America's backward education system is hurting its foreign policy

In 2017, President Donald Trump defended Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying, “There are a lot of murderers.” “Do you think our country is so innocent?”

In the 1990s, policymakers joked that the United States could not conduct foreign policy because Republicans thought America was too good for the world and Democrats thought the world was too good for America. But in the 2020s, neither Democrats nor Republicans see the United States and its allies as setting a good example.

Sadly, you can also blame American educators for making this happen.

At a Dec. 5 Congressional hearing on anti-Semitism that embarrassed the leaders of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Americans learned that elite universities, the vanguard institutions of the Democratic Party, have become increasingly vulnerable to Western democracies like Israel. I saw firsthand how Western values ​​such as ideology and freedom of speech are viewed. As a result, Harvard happened to rank last in the country.

President Biden, a 1980s politician now in his 80s, will be the last Democratic president to support democratic Israel over its authoritarian opponents. Left-wing professors and reporters portray “indigenous” Hamas terrorists as freedom fighters and Israelis with deep historical roots in the region as “settler colonialists.”

Woke influencers are a little embarrassed that Israelis can criticize their government and elect their leaders, while Gazans can be killed if they want to. There is. PBS and Harvard don't get all that politically incorrect, but free speech and free elections are inventions of Western civilization.

Lacking the freedoms of the West, Gazans (like the Russians) will never hold accountable the leaders who started a stupid war and refused to negotiate terms of surrender, even though their people suffer the consequences. I can't.

Republicans used to be the big boys when it came to foreign policy. But as Nikki Haley's campaign has hit a snag, it seems likely that George W. Bush will be the last Republican president to commit to a NATO alliance that includes Russia. President Trump is considering withdrawing from NATO. Trump supporter and gonzo journalist Tucker Carlson praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose unprovoked invasion of Ukraine left hundreds of thousands of people dead and seriously injured. The Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives appears unable to pass an aid package to help Ukrainians, despite signing a U.S. pledge to help them defend their country.

So how did Americans, ideologically ranging from MAGA Republicans to woke Harvard students, reach such a level of global ignorance that America can no longer conduct foreign policy? ?

Decentralization of our state took a century. The culprit is K-12 education.

The beginning of the end for America's global leadership came in 1918, when the National Education Association published its highly influential “Cardinals of Secondary Education.” Topics that education professors and administrators cannot directly apply to education, as Jonathan Wye and I detail in “Why America's Education Policy and Practice Is Lack of Intelligence and What Can We Do About It?” It was at this time that he despised the education of the United States as unrealistic and unfair. work. After all, not everyone can learn at such a high level.

In recent decades, the progressive approach of fundamental principles has become even more dominant. I see this a lot in my fieldwork. An award-winning high school principal says the most exciting thing about their school isn't learning math, science, great literature, or the U.S. Constitution, but rather that students “develop their personal brand on social media.” That's when I boasted. ”

Prioritizing branding over knowledge prepares students to emulate President Trump and 1619 creator Nicole Hannah-Jones, which is hardly the nation's best role model. .

The marginalization of academic content explains why so few social studies teachers know how Vladimir Putin's time in the KGB shaped his worldview. And national “standards” only reinforce the ignorance of educators. My co-author Martha Bradley Dorsey and I found that 39 of her 51 social studies and civics frameworks for states and the District of Columbia did not mention NATO. . The New York one is the only one that explicitly addresses the Soviet genocide of millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor. Eleven states talk about McCarthyism in America, but none mention Putin's KGB, Stalin's purges, or Shaw's trial.

These wide gaps in historical knowledge prevent teachers and students from understanding why democracies are better than dictatorships, why NATO is important, and why Ukrainians go out of their way to fight for their homeland. It's gone.

Hostility toward teaching Western concepts such as democracy and the nation-state also reflects the victim-view of leading educational researchers. Compare how two academic groups, the left-wing American Political Science Association (APSA) and the more radical American Educational Research Association (AERA), responded to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. APSA unequivocally condemned the “unprovoked and unwarranted Russian invasion of Ukraine.” In contrast, AERA treated the Russian invasion as if it were a case of domestic abuse, emphasizing personal trauma and the right to a “violence-free environment essential to effective scholarship and learning.” . AERA lamented that the war “will harm survivors for years and decades to come.”

APSA will send the necessary guns to the Ukrainian government. AERA will send out grief counselors as if it can stop Putin.

In the words of Thomas Jefferson, it is impossible to remain ignorant and free for long. In other words, in order to fix democracy and foreign policy, we must first fix our schools.

Robert Marant is the 21st Century Leadership Chair of the University of Arkansas Office of Educational Reform and a former Education Commissioner..