Maddow Blog | In education order, Trump revives failed ‘1776 Commission’

As part of his strange and brazenly dishonest presidential inaugural address, Donald Trump declared that the United States has “an education system that teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves — in many cases, to hate our country.” The Republican assured the public that this would “change very quickly.”

In reality, of course, the president was peddling a bizarre and baseless myth. But as NBC News reported, that didn’t stop him from issuing an executive order on the subject.

The White House announced [Wednesday] evening that Trump signed an executive order aimed at “ending radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling,” according to its title. The order directs several Cabinet members within 90 days to “provide an Ending Indoctrination Strategy to the President” that includes “protecting parental rights” and eliminating funding for “illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination in K-12 schools.”

For those concerned about their local schools, all of this might sound alarming, but some caveats are in order. In fact, the phrasing in the executive order itself reflects a degree of hollowness: Trump has directed officials to provide him with a “strategy” that meets his expectations. The president didn’t literally say, “Go figure something out,” but he might as well have.

But a large chunk of the same executive order was devoted to something called the “President’s Advisory 1776 Commission and Promoting Patriotic Education,” the point of which is to apparently promote patriotism — or at least a Republican-preferred version of patriotism — into school curricula.

To that end, the EO allows Trump to handpick 20 people to serve as commissioners of this 1776 initiative, who will work with the White House on “promoting patriotic education.” The whole thing will be financed by way of funds from the U.S. Department of Education, which is a federal cabinet agency the president has vowed to destroy.

This stood out for me, not only because it’s a misguided idea, but also because it’s a return to a misguided idea.

As regular readers might recall, one day before Election Day 2020, Trump signed an executive order establishing what the White House described as the “1776 Commission.” Explaining its value, the Republican said the initiative would help “clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms,” adding that versions of history at odds with conservatives’ values constituted “a form of child abuse.”

On the last full day of his first term, the White House issued a rather pitiful document, which, as The New York Times reported, was quickly denounced by scholars as ridiculous.

“This report skillfully weaves together myths, distortions, deliberate silences, and both blatant and subtle misreading of evidence to create a narrative and an argument that few respectable professional historians, even across a wide interpretive spectrum, would consider plausible, never mind convincing,” James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association, told the newspaper. “They’re using something they call history to stoke culture wars.”

The Times also noted a highly relevant detail: Trump’s “commission” featured conservative educators, but it did not include a single professional historian of the United States.

Four years later, Trump apparently wants to do it all again — as if the first go around was a success. It was not.

In 2021, the Republican’s 1776 initiative was largely ignored and forgotten. In the president’s second term, it’s hardly unreasonable to wonder whether it might be more menacing.

This report updates our related earlier coverage.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com

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