One of President Donald Trump’s first executive orders after taking office was the one he calls “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” “Parents,” he declares, “trust America’s schools to provide their children with a rigorous education and to instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation and the values for which we stand. ” He continues:
In recent years, however, parents have witnessed schools indoctrinate their children in radical, anti-American ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight. Such an environment operates as an echo chamber, in which students are forced to accept these ideologies without question or critical examination. In many cases, innocent children are compelled to adopt identities as either victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color and other immutable characteristics. In other instances, young men and women are made to question whether they were born in the wrong body and whether to view their parents and their reality as enemies to be blamed. These practices not only erode critical thinking but also sow division, confusion, and distrust, which undermine the very foundations of personal identity and family unity.
To state the obvious, this opening is a vicious attack on teachers. Most reprehensible is where he accuses educators of “making” “young men and women…question whether they were born in the wrong body” and trying to turn them against their parents. To test out that idea, I would invite you to think back to when you were 12 or 14, and ask yourself whether, at that time, it would have been possible for some teacher to persuade you to change your sex if you were otherwise comfortable with the gender you had. But it is clearly the mindset of many, including our president, that if a teacher tries to make students aware of transgender people as a population group worthy of acceptance and respect, or shows empathy and support for a student who self-identifies as transgender, such teacher is a groomer, an abuser of the unsuspecting young. Throughout the document, Trump uses the term “gender ideology” to refer to any acceptance of the transgender realm and announces that federal funding will be withheld from any school program seen as promoting such.
The other major theme in this executive order is how US history is to be taught in the public schools. Here, he accuses the schools of indoctrinating students in anti-American ideology. This is by no means new; some variation on it has played itself out in nearly every period in the history of American public schooling. Trump seems to think that teachers are addressing Black students as victims and white students as oppressors, suppressing any divergence of thought away from that rigid paradigm. Moreover, he clearly thinks the federal government needs to establish tighter control over how history is taught–rather odd for a president who thinks the US Department of Education should be abolished.
At first glance, Trump would appear to be taking a stand that the teaching of US history in the public schools must be value-neutral, or that all sides of the story must be aired. He would appear to be advocating for the complete absence of any political bias in the way that the teacher presents the historical narrative. However, there is a curious contradiction as one reads on.
In Section 4 of the executive order, he reconstitutes the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission to promote “patriotic education.” Earlier in the order, he defines the term:
(d) “Patriotic education” means a presentation of the history of America grounded in:
(i) an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and foundational principles;
(ii) a clear examination of how the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history;
(iii) the concept that commitment to America’s aspirations is beneficial and justified; and
(iv) the concept that celebration of America’s greatness and history is proper.
It should be clear that Trump is attempting to prescribe a specific interpretation of history and to pressure school systems to adhere to it. Where he seems in his opening to be calling for critical thinking, he does not appear to want critical thinking to get in the way of presenting, as absolute truth, the assertation that the United States “has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history.”
To be sure, there is no shortage of facts that support this interpretation. Slavery once existed in this country; since 1865, it hasn’t. Women didn’t have the right to vote before 1920; since 1920, they have. School segregation was officially sanctioned as legal until 1954; since 1954, it’s been illegal. Since 1964, it has been illegal nationwide for businesses to turn customers away on the basis of their ethnicity. That much is understood, and nobody is denying it.
But are there not contradictions to this march of moral progress? This is where things start to get muddy, and teachers might well consider it more fruitful to pose that paradigm as a question to be debated rather than as an absolute truth to be held sacred. In any event, though, the key point that needs to be understood is that the president, in the name of “ending radical indoctrination,” is attempting to prescribe another form of indoctrination, that of the patriotic variety. Approve or disapprove of the paradigm, it’s still indoctrination.
