This story had been out there for several days. The U.S. Naval Academy has taken nearly 400 books off the shelves in the Nimitz Library at the Annapolis, MD campus because they violate the new Trump Administration policy against DEI materials in the classroom. Initially, Trump issued an executive order in January that banned DEI materials in kindergarten through 12th grade education. On March 28th, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth informed the Naval Academy that the order would apply to it as well though the Academy is a college.
The materials being banned are of course anything deemed to be about diversity, equity, and inclusion. The banned titles cover topics like the history of racism in America, studies on the KKK, the Holocaust, and sex and gender. It appears, though, that the book banning isn’t about DEI at all. It is about teaching a view of America devoid of all criticism.
In the original January 29 press release announcing the executive order banning material in K-12 class rooms, the Administration stated that “Parents trust American schools to provide their students with a rigorous education and to instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible nation and the values for which we stand.” In other words, saying true things about America’s past that suggest a less-than-perfect history is not to be allowed.
I can’t believe this has to be said, but every nation has done things for which it has latter been ashamed. Learning about history is in great part learning why these events happened so similar occurrences don’t happen again. Depriving K-12 students of these lessons is unfortunate. Depriving future military leaders of a thorough understanding of these lessons is a tragedy precisely because so much of the worst of any nation’s past has happened at the point of a gun.
President Jackson’s policy of displacing Native Americans, the so-called “trail of tears,” the enforcement of Jim Crow in the South, the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, the murder of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai are just a few of the events in American history that should be taught. But if the goal of education in Trump’s America is exclusively to instill patriotic admiration for “our incredible nation,” it would seem these events and others will somehow be lumped together as DEI topics and forgotten. The results will be catastrophic.
Trump is destroying so much in America, it is almost easy to ignore what he is trying to do to education. We shouldn’t let him.
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Retired political staffer/civil servant. Dual U.S./Canadian citizen writing about politics on both sides of the border. Twitter @Richard05569297, cross-posting at PhantomPublic.org