by Daniel Buck

In the past decades, American education has undergone a fundamental shift in its telos, replacing achievement, equality, and merit as foun­dational ideals with this notion of equity, and, until very recently, few have stopped to question the goodness or rightness of this transformation. At that meeting, I naïvely whispered to my colleague, “what if we disagree with the idea of equity?” He scoffed. Such a question was not worth discussing.

Of course, this single anecdote illustrates a larger shift and politi­cization of American education. Schools have removed classics from shelves and reading lists, and replaced them with young adult fiction parroting the latest progressive obsession. Prospective teachers imbibe Marxist-influenced “critical pedagogy” from academic publications and at university schools of education. In social studies, students research and advocate for the latest cause célèbre, instead of learning traditional history or reading our country’s founding documents. If they engage in the latter pursuits, they do so only to critique, deconstruct, and topple our national ideals like antiquated statues.

Taken together, such stories illuminate what revered professor E. D. Hirsch has called the educational “thought world,” the dominant beliefs within the sector that manifest in slogans, platitudes, passing remarks, and ultimately the instruction, curriculum, and policy of our schools—the ideas that are almost in the air, reinforced in every education-focused publication and teacher meeting.