by Paul Gottfried

his short book by Allen Quist, a professor of political science at Bethany Lutheran College and a former Republican candidate for the governorship of Minnesota, documents a cognitive and moral revolution that is unfolding in our public schools. According to Quist, a new federal curriculum passed by Congress under presidential direction in 1994 is contributing to a dramatic change in the Americans’ self-understanding. Three related pieces of legislation work in tandem to authorize the U.S. Secretary of Education to “educate students about the history and principles of the United States” and empower the Center for Civic Education (CCE) to prepare national curricular guidelines toward this end. The CCE, a non-governmental organization, came into a windfall when President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” education bill increased its funding in December 2002.

 Quist relates the values that these guidelines are intended to convey, quoting at length Shirley McCune, an architect and outspoken defender of them. The guidelines offer a “globalist” critique of traditional communal and familial loyalties. For instance, the “National Standards for Civics and Government”—which came out of the CCE—persistently treat nation-states as if they were obstacles to world government. Rather than describing the world as “consisting of” various nations, the standards present the planet as being “divided up” by them. The same document also creates the impression that the American people now live under the moral and political authority of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. This utopian perspective recalls the rhetoric of the modern-day German Left, which consistently denounces German national and regional loyalties as expressions of prejudice. The “new federal curriculum” in the United States shows the same Teutonic flight from reality, but it is also marked by a more typically American white-bread preachiness.

 Thus, whereas the curricular designers celebrate the ever-expanding ramifications of the First Amendment, they entirely ignore the Second Amendment and seek to convince students that we would all be better off without firearms. Hints about the emotional satisfactions produced by same-sex unions, instruction on universal citizenship, and a revulsion for any specifically Western Christian heritage pervade the guidelines. Having looked at them myself, it seems to me that Professor Quist is properly interpreting what are transparently propagandistic texts.

 Every day I perceive the effect of what is here criticized, when encountering the ritualized responses of my college students to political and ethical questions. Ironically, those distorted opinions that Quist and Mrs. Schlafly (in her stately foreword) correctly describe as a threat to America’s sense of its past and to factual truth are becoming, thanks to our educationists, uncontestable dogma. Contrary to what is viewed in this book as the true American tradition, Quist’s countrymen now increasingly accept what they hear in our schools and on television about the importance of building a global, multicultural society. Former president Clinton, after the terrorist attacks on America of September 11, lectured at Georgetown University about how those attacks were the consequence of cumulative Western sins. (See “Clinton’s Folly,” American Outlook, Fall 2001.) The First Crusade of the eleventh century and the fact that over two hundred years ago the United States had “legalized slavery and many black slaves and Native Americans were terrorized and killed afterwards” were offered as the explanation for the calculated murder of more than three thousand people in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the plane that was forced down in a Pennsylvania field. Perhaps even more significant than the lunacy of Clinton’s claims was the failure of the national press to find anything objectionable or incorrect about them.

That a book of this kind had to be published on a shoestring by a concerned citizens’ group, the Maple River Education Coalition, tells much about our collective insensitivity to the present brainwashing. Such indoctrination will likely continue, moreover, because, as Peter Brimelow shows in his book The Worm in the Apple, the American educational establishment is pushing the very worldview that Quist dissects. Furthermore, a higher percentage of American youth is now being educated in public schools than was the case twenty years ago. Finally, as California’s recently adopted guidelines for teaching world religions indicate, state educational bureaucracies can be even more outlandish than their federal counterparts. Those guidelines and the accompanying textbooks attempt to “unmask” Judeo-Christian teachings and revelations, but their treatment of Islamic religion and societies might have originated with some Iranian imam. (The only thing that the Shiite imam might object to is that California educators apparently love the Sunnis and Shiites with equal fervor.)

Quist has written a timely critique—and one that American conservatives should carefully examine. One minor cavil, however: like John Fonte, who has written incisively on these subjects, Quist complains about the “relativism” and “historicism” that educationists are putting in our school curricula. “There are no absolute moral standards that are universally true for all human beings outside of a particular historical context; rather morality and truth are ‘socially constructed,’” Quist writes, describing what he takes to be the philosophical premise behind the federal guidelines. The problem with attributing this coherent view to educationists is that many of them do not actually believe it. They rush to privilege their values at the expense of other ones and make ruthless efforts to impose what they believe on a captive public. Relativistic historicism is for them merely a convenient tool for discrediting the absolute moral claims that they happen to oppose. Were they true believers in relativism, they would demonstrate consistency by also debunking—and certainly not privileging—the values that they claim to hold dear, such as compassion, sensitivity, and opposition to fascism. Fonte and Quist treat their opponents with too much respect, by crediting them with a sincerely skeptical outlook. These opponents are, quite simply, duplicitous totalitarians.

Paul Gottfried is professor of humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, and the author of After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (Princeton).

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