, its students were subjected to lessons on “Indigenous womxn” and “two-spirits.” Future doctors had to take a class on “structural racism” and were led in a “Free Palestine” chant by a Hamas-praising […]
Tilly R. Robinson and Neil H. Shah Harvard Sociology assistant professor Christina J. Cross was accused of plagiarism in an anonymous complaint to Harvard’s Office of Research Integrity, conservative activist Christopher F. Rufo reported in the City Journal — the fourth Black woman at Harvard who studies race or social justice to be accused of plagiarism. The […]
Alex Tabarrok: The Hill has a good op-ed by Matt Cole and Chris Nicholson on how labor and DEI regulations are strangling the CHIPS act. It’s somewhat over the top, failure is overdetermined, but this is an important op-ed and directionally correct.
David Butterfield: DEI, EDI, DIE — whatever order the acronym comes in — advances a conformist system bereft of intellectual depth: in an academic context, Diversity means uniformity, Equality equity, and Inclusion exclusion of those who challenge the narrative. This ideological system is unquestionably obstructing freedom in academia: “DEI statements” are now tied in with job applications, […]
By Max Abelson, Simone Foxman, and Ava Benny-Morrison Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has made a surprising change to its “Possibilities Summit” for Black college students: It’s opened the program to White students. At Bank of America Corp., certain internal programs that used to focus on women and minorities have been broadened to include everyone.
Jim Piwowarczyk The document lists “behaviors” that “are examples of white privilege and fragility in action,” citing “physically leaving” or “emotionally withdrawing,” “focusing on intentions,” “denying” and “seeking absolution. The screenshots were shared this month on X by the page “End Wokeness,” which has 2.2 million followers. “EXCLUSIVE: UW Health employee sent this from their mandatory DEI […]
Andy Kessler: Have we reached peak DEI? The unraveling of “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives had already begun—five states banning DEI programs; Google, Facebookand others cutting DEI staff; Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—well before Harvard President Claudine Gay was demoted. Author Christopher Rufo, echoing 1960s student activists, called the rise of DEI a “long […]
Roger Clegg: Very well: We want not DEI but MNO — that is, Merit, Nondiscrimination, and Openness. It seems obvious that our institutions should strive for merit rather than a predetermined demographic mix of any sort (the Left’s definition of “diversity”). And it can be added that, if you don’t think that the current standards […]
DEI divisions at large state universities are often huge. At Michigan, for example, DEI is so big that if its payroll were converted to a scholarship fund for in-state students, nearly 900 people could attend Michigan tuition-free. pic.twitter.com/NIENQFuDn2 — i/o (@eyeslasho) January 4, 2024
Alexander Riley One of the seldom discussed aspects of the ongoing revolution in contemporary higher education is the problem institutions are having filling courses that are designed to impart the DEI message to students. In the mediasphere, the conversation on DEI in higher ed is mostly about, e.g., the fear that conservative “politicization” will drive enrollments down. Students, it […]
Washington Examiner Diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, in higher education was deceptively sold as a set of policies designed to promote “the fair treatment and full participation of all people,” particularly groups that “have historically been underrepresented.” But DEI offices have proved to be epicenters of division and ideological conformity, stirring hostilities and imposing an intolerant monoculture. Fortunately, […]
A thread of threads. It’s been an interesting year. My writing primarily focused on institutional capture in higher ed. Put simply, DEI. Now more than ever, the issue is front and center. So consider this both a highlight reel and list of (self) recommended pieces. — John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) December 30, 2023
The last place DEI will be cut is in the public education system. It’s a cash cow for every progressive trend that comes along. Instead of cutting waste when money gets tight, they simply take more from the taxpayers. We need legislators to take the necessary steps to defund DEI. https://t.co/I0HD1gsmKq — Beanie (@Beanie0597) December […]
Campus Reform: Oklahoma colleges will be required to review their DEI programs to “eliminate and dismiss non-critical personnel” per a new executive order from Governor Kevin Sitt. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt announced the mandate Wednesday, citing a need to spend more money on preparing young Oklahomans for the workforce, and less on “six-figure salaries to DEI staff.” […]
Mike Nichols: I don’t want to get in the way of the decent idea finally and begrudgingly approved by the Board of Regents as part of the DEI deal — approximately doubling the number of conservatives on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus faculty and adding one more. But I do hope whoever writes up the […]
WILL: The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) and the Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF) are preparing a legal challenge against the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse for denying a conservative group, Young America’s Foundation (YAF), a student organization designation. In violation of the First Amendment, UW-La Crosse is denying the group’s designation because […]
Just a reminder in the UW-Legislature DEI dispute: UW officials have already laid out plans (& have implemented @ one campus) a re-branding of DEI as “inclusive excellence,” with DEI positions being moved around (possibly to avoid scrutiny). Not much reporting on this, but… pic.twitter.com/hLxVpxr9J2 — Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) December 15, 2023 related: This might […]
David Blaska: Madison school board members Savion Castro and Maia Pearson are seeking re-election in April. They are thoroughly Woke. Get 100 signatures to get on the ballot. Nomination papers are not due until January 3. The forms candidates need can be found here even though, strangely, the city’s website has not been updated! Blaska’s […]
We applaud Speaker Vos’s efforts to reduce & eventually eliminate discrimination through DEI from the UW campuses. Today’s deal is a victory in a state with divided government. 🧵 https://t.co/BW7Bij6p7Q — WILL (@WILawLiberty) December 8, 2023
John Sailor: Note that the first author of this truly terrible paper was recently hired at Emory University. Here’s Emory’s rubric for assessing faculty candidate’s DEI contributions. Emory has pioneered the heavy use of diversity statements in faculty hiring (i.e. cluster hiring).
