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Max Eden


STANDARDIZED ACTIVISM

Minnesota’s new social studies benchmarks will force teachers to indoctrinate
students.

/ Education
February 19, 2024 / Share
/ Eye on the News / Education
Feb 19 2024 / Share

Earlier this month, a Minnesota administrative law judge gave the state final
approval to implement the most ideologically progressive and intellectually
vapid social studies standards in America.

The Minnesota Department of Education faced an administrative legal challenge to
its standards, which, according to the judge, “identify the knowledge and skills
that Minnesota students must have at the end of particular grade levels and for
graduation.” Critics claimed that the department lacked the authority to include
ethnic studies criteria in its standards, and that the standards themselves were
too vague. The judge upheld the department’s authority to include such criteria
in its standards but took issue with one passage:

> Ways of Knowing and Methodologies: The student will use ethnic and indigenous
> studies methods and sources in order to understand the roots of contemporary
> systems of oppression and apply lessons from the past in order to eliminate
> historical and contemporary injustices.

While this language certainly presents problems, the judge objected not to its
spirit but to its construction, arguing that “[a] plain reading of the text
suggests that each student must eliminate a historical and contemporary
injustice to satisfy the standard.” In response, the MNDOE amended the language
slightly and successfully passed new standards.

Unlike California, which drafted a dedicated ethnic studies curricular framework
in 2019, Minnesota’s standards are not obviously anti-Semitic. Nor do
Minnesota’s standards direct students, as California’s original framework did,
to engage in chants derived from Aztec human sacrifice rituals. Yet the spirit
and purpose of Minnesota’s standards are plain: to produce graduates who embrace
left-wing activism and promote a left-wing worldview.

The standards task first-graders with identifying “examples of ethnicity,
equality, liberation and systems of power.” They require seventh-graders to
examine “the benefits and consequences of power and privilege,” and they
introduce ninth-graders to “the construction of racialized hierarchies based on
colorism and dominant European beauty standards and values.”

The standards take seriously the complaint of leftist academics, who maintain
that American social studies is “Eurocentric.” As such, Minnesota students will
not be asked to learn anything about Europe until ninth grade. Then, students
will be taught to “identify different historical perspectives about religion,
slavery, feudalism and disease in Europe and the Mediterranean World, including
the Ottoman Empire,” and “identify the influence of Islamic centers of learning
on the European Renaissance.” The standards make zero mention of Greece, Rome,
Spain, France, or even England. By contrast, they reference Native
American–related items 48 times. Similarly, Christianity doesn’t make its first
appearance until eighth grade, and then only as one of nine religions whose
basic tenets students are asked to describe.

State social studies standards typically insist that students know particular
facts, figures, and treaties. Minnesota’s standards, by contrast, disdain this
approach in favor of telling teachers that students should “examine dominant and
non-dominant narratives” about huge swathes of history. For example, Minnesota’s
standards require students to “identify and examine dominant and non-dominant
narratives about the development of cities, societies and empires in Asia, the
Americas and Africa,” (2,500 B.C.–800 A.D.) and “evaluate dominant and
non-dominant narratives about the first global age” (1400–1800).

If the standards are implemented faithfully, Minnesota high school graduates
won’t know much of anything about the world. But they will have been asked,
every year from kindergarten through twelfth grade, to “analyze the ways power
and language construct the social identities of race, religion, geography,
ethnicity and gender,” and to “apply these understandings to one’s own social
identities and other groups living in Minnesota, centering those whose stories
and histories have been marginalized, erased or ignored.” In fact, the “stories
and histories” that have been “marginalized” and “ignored” in these standards
are those that most states still insist be taught: from Pericles to the papacy,
from Robespierre to Rembrandt, from Locke to Leonardo da Vinci.

Under this pedagogical framework, Minnesota high school graduates will learn to
resent things that they never even got the chance to understand. Maybe a few
bright ones will look back at their education and properly recognize it as part
of a contemporary system of indoctrination. But that’s a slim reed to cling to.

Max Eden is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Photo: Victoria Pearson/The Image Bank via Getty Images


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Also by Max Eden
Advanced Petty Black Studies
Eye on the News Dec 08 2023
Office of Wokeness Enforcement
Eye on the News Nov 20 2023
Morally Perverse
Eye on the News Oct 18 2023




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UP NEXT

Max Eden Advanced Petty Black Studies

The final version of the College Board’s AP African-American Studies framework
is no longer pure leftist indoctrination, but it has little else to recommend
it.

Eye on the News article
Dec 08 2023

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