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Why sing 2 national anthems? Don't ask Tom Horne

34 1
19.02.2024

If you want to know why there were two national anthems sung before the Super Bowl, don’t expect a good answer from Arizona public school students.

Not after Arizona’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne decided to push a curriculum from a conservative advocacy group masquerading as an educational publisher, Prager University Foundation, that has us all focusing on the wrong stuff.

The coursework, which is now available to Arizona’s K-12 public schools, aims to counter “woke culture,” which Horne and others have turned into a boogeyman to leverage votes from those clinging to the belief that their version of history is the only draft worth considering — even if it glosses over or flat ignores the role race has played in boosting some at the expense of others.

“My fear is when you have PragerU teaching content that is quite frankly offensive, some would say racist, it is creating a mindset of a new generation to have those same ideologies that people have fought so hard to move away from,” Reginald Bolding, the former Arizona House minority leader who holds a doctorate in education from Arizona State University, said.

In other words, it’s the kind of stuff you’d teach if you wanted Black, Latino and Native American kids to be the shoulders everybody else gets to stand on as they climb toward middle-class lives.

If schools adopt the optional — and unaccredited — PragerU curriculum, students are going to have a twisted view of race and how it’s affected people, rather than learning to think critically on the issue.

For example, according to education watchdog Media Matters, PragerU provides an animated video in which a cartoon Booker T. Washington says “future generations are........

© Arizona Republic


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