Lauren Wurth: Big businesses are no strangers to being scrutinized for the lack of diversity amongst their employees. In 2020, many companies decided to adopt diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies to ensure that their hires came from diverse backgrounds. Newly implemented DEI protocols were met with mixed reviews. Some praised the inclusion efforts while […]
Jarrett Stepman: The lengthy report in The New York Times, of all places, highlights how the use of DEI statements essentially has allowed schools to create ideological loyalty oaths for new faculty. These tests aren’t being applied only in humanities departments, they’re the norm in science departments and all others too. California—upholding its reputation for being […]
Heika Mrema: A New Hampshire university president recently wrote that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs benefit higher education, but some scholars argue that evidence suggests otherwise. Plymouth State University President Donald L. Birx argues in an opinion editorial published Aug. 28 that DEI programs equip students with the skills needed to ‘advance’ the United […]
BREAKING: Stanford Law School has parted ways with Tirien Steinbach, the DEI administrator who accosted a sitting federal judge. Story forthcoming. pic.twitter.com/JHMBTIPuLC — Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) July 20, 2023
James Reinl University of officials massively downplayed the scale of their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs in official filings to Ron , one of the governor’s appointees has alleged to DailyMail.com. Christopher Rufo, a DeSantis education hire, accused university bosses of ‘lying through their teeth to the governor’ by declaring they had some 30 DEI schemes […]
Conor Friedersdorf John D. Haltigan sued the University of California at Santa Cruz in May. He wants to work there as a professor of psychology. But he alleges that its hiring practices violate the First Amendment by imposing an ideological litmus test on prospective hires: To be considered, an applicant must submit a statement detailing […]
📣Republicans in Wisconsin: Hold the Line on DEI cuts to the WOKE UW System💪🏽 The UW System has unfortunately become a cesspool of woke indoctrination. Yet Democrats want over $300 million more tax dollars and ZERO spending cuts in UW’s 32 million budget for “Diversity, Equity… pic.twitter.com/3BZi4MPX56 — Scarlett Johnson (@scarlett4kids) June 21, 2023
The Fire The University of California, Berkeley used diversity statements to weed out candidates for faculty positions, according to public records the university finally released more than two years after FIRE requested them. Many universities now require or invite current or prospective faculty todemonstrate their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion — often through written statements that […]
Lawrence Andrea: Wisconsin’s top state legislative Republican continued his attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at the state’s public universities, calling the programming “the single most important issue” and claiming he was embarrassed to be a University of Wisconsin System alumnus because of it. “This is probably to me the single most important issue […]
DEI is entirely inconsistent with constitutional guarantees of equality, due process, freedom of speech & religion. Defunding DEI is not only good policy – it is constitutionally mandated. DEI is an authoritarian, anti-constitutional, Marxist worldview that tramples rights. https://t.co/y4OZBvBkbI — Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) June 14, 2023 .@SpeakerVos on @UWSystem DEI funds: “It’s become (the left’s) […]
David Glasser: The University of Southern California is prioritizing diversity, equity and inclusion over merit and talent when awarding funding to students in PhD programs, according to a group of scholars who recently sounded the alarm on the issue as well as a memo that spells out the practice. While dozens of universities consider DEI when distributing […]
William Jacobson: I was pleased to appear on the Well Said Podcastwith Cherise Trump of Speech First. We covered many topics in depth, including the structure and projects of Legal Insurrection Foundation (CriticalRace.org and EqualProtect.org), how DEI has penetrated deeply into education, how it is how CRT is put into action, and whether there is hope or […]
