America the Beautiful?

“We will make sure that parents can send their kids to school to get an education, not an indoctrination.”  -  Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on the occasion of signing the aptly nicknamed “Don’t Say Gay Law”into effect.

DeSantis and other Republicans have described the rules as reasonable, saying children should learn about sexual orientation and gender identity from their parents, not in schools.  As has been widely reported, teachers who dare wade into this territory invite a lawsuit initiated by any aggrieved parent.   

I commented on this bill and its companion Stop Woke Act  in a post last month. The Stop Woke Act, like scores of similar pieces of legislation across the nation, prohibits Critical Race Theory and other discussions of racism in another effort to guarantee “education” not “indoctrination.”

In related news, the Kentucky Senate passed a bill that, among other things, explicitly listed a set of documents  - American Principles - that must form the social studies curriculum in middle and high schools.  The list rather tellingly includes a speech by Ronald Reagan along with the more expected documents like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

The legislation, Senate Bill 1 (SB 1), was forwarded for Democratic Governor Andy Beshear’s signature.  His intentions are unclear, but he would veto such a patriotic bill at some political peril.  The majority with which it passed suggests that it is veto-proof.

SB 1 also shifts curriculum authority from school-based decision-making councils to superintendents who are hired by school boards, thus shifting educational decisions more toward “parental control” rather than leaving educational matters in the hands of, well, educators.

As of last month, at least 15 states had passed laws that give parents the right to control what their children read or learn in school.  26 more pieces of similar legislation are in the works.

I beat this dead horse again because I think it is among the greatest dangers our democracy faces.   And it is breathtakingly ironic that the “truth” is now indoctrination and several centuries of indoctrination are once more the “truth.”

For those of us “of a certain age,”  indoctrination was always the intent, beginning with the Pledge of Allegiance, a daily practice required by law in America’s schools.  

We small children put our little hands over our hearts and pledged allegiance to a flag and to a complex nation under a “God” we could not comprehend.  We were then instructed through the day on what to think and what to read.  We sang My Country ’Tis of Thee and America the Beautiful.

There were only “right”answers to questions that might have many answers to the critical mind.  In a world of wondrous riches, we knew only of white male leaders, and the art and music of white males in the Eurocentric realm.  Columbus “discovered” America and Indians were savages to be vanquished by brave explorers in our textbooks and on our weekend movie theater screens.  

The only Black faces we encountered were caricatures like Amos and Andy and we chanted “eenie, meenie, miny moe, catch a n***** by the toe” without a smidgen of discomfort.   I do remember one lesson about George Washington Carver and associated him - wrongly as it turns out - with peanut butter.

Gradually I became “woke” to the truth, but the long years of indoctrination are very hard to overcome.   Having sworn a daily oath to God and flag and singing “sweet land of liberty” and “God shed his grace on thee,” it is unimaginable to contemplate that this “sweet” land was stolen by force and that, if there is a God, he might well withhold his grace from a nation born in the subjugation and dehumanization of Black men, women and children.  Or that “amber waves of grain” grew in forcibly confiscated fields and that the “fruited plains” were stained with the blood of conscripted workers.  

And, of course, homosexuals were unnatural - perhaps mythological - as I knew no such person in my 3,000 student high school.  I finally came to understand the pain our society inflicts when a very popular and funny college friend knelt at my dorm room bedside with a razor blade on his wrist, because it was unbearable to live a lie.  He didn’t die quite then. I learned of his suicide a decade later.

No, Ron DeSantis and Republicans around the country, we progressives don’t want to indoctrinate your children.  We want to educate them to the world they live in, not to the white-washed, homophobic fantasy that gives you comfort at the expense of others.

I don’t see you as the patriots you claim to be.  I see you as frightened and entitled, threatened by the truth and wanting your children to be steeped in the same myth of American exceptionalism.