Curriculum and Teaching
Many of the technologies and tools which our children now use will become obsolete in the years to come.
By contrast, excellent reading, writing, and communication skills, as well as proficiency in mathematics, will never be obsolete.
A rigorous education focused on core skills, supplemented by enriching courses in the arts, languages, and other subjects, will best prepare our children for success in today’s world—and tomorrow’s.
Speaking of core skills, math proficiency is no longer a prerequisite only for engineering, medicine, science, finance, or the like. It is increasingly important in a wide variety of careers, including the hi-tech manufacturing environment.
For example, according to the American Welding Society, many young people don’t have the necessary math and STEM skills.
American students have stagnated and/or fallen behind compared to young people in other nations on math and other subjects, according to OECD data. While our school district is often compared to other districts in the state of Indiana, PFAS is concerned with performance on a global scale.
When it comes to teaching the humanities, PFAS supports age-appropriate, robust examinations of worldviews, social issues, and political positions, with an eye toward critical thinking—and respect and tolerance for different points of view.
Like Americans in other communities, we have watched with great concern as many schools around the U.S. have embraced, to varying degrees, a radical and divisive ideology.
In Federalist No. 10, James Madison warned of a faction of citizens “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community”.
PFAS believes that those who sell to young people the idea that America is systemically racist, who portray black Americans as an oppressed class and white Americans as their privileged oppressors, and who see capitalism as evil, represent such a faction Madison warned about.
Among the lies told by promotors, enablers, and apologists for Critical Race Theory, or the New York Times 1619 Project, is that Americans opposed to such “teachings” want to ignore history.
The claim is self-evidently false. Black Americans’ struggle for full political and civil rights, which continued long after Americans fought a bloody civil war to abolish slavery, has long been part of schools’ history curriculum—as it should be.
Indeed, Slavery, Jim Crow, “Separate but Equal”, and other examples of our nation not living up to its principles are an essential part of the history curriculum.
But we reject the radical, revisionist, and false history which teaches that America’s War of Independence was fought to protect Slavery, or that “antiblack racism runs in the very DNA of this Country”—as 1619 Project founder, Nikole Hannah Jones, insists.
We reject the fundamental ideas of Critical Race Theory (CRT)—such as “systemic racism”, “white privilege”, and “white fragility”; that “objectivity, color-blindness, and meritocracy” are “camouflages for the self-interest of dominant groups in American Society”; or that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”
During a recent address, historian Wilfred McClay framed the issue this way: “Would a serious country so completely lose perspective on its own past that it would entertain the idea that the nation was founded on slavery, rather than on the ideals that have made it a beacon to the rest of the world? And would a serious country think it appropriate to teach its children that the nation’s past is best understood as a parade of horrors, to which the most appropriate response is not pride but lacerating shame?
As Professor McClay puts it, “nobody wants an account of the American Past that is sanitized”. We can both acknowledge America’s faults yet see her greatness. To borrow from McClay once more, our children should be taught to see America “as a land of hope for a world that needs hope more than ever.” The 1619 project and CRT—which have been heralded by educators around the country—deny American greatness, and reject the idea that the U.S. is a land of hope for the world.
We reject the 1619 Project and CRT. And we will fight efforts to incorporate their teachings into the classroom here in Zionsville.
Pushing back against fashionable yet destructive and divisive obsessions with race and identity politics will expose PFAS to attacks from some. But we feel compelled to do so.
Schools have become too politicized. We didn’t look for this fight, but we will stand up for what’s right—for the sake of our country, our community, and most of all, our kids.