Jay Mitchell: The bar exam is about to get a nationwide overhaul. The National Conference of Bar Examiners, or NCBE, which creates and administers the uniform bar exam, plans to roll out a revamped version of the bar exam, which it calls the “NextGen” exam, in 2026. After attending the NCBE’s annual meeting this month, […]
Flag officers 4 America: “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) divides rather than unites our military and society. DEI’s principles derive from critical race theory, which is rooted in cultural Marxism, where people are grouped into identity classes (typically by race), labeled as “oppressed” or “oppressors,” and pitted against each other. Join with the other […]
David Blaska: Requiring prospective employees to attest to their DEI faithis a prohibited political test, President Rothman told legislators. “If people think we are imposing litmus tests on them at that stage in the employment process, we are not being inclusive,” he said. “We need to be inclusive.” Doubtless, the UW system boss was responding to Assembly Speaker Robin […]
Scott Gerber Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested, prosecuted and killed by an inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. I’m Josef K. Around 1 p.m. on Friday, April 14, Ohio Northern University campus security officers entered my classroom […]
Dave Cieslewicz The fundamental problem with these programs is that the ideology behind them conflicts with both common sense and long-held American values. As Vos said, the vast majority of us want a color blind society and most of us recognize that, while we’ve made great progress toward that goal, we’ve still got a ways […]
Hung Cao: In fiscal year 2022, the Army missed its recruitment goals by 25 percent. The Navy was able to barely meet its quota by rolling forward recruits and padding their numbers before the end of the fiscal year. This caused a deficit for fiscal year 2023, so the Navy’s solution was to accept recruits with lower […]
The @UWSystem spends $15.9million tax dollars/year on leftwing DIVERSITY/EQUITY positions. That’s 227 employees w/full-time salaries for 13 campuses. That’s 17 DEI employees/campus making $70k/year on average. @MacIverWisc @wisconsin_now @DukePesta @SenRonJohnson @RepDaveMurphy pic.twitter.com/l6aY0FATGZ — Vicki McKenna (@VickiMcKenna) May 5, 2023
Kelly Meyerhofer: The UW System spends about $13.6 million annually on 185 administrators related to DEI, with most of the positions concentrated at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee, according to records first reported on by WisPolitics. The $13.6 million in salaries represents about 0.2% of the UW System’s $6.9 billion annual operating budget. Vos called for eliminating […]
David Blaska: “The governor’s request comes at a time when diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs are under fire in higher education, business, and in government for fundamental unfairness and divisiveness and a failure to achieve their intended goals,” the Badger Institute notes. The University of Wisconsin-Madison is riddled with DEI bureaucrats.Madison’s flagship campus has an entire […]
This is Bowling Green’s diversity statement rubric. Notice the conspicuous attempt to acknowledge viewpoint diversity (“diverse ideologies or perspectives”). Unconvincing. As with any DEI statement requirement, the door for ideological policing is wide open. pic.twitter.com/YaWyHZaQwp — John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) April 18, 2023
Abigail Anthony “Thirty-one academic departments have DEI committees.” Princeton’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are misnamed: They divide, exclude, and ostracize students of all political affiliations by rendering it socially dangerous to express any criticism of progressive mantras. Thirty-one academic departments have DEI committees, which could explain the land acknowledgementsin syllabi and the deluge of departmental anti-racism […]
SCOOP: University of Florida has created a radical DEI bureaucracy that promotes racial preferences in faculty hiring, encourages white employees to engage with a 12-step program called Racists Anonymous, and maintains segregated scholarships that violate civil rights law. 🧵 — Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 7, 2023 More, here.
