The Assault on History

Spreading ignorance hurts us and helps them

Expect this all to get much, much worse.

The increasingly authoritarian rule of the Trump regime is changing the way history is being taught in America. A recent Morning Consult poll found that 53% of K-12 teachers nationwide report having had to modify their curricula or class discussion topics due political pressure. In 2024, just a little over one third of teachers reported having to modify curricula due to state laws or updated school policies.

So far, 20 states have passed laws restricting lessons on race, gender, and American history in the last five years. The truly unprecedented change we’re seeing in this year’s curricula involves censoring the Constitution. The nonpartisan civics education group, iCivics, found a 28% drop in lessons on core Constitutional principles, particularly discussions about the limits of executive power. This tracks with the Trump regime’s authoritarian goal of obtaining as much executive power as possible, despite the limits clearly laid out in the Constitution. Limits, by the way, the corrupt, illegitimate super-majority of the Supreme Court keeps choosing to ignore.

Censoring education isn’t new, but as Adam Laats, Binghamton University’s historian on education, told the New York Times,

“Never before has this kind of fervor from the right owned the Oval Office.”

These shifts are not just occurring in red spaces. Brown University administrators shut down its “Choices Program” after allegations of anti-Israel bias. Its abrupt cancellation shocked Brown staff. The program provided a cutting-edge history curriculum to over 8,000 schools throughout the country. Its’ advanced history classes taught about race, gender, and colonialism, but Brown has chosen not to make it available for acquisition by another entity. And the University has declined to archive the curriculum on its website. The school’s provost wrote that “Choices” was no longer economically viable at Brown, but the decision to end the program came back in June when the Trump regime was threatening to withhold $510 million in federal grounds from the university because it had allowed students to protest Israel’s genocide on Palestine.

California is reversing course on its once progressive approach to teaching history. In 2024, the state mandated an ethnic studies course, which became very popular among students. Studies have shown that participating in ethnic studies boosts attendance and improves grades for students at risk of dropping out. Right-wing backlash over the course, however was swift, and questions were raised about whether ethnic studies programs should include material about systemic racism and international conflicts, specifically the histories of Israel and Palestine. Detractors of the program claim that the content is antisemitic. When the state legislature failed this year to modify the subject matter covered by the program, Governor Gavin Newsom quietly defunded ethnic studies in the budget.

These changes are deleterious to our students’ ability to understand the complexities of the world in which they live. We are not allowing them access to facts that will help them make their own decisions about how to respond to what’s going on in the world. These are not decisions that are being made by educators. They are not driven by considered discussion about what is best for our students and how best to teach them. They are purely political and, in many cases, they’re utterly cynical.

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A lot of what we are seeing is simply backlash to a majority of Americans having elected a Black president twice and voted for a woman. Much of the progress we have seen in the past couple of decades is being completely undone because it does not serve the agenda of the people currently in power, most of whom are rich, white Christian men.

According to ABC News:

“This September, the US Department of Education announced an end to federal grant funding from minority serving institutions, specifically for colleges and universities with large numbers of Hispanic, Asian American and native Alaskan and Hawaiian students. In its announcement, the Department of Education says this type of funding is discriminatory and unconstitutional.”

What is actually racially discriminatory is pretending that America was built by white people. What is racially discriminatory is pretending that America is not now and never has been a racist country. Those lies only serve to benefit the current regime and its adherents.

For the Trump regime to convince more Americans that keeping them in power in perpetuity is not only necessary but also American, they need to reprogram the way we understand how our government works. Whitewashing American history is one way to do that. Censoring dissent is another. Banning books, attacking knowledge, failing to teach critical thinking, reversing the trend of upward mobility of minorities are all effective tools as well. And they are the tools of dictators.

Another effective way to undermine our ability to analyze the damage being done to our way of governance is to cancel funding for independent public media outlets like NPR and PBS. PBS is a particular threat because, beyond teaching our children the basics of reading and arithmetic, many of their shows teach our children how to be empathetic, kind, and accepting people who value diversity.

The Trump regime’s attacks on knowledge and history are desperate ploys meant to preserve white male supremacy. They are, in many instances, being met with resistance, but there are far too many examples of capitulation. Liberal leaders and institutions must stand strong in the face of these onslaughts against our culture and our history and the ways in which we educate our children.