NAS Supports Idaho Senate Bill 1336 to Reform K-12 Social Education
The National Association of Scholars and the Civics Alliance are pleased to support Idaho Senate Bill 1336 (SB 1336), introduced by the Senate State Affairs Committee. SB 1336 would enact a wide range of reforms to Idaho’s public K-12 social education, including:
- Dedicating social studies instruction to fostering the cardinal virtues and the civic virtues.
- Grounding social studies instruction in America’s foundational documents of liberty, from Magna Carta to the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution to the Gettysburg Address.
- Detailing the substance of American history and American government instruction, with complementary English Language Arts instruction, to include core instruction in our institutions, ideals, and foundational documents of liberty, republican self-government, and civic virtue.
- Requiring high school students to take a year of American history and a year of American government.
- Requiring Grade 8 students to take a year-long course in Western civilization, from Ancient Greece through the Enlightenment.
These are excellent reforms—and the requirement for Western Civilization instruction is groundbreaking. We enthusiastically endorse Idaho SB 1336.
SB 1336 has been informed by several of our model bills, including the Civics Course Act, the United States History Act, and the Western Civilization Act. Our model material also has been modified to fit Idaho, and we are grateful to SB 1336’s authors for their intelligent work refashioning our model language to make it suitable for Idaho’s public schools. We want the material in our model bills to be modified by state policymakers, who know what suits their own state.
SB 1336’s proposed reforms of American history and American government instruction are essential. The default K-12 instruction in these subjects, around the nation, has become some mixture of deracinated pablum and a hate-reading of America, its history, its government, and its ideals. State governments have the right, indeed the duty, to frame public K-12 social studies instruction so that it includes core instruction in America’s ideals and institutions—and, above all, direct instruction in our documents of liberty. Students who read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address themselves will know when they’re lied to about America by textbooks or teachers.
But we are particularly enthusiastic about SB 1336’s pioneering proposal to have students study Western Civilization for one year in Grade 8. No state in America now teaches Western Civilization as a coherent subject. This is an educational calamity.
Traditionalists scarcely noticed the quiet revolution a generation ago, in every state in the union, that substituted World History for Western Civilization in our public schools—including in the authorizing statutes in every state. This change has had disastrous results. The removal of the historical narrative of Western Civilization from the K-12 curriculum has removed the history of our long struggle for liberty’s ideals and institutions. Students cannot understand America’s own ideals and institutions of liberty if they do not learn about their origins in an extended, coherent account of Western Civilization, from Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome to the present. World History at best abbreviates the West’s history of liberty and usually chops up Western history so that liberty’s history disappears entirely.
Idaho’s SB 1336 is the first attempt to heal this lobotomized history that perverse pedagogues have inflicted on American students. It provides for a full year of instruction in Western Civilization in Grade 8, from ancient Greece to the Enlightenment—the history the Founding Fathers knew when they made America. This will provide far more sophisticated instruction than if Western Civilization were presented in elementary school. Other states might consider whether to require Western Civilization instruction in high school—but SB 1336 requires intensive instruction in American history and American government, and these also are excellent choices. Idaho high school students can still take elective, dual enrollment, or advanced placement courses in Western civilization.
We might suggest as an emendation that Idaho’s policymakers add “ancient Israel” to its list of Western civilization topics, as a pendant to “the history and influence of Christianity.” We also would suggest that Idaho policymakers, formally or informally, suggest to Idaho’s Department of Education that it create a high-school World History elective, including discrete narratives of the political, religious, and intellectual history of China, India, the Islamic world, Africa, and Latin America, from ancient times to ca. 1200. (A World History course with this focus would complement the College Board’s AP World History course, which covers history from ca. 1200 to the present.) Idaho students—as should all American students—should first learn the coherent history of the West, but they would also benefit from the opportunity to learn World history.
If and when SB 1336 passes, we urge Idaho policymakers to keep an eye on how the Idaho Department of Education carries out its measures. Social studies reform measures in both Iowa and Oklahoma have suffered from sustained noncompliance and sabotage by education department administrators. It would be best if the Idaho Department of Education entrusted revision of SB 1336 mandated social studies standards to an independent committee of education reformers rather than to members of the education establishment. Failing that, Idaho policymakers should keep an eye on what the Department of Education does to revise its social studies standards and other educational materials and policies, to make sure that the Department follows legislative intent.
Idaho’s policymakers will greatly improve public K-12 education if they pass SB 1136 into law. SB 1336 will educate Idaho’s children to know more of America and the West, and above all, to know what there is to love about our country and its ideals. It should not require legislation to ensure that public schools meet this low bar—but, alas, there has been great rot in American education. Idaho’s SB 1336 is a good bill, it is a necessary bill, and it is a well-tailored bill. We urge Idaho’s policymakers to pass it into law.
Photo by Alexandra Gold on Unsplash
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