The blog of the Network for Public Education posted Justin Parmenter’s concern about the latest meddling into education by the state’s Republican-dominated General Assembly. The NPE blog is curated by the estimable Peter Greene. Justin Parmenter is an NBCT high school teacher in North Carolina.
Teacher Justin Parmenter monitors anti-public ed shenanigans in North Carolina. He explains in a recent post a bill to force adoption of Hillsdale College’s “patriotic” curriculum.
Parmenter writes:
Legislation filed in the North Carolina General Assembly last week would authorize Beaufort County Public Schools to ignore the state’s standard course of study and instead teach a controversial social studies curriculum developed by a conservative Michigan college with close ties to former President Donald Trump.
The bill was filed by Rep. Keith Kidwell, who represents Beaufort, Dare, Pamlico and Hyde counties.
The curriculum Kidwell is proposing be used in Beaufort County’s public schools was created by Michigan-based Hillsdale College after white fragility over Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project prompted former president Donald Trump to issue an executive order setting up what he called a “patriotic education” commission.
Trump said at the time that the commission was intended to counter “hateful lies” being taught to children in American schools which he said constituted “a form of child abuse.”
Trump appointed Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn to chair the 1776 Commission near the end of his presidency in 2020.
The commission’s report, published on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in January 2021, was widely criticized by actual historians as a whitewashed take on American history for its downplaying of Founding Fathers’ support for slavery and quoting Dr. Martin Luther King out of context in order to create a falsely rosy view of race in the United States, among other reasons.
Hillsdale College released the “1776 curriculum” in July 2021. In its “Note to Teachers,” the curriculum reminds anyone who will be using the curriculum to teach children that “America is an exceptionally good country” and ends with the exhortation to “Learn it, wonder at it, love it, and teach so your students will, too.”
In North Carolina, current state law gives the State Board of Education the authority to develop a standard course of study which each school district is required to follow. The state’s current social studies standards were adopted in 2021 over objections of Republican state board members who said the standards portrayed America in a negative light and amounted to critical race theory.
Kidwell’s bill comes just days after Representative Tricia Cotham’s party switch handed North Carolina Republicans a veto-proof supermajority in the legislature. That means there’s a good chance this Trump-inspired, whitewashed version of American history will end up on desks in Beaufort County, and there’s no reason to think other counties won’t follow suit.
According to DPI’s Statistical Profile, more than half of Beaufort County’s 5,821 public school students are students of color. Those students deserve to have their stories and their ancestors’ stories told. Those students and all students deserve to learn real American history, warts and all, not a watered-down, Donald Trump-conceived version designed to make white people feel comfortable.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Totally off topic but this is fun.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2023/national-debt-cut-game/
Adopting the 1776 curriculum isn’t enough. They need to do this, to institute hourly prayer sessions, and ensure that all students have memorized the following KEY text:
Patriotic Noise 2 | by Bob Shepherd, Patriot
Submission pursuant to an application for the position of speechwriter for Donald Trump, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Greg Abbott, or Ron DeSantis
Murika, land of the
tis of thee,
by jingo by golly
by jingoism,
by the dawn’s eerie
night
from above,
by crackie,
by cracker,
by crackle!
freedumb de dumb de dumb
Another village saved from thinking!
A tear in the eye as the flag goes by
saved by the Liberty Bell!
well,
mission accomplished,
O land that beats true
for that ole black ‘n’ blue,
for me and you
and all true
merkins
ole black Joe
stuck a feather in his
tweedle dumb,
tweedle dee,
so stand your ground,
women for Trump,
while these savings last,
yes, they stole the erection,
but I’ll be home by Christmas,
there’s a war on that
funded by Soros and the teacher’s unions,
indoctrinating our kids with their critical race theory
that leaves dishes in the sink and
turns children transgender
and lord knows what they are doing
with those Jewish space lasers
am I rite?
they dont want you to have hamburgers!
hamburgers!
But your donation is a weapon aimed at the heart of Antifa,
protecting our statues, our Truth Social, our Just Us and $1.99 hamburgers!
They wanna take your cows.