Tabia Lee: My crime at De Anza was running afoul of the tenets of critical social justice, a worldview that understands knowledge as relative and tied to unequal identity-based power dynamics that must be exposed and dismantled. This, I came to recognize, was the unofficial but strictly enforced ideological orthodoxy of De Anza—as it is […]
Tax Prof summary Stanford Law School’s chapter of the Federalist Society earlier this month invited Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan to speak on campus. Student groups that vehemently opposed Judge Duncan’s prior advocacy and judicial decisions regarding same-sex marriage, immigration, trans people, abortion and other issues showed up to protest. Some protesters […]
Jennifer Kabbany: A debate on diversity, equity and inclusion is scheduled to soon take place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An esteemed panel of scholars will tackle the question: “Should academic DEI programs be abolished?” One group of individuals who will not be defending DEI at the upcoming event is the phalanx of highly paid diversity, […]
William Jacobson: Last week we wrote up the continuing struggle of University of Central Florida Professor Charles Negy to get justice for UCF retaliating against him because internet and student mobs objected to his tweets disputing systemic racism and white privilege, Prof. Charles Negy, Investigated and Fired After Tweets Disputing Systemic Racism, Files Federal Lawsuit Against […]
Wall Street Journal: Critical race theory is becoming institutionalized across American universities, and a major reason is the educational bureaucracy. Most universities now have offices for diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, that exercise a broad writ on campus and act as speech police within the university. That power was on ugly display last week […]
University of Iowa Over the next few months, the Board of Regents will initiate a comprehensive study and review of all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs and efforts at the University of Iowa, Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa. I am appointing Regents Barker, Lindenmayer and Rouse to lead the study. […]
In one of the deeper levels of hell, you spend eternity living in a community governed by college “DEI Deans.” https://t.co/CpvqWDQQ6w — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 10, 2023 Stanford Law School dean admits Judge Kyle Duncan’s event “went awry.” Suggests student hecklers violated policies: “It is a violation of the disruption policy to ‘prevent the […]
Scott Girard: An effort that began in summer 2021 to gauge the Madison Metropolitan School District’s equity work found that students, parents and staff are aware of some district efforts toward diversity, equity and inclusion but want more involvement and more communication with district administration. The district partnered with Jerlando Jackson, now the dean of the College […]
Jonathan Turley: We have been discussing various cases of professors being investigated or terminated for raising dissenting views on subjects like systemic racism or Critical Race Theory (CRT). The latest such controversy is at the University of Texas where a professor is suing after he was allegedly threatened for criticizing as having “no scientific basis.” Notably, the […]
Jonathan Turley: We have been discussing various cases of professors being investigated or terminated for raising dissenting views on subjects like systemic racism or Critical Race Theory (CRT). The latest such controversy is at the University of Texas where a professor is suing after he was allegedly threatened for criticizing as having “no scientific basis.” Notably, the […]
NEW: @UTSystem Board of Regents chairman Kevin Eltife says the @UTSystem has paused any new DEI efforts at all of its campuses. The system has also asked for a report on DEI policies at each campus for review. The full statement he made at the regents meeting just now: pic.twitter.com/HXOlwcvbrN — Megan Menchaca (@meganmmenchaca) February […]
John Sailer: Diversity statements—short essays that express one’s past contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and future plans to advance the cause—have become ubiquitous in academia. As I’ve written before, many universities embrace these requirements not only for faculty hiring but also for all levels of employment. And in a recent piece for the Wall Street Journal, […]
Jay Greene: In the past, state officials refrained from addressing the rise of DEI bureaucracies in public universities, not out of an inability to do so legally but from a conviction that it was somehow inappropriate for them to interfere. DeSantis’s innovation was to recognize that this self-restraint was unnecessary, counterproductive, and based largely on […]
David Catron: During the last few years, most conservatives have become at least dimly aware that leftist ideology, in the guise of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), has infected public education. It’s unlikely, however, that many Americans realize just how far the disease has advanced. It has long since spread beyond a few courses embedded […]
Maggie Kelly: The University of Florida, the state’s flagship university, listed 43 staff positions connected to DEI and reported expenditures totaling $5.3 million on “diversity-related programs and expenses,” the news service reported. The state provided close to $3.4 million of those funds. The university’s Office of the Chief Diversity Officer alone included four staff jobs […]
William Biagini: At a mathematics education conference previously reported by Campus Reform in which numerous scholars pushed for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI), one speaker stood out by arguing that boys in particular are at a disadvantage in numerous ways in American K-12 education. Campus Reform obtained exclusive audio of this presentation. The conference was hosted at the Loews Vanderbilt […]
Free Black Thought: The purpose of this article and its associated downloadable Powerpoint is to make available, for parents, educators, and all who care about K-12 education, information about some of the potentially harmful ideas and practices around race that have become increasingly prevalent in K-12 education. For convenience, we call these new ideas and practices “DEI,” […]
