In order to get an "A" in US history in Oklahoma next year, students may just have to embrace Donald Trump's Big Lie.
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There are plenty of reasons to teach high school students about the aftermath of the 2020 election. It was the first ever coup attempt in the United States, so it’s worth studying in history, civics, and government classes.
Oklahoma, however, is taking a different route next school year.
After the state legislature failed to take action this week on a resolution that would have changed the state’s new social studies standards, Oklahoma students will soon be asked to question the results of the 2020 election, which Donald Trump lost by more than seven million votes.
Specifically, they have to “identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends.”
According to local news, state officials had snuck that language into an amended version of the original draft standards, which would have simply asked students to examine issues related to the election. That seems like a reasonable thing to include in a curriculum, if the goal is to ask students to examine the insurrection that Trump’s incessant lying sparked.
To prevent that from happening, state officials clearly felt the need to be more explicit.
Of course, in theory, this should be an easy assignment for students since the correct answer is that there were no significant discrepancies, that Trump and his allies never delivered a shred of evidence that the election was “stolen,” that Fox News had to pay nearly $1 billion to a voting machine company for its role in the Big Lie, and that Trump is simply a sore loser.
However, something tells us that the Oklahoma “educators” who inserted this language into the social studies standards are looking for something less based on reality and more in line with Trump’s unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud.
And, per usual, they justify this kind of stunt by claiming that it is meant to achieve the exact opposite of what it does.
“Having a literate citizenry rests on a commitment to and practice of democratic values and the practice of them,” the document states. “It requires the ability to use knowledge about one’s community, nation, and world, apply critical thinking and reasoning practices, and employ skills of data analysis, collaboration, decision-making, and problem-solving. Young people who are knowledgeable, skillful, and committed to democracy are necessary to sustain the democratic way of life.”
Sounds nice, but then what’s the point of willfully trying to keep students ignorant about Trump’s Big Lie?
In the end, the only academic value the new standards will have is that they can serve as an interesting example of how Republicans became a cult when all of this is taught in psychology classes in the future.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