Well, I say, no more,
for the business of America is hamburgers
and American Cheese food product
all the livelong day, that
gem of the
dancing with the,
hey there with the,
you there with the,
stars in your eyes,
and stripes on your back cause
it’s really the whites who are
discriminated against and
nothing was given to you, rite?
you earned it
you rock, you roll!
you gitter dun
you could grow up to be the next
Glorious Leader Who Shines More Orange Than Does the Sun,
in the sweet buy and bye [call now]
some of my best friends are,
bye, bye blackbird:
buy now, for deals like this won’t last forever,
and see you in Church on Sunday
for your tax-deductible donation
thank you, Jesus,
Proud to be a merkin,
’cause least I know I’m
freebird
freedumb
freebase
freefall,
but definitely not freegan,
born free, as free as
THE WIND BLOWS
(a REAL gurl knows),
by golly,
by gee,
by Jim Dandy doodle dandy,
Onward!
Where our fathers fruited plain.
Everybody sing!
All Fascist countries have exceptionalist national curricula. Of course they do. This is how one creates little Fascists.
Wikipedia describes Keith Kidwell as being on the membership roster (with 38,000 others) of the Oathkeepers.
I was lucky to get to hear Ruta Sepetys lecture this morning. She is a Nashville-based writer of historical fiction. In her lecture, she bemoaned the absence of knowledge concerning some of the historical events she uses in her stories.
She has a point; there are many things we do not know about chapters in history that are full of tension. But you cannot put all the stories on a history class. You have to put in the stories that will provide structural integrity for future knowledge people will encounter. Thus the curriculum. And thus the problems with it.
I’ve lived in Beaufort County NC and it doesn’t surprise me one bit that they’re the ones pushing this nonsense. It’s as backward as they come. In fact my late mother divorced my father in 1969 because she refused to move there from Westhampton Beach NY when my dad’s company did to escape unions. She took one look at the place and called my grandmother in tears saying “it makes Speonk look like Paris”.
Westhampton Beach is beautiful.
My dad had just built a house on North Beach Road a year earlier. Then he had to announce to her that we were moving to East Pig Poo, North Carolina. My mom grew up in Forest Hills Gardens. There was no way she was going to live in Little Washington (the county seat of Beaufort). All because my grandfather hated unions. And yes Westhampton is beautiful. I still miss it.
Years ago, taking advice from Sun Tzu’s Art of War, I subscribed to Hillsdale’s newsletter to get to know our enemy better. That waste of printed paper still show up in my mailbox and I struggle to read what I can stand.
The opinion pieces are so obviously biased and full of deceit that I seldom finish reading one. When I start angrily shouting at that slop, I stop reading, then start exercising and mediating to calm down.
After years of reading what I can stand of that crappy propaganda that newsletter spews like toxic vomit, I think Hillsdale is a domestic enemy to the United States and its Constitution and should be treated like the Taliban and al Qaeda were for a couple of decades after 9/11, bombed into oblivion using Predator drones.
Hillsdale’s newsletter is free. It costs them to print and mail that sewer sludge.
Oh, make no mistake, America IS an “exceptionally good country.” We truly are exceptionally good at a great many things. Building a merciless global empire on the dust of the bones of slaves being just one of the things we are exceptionally good at.
<< “Learn it, wonder at it, love it, and teach so your students will, too.”>>
I have no problem with this mission. Right now, however, I am “wondering” what they mean by “it?” I suspect our definitions of “it” are vastly different.
Are we talking about the “it” that made John Brown so angry?
Or the one where Mumbet (Elizabeth Freeman) had to sue for her freedom?
Or the one about George Washington reluctantly “promising” freedom to enslaved blacks who helped fight against the British?
Or the “it” that conflates the economic and political system of savage capitalism with Democracy?
Or is the “it” referring to that unique to USA genre of literature, Slave Narratives?
Or maybe the “it” refers to Henry Clay’s brave and righteous (which was neither brave nor righteous) re-writing of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850?
Or maybe the “it” is referring to the 20 soldiers who received the Congressional Medal of Honor for shooting unarmed women and children at Wounded knee?
Or maybe the “it” is a reference to how our 40th POTUS “leased” the outer continental shelf to foreign oil companies?
Obviously, I could go on. As could any actual student of history. It is not so difficult, it turns out, to see know a hawk from a handsaw.
Rest assured, my kids “learn it, wonder at it, and love it” in spite of it. Kids are hardwired for conflict and we only hurt them by shielding them from an honest examination of “it” all.
Thomas, what’s the source of your quote?