Beth Mitchneck and Jessi L. Smith That hegemonic, numbers-crunching conceptualization of merit in the American academy today stifles innovation and constitutes one of the main techniques of maintaining the status quo and reproducing the social order that undermines efforts toward DEI. We are not the first to point this out, of course, but thinking about […]
Max Eden & Scott Yenor: At least one out of five job candidates in academia are formally evaluated based on their commitment to “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI). Faculty departments, sometimes at the behest of university administrators, are formalizing an ideological litmus test for hiring. State and federal legislators can, and should, stop them. The words “Diversity,” […]
Roland Fryer: One of the most important developments in the study of racial inequality has been the quantification of the importance of pre-market skills in explaining differences in labor market outcomes between Black and white workers. In 2010, using nationally representative data on thousands of individuals in their 40s, I estimated that Black men earn 39.4% […]
aljazeera: Saada governorate, the most heavily bombed region in Yemen, has the world’s highest stunting rates among children, affecting eight out of 10 in some areas, it said. Stunting – where a child is short for their age – is another sign of chronic malnourishment and has irreversible consequences for both physical health and cognitive […]
Michael Knox Beran, via Will Fitzhugh:
Emerging as a force in American education a century ago, social studies was intended to remake the high school. But its greatest effect has been in the elementary grades, where it has replaced an older way of learning that initiated children into their culture [and their History?] with one that seeks instead to integrate them into the social group. The result was a revolution in the way America educates its young. The old learning used the resources of culture to develop the child’s individual potential; social studies, by contrast, seeks to adjust him to the mediocrity of the social pack.
Why promote the socialization of children at the expense of their individual development? A product of the Progressive era, social studies ripened in the faith that regimes guided by collectivist social policies could dispense with the competitive striving of individuals and create, as educator George S. Counts wrote, “the most majestic civilization ever fashioned by any people.” Social studies was to mold the properly socialized citizens of this grand future. The dream of a world regenerated through social planning faded long ago, but social studies persists, depriving children of a cultural rite of passage that awakened what Coleridge called “the principle and method of self-development” in the young.
The poverty of social studies would matter less if children could make up its cultural deficits in English [and History?] class. But language instruction in the elementary schools has itself been brought into the business of socializing children and has ceased to use the treasure-house of culture to stimulate their minds. As a result, too many students today complete elementary school with only the slenderest knowledge of a culture that has not only shaped their civilization but also done much to foster individual excellence.
In 1912, the National Education Association, today the largest labor union in the United States, formed a Committee on the Social Studies. In its 1916 report, The Social Studies in Secondary Education, the committee opined that if social studies (defined as studies that relate to “man as a member of a social group”) took a place in American high schools, students would acquire “the social spirit,” and “the youth of the land” would be “steadied by an unwavering faith in humanity.” This was an allusion to the “religion of humanity” preached by the French social thinker Auguste Comte, who believed that a scientifically trained ruling class could build a better world by curtailing individual freedom in the name of the group. In Comtian fashion, the committee rejected the idea that education’s primary object was the cultivation of the individual intellect. “Individual interests and needs,” education scholar Ronald W. Evans writes in his book The Social Studies Wars, were for the committee “secondary to the needs of society as a whole.”
The Young Turks of the social studies movement, known as “Reconstructionists” because of their desire to remake the social order, went further. In the 1920s, Reconstructionists like Counts and Harold Ordway Rugg argued that high schools should be incubators of the social regimes of the future. Teachers would instruct students to “discard dispositions and maxims” derived from America’s “individualistic” ethos, wrote Counts. A professor in Columbia’s Teachers College and president of the American Federation of Teachers, Counts was for a time enamored of Joseph Stalin. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1929, he published A Ford Crosses Soviet Russia, a panegyric on the Bolsheviks’ “new society.” Counts believed that in the future, “all important forms of capital” would “have to be collectively owned,” and in his 1932 essay “Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order?,” he argued that teachers should enlist students in the work of “social regeneration.”
Like Counts, Rugg, a Teachers College professor and cofounder of the National Council for the Social Studies, believed that the American economy was flawed because it was “utterly undesigned and uncontrolled.” In his 1933 book The Great Technology, he called for the “social reconstruction” and “scientific design” of the economy, arguing that it was “now axiomatic that the production and distribution of goods can no longer be left to the vagaries of chance–specifically to the unbridled competitions of self-aggrandizing human nature.” There “must be central control and supervision of the entire [economic] plant” by “trained and experienced technical personnel.” At the same time, he argued, the new social order must “socialize the vast proportion” of wealth and outlaw the activities of “middlemen” who didn’t contribute to the “production of true value.”
