(Headline USA) A group of education scholars and leaders are standing up to President Joe Biden on an issue worrying Americans around the country: critical race theory.
President Joe Biden announced last week he would dissolve the 1776 Commission, a group of education experts charged by former president Donald Trump to examine attempts to “re-educate” American students through critical race theory and other methods.
Now, though, the members have decided to defy Biden and continue meeting.
“Just signed an order to establish the 1776 Commission,” Trump wrote on Twitter in November of last year. “We will stop the radical indoctrination of our students, and restore PATRIOTIC EDUCATION to our schools!”
Trump created the commission via executive order after growing concerns over anti-American sentiment in curriculum.
“In recent years, a series of polemics grounded in poor scholarship has vilified our Founders and our founding,” the executive order reads. “Despite the virtues and accomplishments of this Nation, many students are now taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but rather villains.”
The Commission created a report during the Trump administration highlighting the dangers of critical race theory, which paints American society, from its founding until today, as fundamentally based on and steeped in racism.
From the report:
“Italian Marxist Antonio…. Gramsci was an important influence on the thinkers of the ‘Frankfurt School’ in Germany, who developed a set of revolutionary ideas called Critical Theory. Herbert Marcuse, one member of the Frankfurt School who immigrated to the United States in the 1940s, became the intellectual godfather of American identity politics. With little hope that the white American worker could be coaxed to revolution, Marcuse focused not on instigating class conflict but on instigating cultural conflicts around racial identity. He saw revolutionary potential in ‘the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors.’
These ideas led to the development of Critical Race Theory, a variation of critical theory applied to the American context that stresses racial divisions and sees society in terms of minority racial groups oppressed by the white majority. Equally significant to its intellectual content is the role Critical Race Theory plays in promoting fundamental social transformation. Following Gramsci’s strategy of taking control of the culture, Marcuse’s followers use the approach of Critical Race Theory to impart an oppressor-victim narrative upon generations of Americans. This work of cultural revolution has been going on for decades, and its first political reverberations can be seen in 1960s America.”
Biden has now dismantled the commission, but under former president Trump, the report was welcomed.
“1776 Commission—comprised of some of America’s most distinguished scholars and historians—has released a report presenting a definitive chronicle of the American founding, a powerful description of the effect the principles of the Declaration of Independence have had on this Nation’s history, and a dispositive rebuttal of reckless “re-education” attempts that seek to reframe American history around the idea that the United States is not an exceptional country but an evil one,” Trump’s White House said in a statement when the commission was active.
