Civics draft

What do Marxism, critical race theory, Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” and the Virginia Department of Education Standards of Learning materials for the civics 2023 draft all have in common? They don’t cite their authority.

What distinguishes them is the ends. The VDOE civics draft, to its credit, puts American founding principles front and center, while the others deny them, but it doesn’t make the case for them either.

If we want our students to understand our constitutional republic’s founding principles, so they “can keep it,” we need to explain their origins in Jerusalem (Deuteronomy 17-28), where the concept that all men are created equal (imago Dei) and no one, not even the king is above the law, was first recorded; and Athens, where Aristotle reasoned that the nature of man (speech, reason and conscience), allows him to choose what is good for the polis, and self-govern for the good of all; and the Roman Republic, where Marcus Tullius Cicero was the first to speak of this natural law as a moral or political law. He said, “And there will not be different laws at Rome and Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times,” according to nccs. net/blogs/articles/natural-law.

Authoritarians from the pharaohs of Egypt to Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, Andrew Jackson,

John C. Calhoun, Woodrow Wilson and their progeny, critical race theory, deny our founding principles. Kids have a need to know how and why it’s important. Parents should demand VDOE tell them because just banning it is easier said than done.