Rugg proposed “new materials of instruction” that “shall illustrate fearlessly and dramatically the inevitable consequence of the lack of planning and of central control over the production and distribution of physical things. . . . We shall disseminate a new conception of government–one that will embrace all of the collective activities of men; one that will postulate the need for scientific control and operation of economic activities in the interest of all people; and one that will successfully adjust the psychological problems among men.”
Rugg himself set to work composing the “new materials of instruction.” In An Introduction to Problems of American Culture, his 1931 social studies textbook for junior high school students, Rugg deplored the “lack of planning in American life”:
“Repeatedly throughout this book we have noted the unplanned character of our civilization. In every branch of agriculture, industry, and business this lack of planning reveals itself. For instance, manufacturers in the United States produce billions’ of dollars worth of goods without scientific planning. Each one produces as much as he thinks he can sell, and then each one tries to sell more than his competitors. . . . As a result, hundreds of thousands of owners of land, mines, railroads, and other means of transportation and communication, stores, and businesses of one kind or another, compete with one another without any regard for the total needs of all the people. . . . This lack of national planning has indeed brought about an enormous waste in every outstanding branch of industry. . . . Hence the whole must be planned.
Rugg pointed to Soviet Russia as an example of the comprehensive control that America needed, and he praised Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, which resulted in millions of deaths from famine and forced labor. The “amount of coal to be mined each year in the various regions of Russia,”
Rugg told the junior high schoolers reading his textbook,
“is to be planned. So is the amount of oil to be drilled, the amount of wheat, corn, oats, and other farm products to be raised. The number and size of new factories, power stations, railroads, telegraph and telephone lines, and radio stations to be constructed are planned. So are the number and kind of schools, colleges, social centers, and public buildings to be erected. In fact, every aspect of the economic, social, and political life of a country of 140,000,000 people is being carefully planned! . . . The basis of a secure and comfortable living for the American people lies in a carefully planned economic life.”
During the 1930s, tens of thousands of American students used Rugg’s social studies textbooks.
Toward the end of the decade, school districts began to drop Rugg’s textbooks because of their socialist bias. In 1942, Columbia historian Allan Nevins further undermined social studies’ premises when he argued in The New York Times Magazine that American high schools were failing to give students a “thorough, accurate, and intelligent knowledge of our national past–in so many ways the brightest national record in all world history.” Nevins’s was the first of many critiques that would counteract the collectivist bias of social studies in American high schools, where “old-fashioned” history classes have long been the cornerstone of the social studies curriculum.
Yet possibly because school boards, so vigilant in their superintendence of the high school, were not sure what should be done with younger children, social studies gained a foothold in the primary school such as it never obtained in the secondary school. The chief architect of elementary school social studies was Paul Hanna, who entered Teachers College in 1924 and fell under the spell of Counts and Rugg. “We cannot expect economic security so long as the [economic] machine is conceived as an instrument for the production of profits for private capital rather than as a tool functioning to release mankind from the drudgery of work,” Hanna wrote in 1933.
Hanna was no less determined than Rugg to reform the country through education. “Pupils must be indoctrinated with a determination to make the machine work for society,” he wrote. His methods, however, were subtler than Rugg’s. Unlike Rugg’s textbooks, Hanna’s did not explicitly endorse collectivist ideals. The Hanna books contain no paeans to central planning or a command economy. On the contrary, the illustrations have the naive innocence of the watercolors in Scott Foresman’s Dick and Jane readers. The books depict an idyllic but familiar America, rich in material goods and comfortably middle-class; the fathers and grandfathers wear suits and ties and white handkerchiefs in their breast pockets.
Not only the pictures but the lessons in the books are deceptively innocuous. It is in the back of the books, in the notes and “interpretive outlines,” that Hanna smuggles in his social agenda by instructing teachers how each lesson is to be interpreted so that children learn “desirable patterns of acting and reacting in democratic group living.” A lesson in the second-grade text Susan’s Neighbors at Work, for example, which describes the work of police officers, firefighters, and other public servants, is intended to teach “concerted action” and “cooperation in obeying commands and well-thought-out plans which are for the general welfare.” A lesson in Tom and Susan, a first-grade text, about a ride in grandfather’s red car is meant to teach children to move “from absorption in self toward consideration of what is best in a group situation.” Lessons in Peter’s Family, another first-grade text, seek to inculcate the idea of “socially desirable” work and “cooperative labor.”
