One theme that runs through virtually every educational gag order is patriotism. On its own, that’s unremarkable. Every state in the country has education-related laws on the books designed to produce patriotic, civic-minded students.
But what legislators are doing now is different. Instead of simply requiring students to learn about, say, the Mayflower Compact or the importance of democracy, lawmakers are attempting to censor what they consider to be “anti-American” ideas, regulate instruction on slavery and racism, and prohibit conversations about contemporary injustice.
In other words, the purpose of these bills is not simply to cultivate patriotism. Rather, it is to make patriotism–or more specifically, a knee jerk and uncritical form of patriotism–compulsory.
There is a long history of such legally mandated patriotism in the United States. The Sedition Act of 1918 was used to imprison antiwar protestors during World War I. Until the 1940s, laws required students and teachers to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. During the Cold War, teachers were compelled by law to swear loyalty oaths to the country. This all testifies to a strain of American censoriousness centered on patriotic sentiment, one that in recent decades schools had successfully kept at bay.
No longer. The current wave of educational gag orders has renewed this threat to America’s educational institutions.
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Instead of targeting specific historical topics for censorship, they propose simply to ban criticism of the United States.
For example, Kentucky HB 706 would prohibit any “revisionist history of America’s founding.” So does Kentucky HB 487, which also bans use of any material deemed to “disparage the fundamental American value of equality.” Iowa SB 2043 bars K-12 teachers from discussing the Pledge of Allegiance “in any manner” that one might reasonably understand to constitute “unpatriotic commentary on the United States.” And under Oklahoma SB 588, public school teachers would be unable to endorse, favor or promote socialism, communism, Marxism, or any form of “anti-American bias.” What constitutes “anti-American bias”? The bill does not specify, but violations are punishable by the loss of state financial support, state accreditation, or both. Another Oklahoma bill, SB 614, would extend that last set of prohibitions to public universities, too.
Indeed, many of these compulsory patriotism bills apply to higher education, including Kentucky HB 487 and Missouri HB 2129 and SB 645. These last two would require high school and university-level courses on American history to “promote an overall positive…understanding of the United States.”
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The history of compulsory patriotism in the United States is not an attractive one. Most Americans look back on the Sedition Act, the Red Scare, the Smith Act, and McCarthyism as stains on the American character, not as something to emulate today. Unfortunately, in a misguided attempt to regulate what teachers can and cannot say about this country, state legislators now appear intent on repeating their predecessors’ mistakes. In doing so, supporters of these bills are in fact proposing a vision of patriotism that is not only unquestioning, but fragile. Each month, as more educational gag orders become law, we come closer to replicating the anti-democratic mistakes of our past.
