Resisting the MAGA curriculum.2

Democratic education—which emphasizes critical thinking, inclusivity, and civic engagement—stands in direct contrast to Trump’s education policies, which focus on racist, anti-'woke' indoctrination.

"Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife." — John Dewey.

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Nashville, 1957.

Following up on my May 3rd post about Trump’s imposition of a MAGA (patrio-fascist) school curriculum on U.S. schools.

School districts everywhere are once again consumed in school wars. This latest round has been imposed on them by President Donald Trump. It’s a battle between democratic education and patriotic, militaristic, white/male supremacist indoctrination. All this because of Trump’s current autocratic lightning assault on public education, public space, and public decision-making.

As the white supremacist Trump advisor Stephen Miller put it this week:

“Children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots. Children will be taught civic values in schools that want federal taxpayer funding. So as we close the Department of Education and provide funding to states, we're going to make sure these funds are not being used to promote communist ideology. For any nation to be successful, it cannot teach its children to hate themselves and to hate their country.”

Miller, of course, conflates peace education, anti-racism, and gender equality with “communism” and diversity and equality with white fear and discomfort.

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Here’s the history component of the MAGA curriculum as summarized by Fox News commentator Jesse Watters:

Watters: The United States has always expanded, either by force or we buy things. We bought Alaska from the Russians. We bought half the country from the French. We beat the Mexicans, the Native Americans, the Spanish, and the British. That's how we do things here. It is manifest destiny.

And if we find out we need Greenland as a matter of national survival, of course, any president should get it, by any means necessary, and it looks like right now we have our intelligence agencies in Greenland on the ground right now ensuring that they vote for Independence. —Fox

‘Ain't gonna study war no more’ — Old spiritual

I’m not revealing anything new here. In one form or another, the battle over the content and conduct of American education (sometimes known as curriculum wars) has been ongoing for decades, whether in the courts, classrooms, or on the streets. Trump has just taken it to a new and lower level.

It hasn’t been just a partisan battle. Democrats were the party of southern school segregation and the spread of private white “segregation academies.” They have also promoted military academies, mainly for Black and Latino students in urban public schools. Chicago became the center for contracted military academies during the tenures of Barbara Byrd-Bennett and Arne Duncan as CEO of Chicago Public Schools, and this trend continued under Rahm Emanuel’s mayoral administration.

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Artem, 15, demonstrates to a group of children how to carry and fire an RPG anti-tank grenade at a library session in Belgorod, Russia, on April 26.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the similarities between the MAGA school curriculum and those of the European fascist/militarist regimes of the past are striking. I was thinking about that this morning when I came across this piece in the Washington Post (In wartime Russia, schools prepare the next generation of fighters).

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin and his government have been waging a parallel struggle to capture the minds of Russia’s next generation and raise loyal fighters for the future wars that he believes he needs to restore Russia’s imperial greatness.

Russia hypocritically is drawing upon the history of the former Soviet Union’s war of national salvation against Hitler’s Nazi invaders to indoctrinate a new generation of loyal followers. The difference is that Putin’s Russia looks nothing like socialism and instead harbors dreams of restoring the old czarist Russian empire. Like his imperial opponent Trump in the proxy war over Ukraine, Putin needs to militarize his economy and Russia’s schools to remain in power.

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Trump’s MAGA curriculum—which emphasizes militarism and patriotic education while banning discussions on diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI), and civil rights history—threatens the very foundation of democratic learning. It seeks to sanitize history, promote a singular nationalist narrative, and erase uncomfortable truths.

Resist!