Hanna’s efforts to promote “behavior traits” conducive to “group living” would be less objectionable if he balanced them with lessons that acknowledge the importance of ideals and qualities of character that don’t flow from the group–individual exertion, liberty of action, the necessity at times of resisting the will of others. It is precisely Coleridge’s principle of individual “self-development” that is lost in Hanna’s preoccupation with social development. In the Hanna books, the individual is perpetually sunk in the impersonality of the tribe; he is a being defined solely by his group obligations. The result is distorting; the Hanna books fail to show that the prosperous America they depict, if it owes something to the impulse to serve the community, owes as much, or more, to the free striving of individuals pursuing their own ends.
Hanna’s spirit is alive and well in the American elementary school. Not only Scott Foresman but other big scholastic publishers–among them Macmillan/McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt–publish textbooks that dwell continually on the communal group and on the activities that people undertake for its greater good. Lessons from Scott Foresman’s second-grade textbook Social Studies: People and Places (2003) include “Living in a Neighborhood,” “We Belong to Groups,” “A Walk Through a Community,” “How a Community Changes,” “Comparing Communities,” “Services in Our Community,” “Our Country Is Part of Our World,” and “Working Together.” The book’s scarcely distinguishable twin, Macmillan/McGraw-Hill’s We Live Together (2003), is suffused with the same group spirit. Macmillan/McGraw-Hill’s textbook for third-graders, Our Communities (2003), is no less faithful to the Hanna model. The third-grade textbooks of Scott Foresman and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (both titled Communities) are organized on similar lines, while the fourth-grade textbooks concentrate on regional communities. Only in the fifth grade is the mold shattered, as students begin the sequential study of American history; they are by this time in sight of high school, where history has long been paramount.
Today’s social studies textbooks will not turn children into little Maoists. The group happy-speak in which they are composed is more fatuous than polemical; Hanna’s Reconstructionist ideals have been so watered down as to be little more than banalities. The “ultimate goal of the social studies,” according to Michael Berson, a coauthor of the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt series, is to “instigate a response that spreads compassion, understanding, and hope throughout our nation and the global community.” Berson’s textbooks, like those of the other publishers, are generally faithful to this flabby, attenuated Comtism.
Yet feeble though the books are, they are not harmless. Not only do they do too little to acquaint children with their culture’s ideals of individual liberty and initiative; they promote the socialization of the child at the expense of the development of his own individual powers. The contrast between the old and new approaches is nowhere more evident than in the use that each makes of language. The old learning used language both to initiate the child into his culture and to develop his mind. Language and culture are so intimately related that the Greeks, who invented Western primary education, used the same word to designate both: paideia signifies both culture and letters (literature). The child exposed to a particular language gains insight into the culture that the language evolved to describe–for far from being an artifact of speech only, language is the master light of a people’s thought, character, and manners. At the same time, language–particularly the classic and canonical utterances of a people, its primal poetry–[and its History?] has a unique ability to awaken a child’s powers, in part because such utterances, Plato says, sink “furthest into the depths of the soul.”
Social studies, because it is designed not to waken but to suppress individuality, shuns all but the most rudimentary and uninspiring language. Social studies textbooks descend constantly to the vacuity of passages like this one, from People and Places:
“Children all around the world are busy doing the same things. They love to play games and enjoy going to school. They wish for peace. They think that adults should take good care of the Earth. How else do you think these children are like each other? How else do you think they are like you?”
The language of social studies is always at the same dead level of inanity. There is no shadow or mystery, no variation in intensity or alteration of pitch–no romance, no refinement, no awe or wonder. A social studies textbook is a desert of linguistic sterility supporting a meager scrub growth of commonplaces about “community,” “neighborhood,” “change,” and “getting involved.” Take the arid prose in Our Communities:
“San Antonio, Texas, is a large community. It is home to more than one million people, and it is still growing. People in San Antonio care about their community and want to make it better. To make room for new roads and houses, many old trees must be cut down. People in different neighborhoods get together to fix this by planting.”
It might be argued that a richer and more subtle language would be beyond third-graders. Yet in his Third Eclectic Reader, William Holmes McGuffey, a nineteenth-century educator, had eight-year-olds reading Wordsworth and Whittier. His nine-year-olds read the prose of Addison, Dr. Johnson, and Hawthorne and the poetry of Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Southey, and Bryant. His ten-year-olds studied the prose of Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, Sterne, Hazlitt, and Macaulay [History] and the poetry of Pope, Longfellow, Shakespeare, and Milton.
