Thread by @pashulman

I don't know what I did to deserve this today

https://twitter.com/W7VOA/status/1351279345772486656

Is it worth critiquing? It reads like a bad high school civics report.

Correction–it reads like a bad middle school civics textbook from 1955.

*sigh*

I wish this was some kind of actionable slander or something.

This whole document is propaganda but the historical half is just fluff. This part gets serious.

Really striking in light of the the outgoing president's mob supporters on 1/6

It's all utterly conventional and predictable and so embarrassingly wrong.

Hey all my historians of education friends–it turns out progressives broke American education INSTEAD OF PRACTICALLY INVENTING IT

You can feel the deep anxieties at play here: a call for authentic education but demand that it produce reverence for an imagined past and no room for genuinely different values within a pluralistic society.

As someone who teaches a lot of primary sources, this is.. just impossible. If you wrench historical documents from their contexts and from expert contextualization you are guaranteed to confuse students or just replicate propaganda.

This one really hits a nerve. They want students to read the Declaration and the Constitution and be told it speaks for itself (really: that it means only what they say it means) as if they are not also doing an act of interpretation.

Ok I'm not sorry I wasted the past hour reading this. But I will say that the biggest indictment of this silly document is that it does not contain a single reference or bibliography. It's a work of ideology meant to inspire ideological faith in a handful of sacred documents.