Public schools have lost touch with their mission and purpose, writes Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. "Our schools are supposed to be in the business of attaching our children to their country, their community, and civil society." They're supposed to form citizens.
Instead, as he wrote in Commentary, "school culture and curriculum seem nearly to revel in the bad and broken." It "fetishizes America’s failures" and ignores "the virtues that made America the envy of the world."
We "public school teachers ... don’t have permission or legal authority to impose our views on a captive audience of our fellow citizens’ children," Pondiscio writes. Educators should teach controversial issues "not as activists and ideologues, but as serious, thoughtful professionals . . . valorizing viewpoint diversity."
As Thanksgiving rolls around again, he wants "public education to cultivate gratitude and optimism in our children, to invest them in their country, and to encourage them to take up the work of building a more perfect union."
Children are learning in school that Thanksgiving celebrates genocide, complain parents on social media. Snopes debunks a current myth that Thanksgiving celebrates the massacre of the Pequot tribe, rather than a feast shared by the Pilgrims and Wampanoags.
From last year, here's a sour retelling of the first Thanksgiving from the Washington Post. "For the Wampanoags and many other American Indians, the fourth Thursday in November is considered a day of mourning, not a day of celebration, reports Dana Hedgpeth.
The Wampanoags were devastated by an epidemic and losing a war with other tribes when they chose to ally with European colonists, according to historians. It was strategy, not friendship. There aren't many Wampanoags left to not celebrate Thanksgiving.