McGuffey adapted to American conditions some of the educational techniques that were first developed by the Greeks. In fifth-century BC Athens, the language of Homer and a handful of other poets formed the core of primary education. With the emergence of Rome, Latin became the principal language of Western culture and for centuries lay at the heart of primary- and grammar-school education. McGuffey had himself received a classical education, but conscious that nineteenth-century America was a post-Latin culture, he revised the content of the old learning even as he preserved its underlying technique of using language as an instrument of cultural initiation and individual self-development. He incorporated, in his Readers, not canonical Latin texts but classic specimens of English prose and poetry [and History].
Because the words of the Readers bit deep–deeper than the words in today’s social studies textbooks do–they awakened individual potential. The writer Hamlin Garland acknowledged his “deep obligation” to McGuffey “for the dignity and literary grace of his selections. From the pages of his readers I learned to know and love the poems of Scott, Byron, Southey, and Words- worth and a long line of the English masters. I got my first taste of Shakespeare from the selected scenes which I read in these books.” Not all, but some children will come away from a course in the old learning stirred to the depths by the language of Blake or Emerson. But no student can feel, after making his way through the groupthink wastelands of a social studies textbook, that he has traveled with Keats in the realms of gold.
It might be objected that primers like the McGuffey Readers were primarily intended to instruct children in reading and writing, something that social studies doesn’t pretend to do. In fact, the Readers, like other primers of the time, were only incidentally language manuals. Their foremost function was cultural: they used language both to introduce children to their cultural heritage [including their History] and to stimulate their individual self-culture. The acultural, group biases of social studies might be pardonable if cultural learning continued to have a place in primary-school English instruction. But primary-school English–or “language arts,” as it has come to be called–no longer introduces children, as it once did, to the canonical language of their culture; it is not uncommon for public school students today to reach the fifth grade without having encountered a single line of classic English prose or poetry. Language arts has become yet another vehicle for the socialization of children. A recent article by educators Karen Wood and Linda Bell Soares in The Reading Teacher distills the essence of contemporary language-arts instruction, arguing that teachers should cultivate not literacy in the classic sense but “critical literacy,” a “pedagogic approach to reading that focuses on the political, sociocultural, and economic forces that shape young students’ lives.”
For educators devoted to the social studies model, the old learning is anathema precisely because it liberates individual potential. It releases the “powers of a young soul,” the classicist educator Werner Jaeger wrote, “breaking down the restraints which hampered it, and leading into a glad activity.” The social educators have revised the classic ideal of education expressed by Pindar: “Become what you are” has given way to “Become what the group would have you be.” Social studies’ verbal drabness is the means by which its contrivers starve the self of the sustenance that nourishes individual growth. A stunted soul can more easily be reduced to an acquiescent dullness than a vital, growing one can; there is no readier way to reduce a people to servile imbecility than to cut them off from the traditions of their language [and their History], as the Party does in George Orwell’s 1984.
Indeed, today’s social studies theorists draw on the same social philosophy that Orwell feared would lead to Newspeak. The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities, a 2006 collection of articles by leading social studies educators, is a socialist smorgasbord of essays on topics like “Marxism and Critical Multicultural Social Studies” and “Decolonizing the Mind for World-Centered Global Education.” The book, too, reveals the pervasive influence of Marxist thinkers like Peter McLaren, a professor of urban schooling at UCLA who advocates “a genuine socialist democracy without market relations,” venerates Che Guevara as a “secular saint,” and regards the individual “self” as a delusion, an artifact of the material “relations which produced it”–“capitalist production, masculinist economies of power and privilege, Eurocentric signifiers of self/other identifications,” all the paraphernalia of bourgeois imposture. For such apostles of the social pack, Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Milton’s and Tennyson’s “soul within,” Spenser’s “my self, my inward self I mean,” and Wordsworth’s aspiration to be “worthy of myself” are expressions of naive faith in a thing that dialectical materialism has revealed to be an accident of matter, a random accumulation of dust and clay.
The test of an educational practice is its power to enable a human being to realize his own promise in a constructive way. Social studies fails this test. Purge it of the social idealism that created and still inspires it, and what remains is an insipid approach to the cultivation of the mind, one that famishes the soul even as it contributes to what Pope called the “progress of dulness.” It should be abolished.
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