On Nov. 11, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s right-wing administration announced a package of proposed changes to the history and social sciences curricula taught in the state’s public schools.
The Standards of Learning (SOLs) provide the framework for the curriculum in each subject taught in Virginia public schools. They determine what students from kindergarten through 12th grade need to learn in order to pass their classes.
By law, SOLs must be reviewed by the State Board of Education at least every seven years. Under the previous administration of Democrat Ralph Northam, a draft of the SOLs had been prepared over several months with the collaboration of historians, academics, economists, geographers and political scientists, as well as input from teachers, parents and students. In total, it comprised more than 400 pages.
Youngkin, who took office in early 2022, has appointed five people to the nine-member education committee. In August, in one of its first major acts under Youngkin, the board rejected the draft SOLs and delayed the planned vote on the draft from late 2022 to early 2023, with Youngkin appointees citing concerns about the content.
The new version only has 52 pages. Below the section headed “Expectations for Virginia Students” is a passage that states that the new standards will recognize the “optimism, ideals, and imagery inherent in Ronald Reagan’s “Shining City on a Hill” speech. were caught”. The reference to Reagan, whose presidency (1981-1989) marked a sharp turn to the right in American politics, sets the tone for the remainder of the document.
Among other things, students are expected to learn about “the inhumanity and deprivation of communist regimes” while “gaining an appreciation for the qualities and actions that have made America the world’s paragon of freedom, opportunity, and democratic ideals.”
Under the section listing the “fundamental principles” for history and social sciences, the document bluntly asserts that “free enterprise, property rights, and the rule of law enable an economic system that allocates assets through free markets and competition and fosters innovation, opportunity, and efficiency” while on the other hand “centralized government planning in the form of socialism or communist political systems is incompatible with democracy and individual liberties.”
Most notable is not what the proposed standards explicitly say, but what they omit. As mentioned above, the original draft has been significantly reduced, from over 400 pages to just 52.
The new version removes references to Native Americans in the kindergarten curriculum and replaces them with “America’s First Immigrants from Asia.” The teachings of ancient China and Mali, as well as the history of Russia and the Ottoman Empire, were discarded.
The new third-grade guidelines remove the teaching of world geography in favor of an exclusive focus on Europe. References to teaching how “climate influences people’s needs and desires” and an analysis of the sustainable use of resources were removed from the eighth grade curriculum.
Classes on Martin Luther King, Jr., Helen Keller, and Cesar Chavez were removed from the curriculum. The standards originally proposed placed an emphasis on teaching about racism. The new standards remove this, as well as references to China’s exclusion law, the Americans with Disabilities Act and the women’s rights movement. Deleted references to teaching about “respect for diversity” and learning to work with “people from different backgrounds, perspectives and experiences”.
Also removed was the teaching of concepts such as colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism.
On the other hand, the new seventh grade syllabus states that courses in economics “should assess the unique qualities of free enterprise and how democracy cannot survive without them”. In addition, there was a lesson on “election observers”.
The new standards remove the original SOL’s language about the US Constitution that it “established a system that is designed to evolve over time. [sic]This cut reflects the Republican legal position, which claims to know the “original intent” of the constitution’s drafters, who allegedly envisioned the founding document to be similar to Scripture. That distance also encapsulates the aims of the Republican assault on public education: the youth must not get it into their heads that society has evolved at all in the last two centuries. Anything but that!
Upon taking office earlier this year, Youngkin enacted a fascist measure that set up a “hint line” for parents and students to report teachers discussing “divisive” concepts. The tip line was reportedly scrapped quietly for lack of input.
Youngkin’s right-wing overhaul of Virginia’s curriculum is part of a broader Republican Party attack on public education. Beginning with the outgoing Trump administration’s “Report of 1776” last year — which aimed to “restore patriotic education,” in other words, to promote a right-wing, chauvinist view of U.S. history — Republican lawmakers by the dozen have by states attempting to ban the teaching of “divisive concepts.” This included a ban on critical race theory and the teaching of the new york times’ 1619 project promoting a racist view of American history.
The new Virginia guidelines are not an explicit ban on teaching specific subjects. However, their removal from the tiered curriculum amounts to the same thing. Teachers are still free to teach these subjects in their free time. But in practice, educators with limited resources and time do not have the means to teach on subjects outside of the SOLs. This is the first step toward open censorship in Virginia public schools.
That World Socialist Web Site Condemns Republican censorship. But this does not imply support for the theoretical and political view of Critical Race Theory, intersectionality and other reactionary ideologies that seek to obscure the centrality of class conflict as the main engine of history, or for the 1619 Project, which describes the American Revolution as a counter-revolution and downplays the importance of the civil war in the abolition of slavery. We recognize that these represent the views of a section of the affluent middle class, clustered around the Democratic Party, and bitterly hostile to socialism and the working class.
In fact, despite their declared opposition to one another, there is a certain symmetry in the historical perspectives of the fascist Republicans and the racist, identity-oriented Democrats. On the one hand, the extreme right promotes an idyllic, mythologized view of American history. Racists, on the other hand, say that American history is the history of “endemic” racial and gender oppression that was “shaped from the beginning” and continues to this day.
What do these seemingly hostile views have in common? It’s this: you remove all real conflict from the story, making it incomprehensible. That one sings patriotic hymns to America while the other bewails the ineradicable oppression of contemporary notions of identity expresses a fundamental unity of historical method. Both eliminate class conflict, the central driver of American and world history. Both even exclude the idea of progress in human society. Both therefore serve the ideological defense of the capitalist order.
In fact, the main target of the right-wing attack on the doctrine of “divisive concepts” is not racial and gender differences, but class struggle and revolution in history. In that sense, the Republican push to censor schools is part of a broader assault on democratic rights by the ruling class, taking place amid intensifying class struggle, as evidenced by the growing railroad workers’ movement and mass strikes among college graduates on both U.S. coasts and growing Anger and militancy among autoworkers and teachers.