Today’s story about Rod Montoya’s letter advising district school boards to adopt their own guidelines regarding social studies curriculum makes sense. But as Michael Potts points out, providing the link in the message below, the state’s PED appears to have veto power over any school board that chooses to follow its own course.
We saw this in the example of the Floyd school board that broke with the governor’s mask mandate. Yet ultimately we know that these masks are almost totally ineffective in preventing the spread of COVID-19.
Similarly, we have seen how the state’s PED almost totally ignored critics of their social studies standards development. Instead, they have infused their standards with anti-American supposedly “inclusive” and “culturally responsive” goals. In the process, our education system has become highly introspective of native and LGBTQIA+ cultures, while ignoring virtually the entire history of the planet before 1912?, 1492?, 1619?. Without this knowledge, students have no basis of comparison with how native cultures interacted with one another prior to the arrival of Europeans, or how European, African, Asian, and other world cultures interacted, evolved, and developed over the past 5,000 years. This lack of perspective will produce a stunted and narrow-minded vision of humanity, not a responsive and circumspect concept.
[By the way, I did send in a rather lengthy commentary on various aspects of the proposed social studies standards and those comments appear to have been summarily ignored, along with those of numerous other citizens.]
Respectfully,
David Tofsted, Ph.D.
Citizen at Large
