A move toward PC history classes for California students

A group of California educators, school board members, and university professors is pushing back on proposed statewide curriculum revisions they say introduce “historical inaccuracies, censorship, and bias.”

The 34-member group, led by the nonprofit Gateways to Better Education, sent a report last week to each member of the California Board of Education listing concerns and urging the board to reject the revisions at their upcoming meeting on July 13 and 14.

“The proposed history and social science frameworks are an attempt to make American history politically correct, but fail to do justice to the actual facts of history,” said David Schmus, outreach director for Christian Educators Association International (CEAI) and one of the submitting members of the report. Schmus taught history in California for 15 years. “The essential contribution of Judeo-Christian ideas to our nation’s founding is either removed, de-emphasized, or marginalized.”

The eight-page report lists detailed concerns with the proposed 5th, 6th, 7th, 11th, and 12th grade framework. The framework is the overall narrative that guides textbook and curriculum writers as they shape material for California’s classrooms.

One proposal for the 5th grade framework changes language saying America was established “by immigrants from all parts of the globe and governed by institutions founded on the Judeo-Christian heritage,” to instead say that the governing institutions were “influenced by a number of religions.”

“No serious historian would support the statement that ‘a number of religions’ influenced America’s governing institutions besides Judaism and Christianity,” says the report.

In another case, the 7th grade framework introduces a new sentence asserting that ‘discoveries’ in the Americas reshaped European thought more than the Renaissance. The framework includes no evidence for the assertion and seems to ignore the significance of developments such as Gutenberg’s printing press, Galileo’s astronomy, and Shakespeare’s plays, something that the report says “will open it to ridicule from educators and historians.”

In February, Gateways to Better Education proposed 29 changes to the revised framework during a public comment phase. The Subject Matter Committee accepted four.

If passed in July, these revisions are just the first step, says Eric Buehrer, president of Gateways to Better Education. He assumes the board will next insist that state “standards”—bullet points used by teachers in the classroom—align with the new framework.

At issue is not just the removal of Judeo-Christian language, but the academic integrity of the state framework, Buehrer said. He pointed to language in the proposed framework praising a shift in the past few decades away from teaching Western civilization to teaching world history. Buehrer said that language helped him understand the overarching goal of these changes—to shift attention away from Western civilization at the expense of teaching accurate history.

Both Buehrer and Schmus plan to attend the July meeting. They have asked concerned parents and teachers to write the board and attend the meeting as well. “California has some of the best standards in the nation,” Schmus said. “We are working to protect them.”

Despite a good response, Schmus said the group is competing for attention with another controversial education issue in California. This week, the State Assembly Judiciary Committee will hear SB1146, a measure that would eliminate the current religious exemption allowing California’s faith-based colleges and universities to operate in ways that are consistent with their religious missions and faith tenets.