Truth be told, very few things are original with Trump, and accusing teachers of indoctrination certainly isn’t, nor is trying to prescribe one kind of indoctrination to supersede another. Consider, to take just one example, Richard Bernstein’s 1994 book Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America’s Future (Alfred A. Knopf). The main thrust of the book is about the mischiefs of what at that time was commonly called “political correctness.” When people use that term, they tend to be suggesting that there is a cultural elite that is forcing singular ways of thinking on society and bullying others into submission. Freedom of thought, as opposed to a singular paradigm that all must embrace, would seem to be the goal. However, on the subject of US history, he indulges in some doctrinal prescriptions of his own. In one spot, he discusses changes in the writing and teaching of the history of the American West, giving it a more negative cast. In the past, he writes, “there were plenty of critical writers who understood the enormous human cost of the westward expansion and, especially, the grievous burden it imposed on the Indians, but they nonetheless saw the whole adventure as, at the very least, an inevitability leading to a free and prosperous life for tens of millions of people. It was, at least in this respect, a triumphal progress” (p. 48). Thus, where he perceives that a new orthodoxy has taken hold, he does not seem to mind orthodoxies as long as his own preferred orthodoxy is the one in place.
But a key question remains: Are the teachers indoctrinating the students? Even the sound of that question sounds eerily close to “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats,” but it is worth considering. It’s a safe bet that every scenario–good, bad, and ugly–exists somewhere in the nation. Any ideologue who wants to make a case that “political correctness” or “wokeness” or any other form of control has taken hold can make that case by searching out and stringing together a collection of anecdotes. Those anecdotes may involve unhelpful classroom exercises involving race, exercises that cause students to feel uncomfortable for being who and what they are, whether Black or white. They may involve a teacher devoting every class period to pushing a narrow political agenda, perhaps a far-left one. But there is a difference between a string of anecdotes and a tendency, and certainly between a string of anecdotes and a constant state of affairs. It is easy for the uncritical mind to forget those distinctions, and to make the leap even from just one distasteful anecdote to a constant state of affairs.
And what is really going on in the public school US history classes? A definitive study to answer that question would be impossible, but some steps along the way have been taken. In 2022, the American Historical Association (AHA), of which I am a member, undertook a deep dive into how US history was being taught in the public schools of nine states, representing all different regions of the country. The report American Lesson Plan was issued in 2024. Up top, the report stated, “We did not find indoctrination, politicization, or deliberate classroom malpractice.” It then went on to identify another problem in history teaching that the researchers felt should be addressed: “lack of resources, professional respect, and instructional time.” “If there is any wholly inaccurate message
being sent by our schools to millions of students and their families,” they told their readers, “it is that history is not important enough to command time, attention, and public resources.” But they found the history teachers themselves, far more often than not, to be conscientious and to want their students to be knowledgeable and to be able to think intelligently and critically. Radical indoctrination was profoundly not what they found going on in the classrooms.
To be sure–and the AHA study doesn’t deny it–teachers have opinions about what is important in history. To be sure, how teachers feel about historical events can affect how they present it. But the AHA study did not find any single dominant ideology in the views of teachers, and even where ideology was a factor, shaping students’ opinions was still not the main objective. Moreover, the study found that teachers, whatever their own opinions, tend to resent and resist having outside authorities dictate instructional content to them, and when they do have a choice of materials, they are more likely to choose materials for their effectiveness than their politics. Neither the controversial 1619 Project (which has been found to overstate the centrality of slavery in the life of the early republic) nor Trump’s “patriotic” 1776 Project is the curriculum of choice for most teachers of US history.
But suppose, for the sake of argument, that some teachers are on a mission to indoctrinate students with left-wing propaganda. Does that require a nationwide remedy, and should that remedy entail prescribing a specific curriculum designed to instill national pride? Hardly. If fostering critical thinking is the ideal, which even Trump pays lip service to in his executive order, then we’re not going to achieve that ideal by prescribing a singular interpretation and penalizing teachers who appear to be deviating from it. Indeed, if history education needs to be reformed, there are surely better ways to do it than prescribing curriculum.
Does it not stand to reason that teachers who subscribe to narrow ideologies are probably not the best teachers? Wouldn’t a possible solution, or at least a step, be to improve working conditions for teachers, including salary, so that more people of talent would be drawn to the profession? If history teachers are well versed in their subject matter, won’t that make them more likely to understand that the reality does not always fit a singular narrative, be it patriotic or otherwise? Won’t they understand that history education has far more important goals than telling students how they should feel personally about their country? Above all, won’t students have more respect for their teachers and for the subject matter if they don’t have reason to think they are being fed the orthodoxy that their president wants them to be fed?
