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.
Back in the 1970s, I never learned about the Pequots nor the massacre of 1866. Custer was sorely wronged.
I‘m glad I didn’t. Otherwise, I’d questioned our history.
PS. At Mass today, the Second Reading (which I pronounced at my church) was from Romans 13. Saul wrote:
𝙱𝚛𝚘𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚜 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚜𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚜:
𝚈𝚘𝚞 𝚔𝚗𝚘𝚠 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚎;
𝚒𝚝 𝚒𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚑𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚗𝚘𝚠 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚝𝚘 𝚊𝚠𝚊𝚔𝚎 𝚏𝚛𝚘𝚖 𝚜𝚕𝚎𝚎𝚙. Apparently, we were being urged to be woke.
The hatred for teachers on this page is astounding. What you claim is indoctrinating children is actually called history.
""not as activists and ideologues, but as serious, thoughtful professionals . . . valorizing viewpoint diversity."
LOLZ 😝 Amazingly they can't do what they're supposed to do but always have the time to trash America
In Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong , James W. Loewen has an entire chapter about how many people want history to be taught as if things are always getting better. That in backsliding or increased problems have to be ignored. Also, in the 2020's the costs have doing something such as building hydroelectric projects or the national highway system have to be addressed.
Well, they can't tell the true story of Thanksgiving, which only happened because the Pilgrims abandoning socialism, instituting private property and the right to keep the outcome of an individuals work and thus saved the colony from starvation.
To reveal this early failure of socialism would ruin the world view of most "educators"