‘Radical autopilot’: Alaska’s school standards ignore Washington, Lincoln, and Christianity

State education bureaucrats routinely set “standards” for schools to include certain things in their classrooms for students to learn.

But too often, they are reflecting an agenda or ideology, not the simple facts, according to a report at the Federalist.

For instance, even in Republican majority Alaska, its latest iteration of requirements, dated just last year, have no mention of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and even Christianity.

“Alaska’s new social studies standards don’t mention the Nome Gold Rush. They don’t mention the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. They don’t mention William Egan, the state of Alaska’s first governor, and they don’t mention Sarah Palin, who ran for Vice President of the United States. There’s a lot more that’s missing in the Alaska social studies standards, but you can tell right away that something is wrong when Alaska’s social studies standards leave Alaska’s children ignorant of the headlines of Alaska’s history and the most famous Alaskans,” the report explained.

“The names of Christopher Columbus, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln are absent. But so are words like Christianity, Protestantism, and Catholicism; any hint that technological advance might have improved Americans’ standard of living; and virtually all of the narrative, events, and heroes of America’s wars.”

The report noted those bureaucrats appear to be on “radical autopilot” for those social studies standards.

Americans expect such indoctrinations in leftist states like Rhode Island and Minnesota, where materials “strip out factual content, and ignore or slander the history of Western civilization and America, and call it ‘social studies instruction.'”

“But radical activists embedded in state education departments do the same thing in red states whenever policymakers and citizens aren’t looking. That’s what just happened in Alaska,” the Federalist said.

The state standards from the Department of Education and Early Development lack “basic facts of American history, much of how our government works, and our foundational documents of liberty. The standards also introduced substantial new amounts of politicized material.”

The results came about because state officials outsourced much of the work on the “standards” to “radical activists who have captured the national social studies establishment.”

Sources included the extremism of the National Council for the Social Studies, the College, Career, and Civic Life Framework for Social Studies State Standards, and more, the report said.

The result was the injection of politics like the racist Critical Race Theory, after a working group used race categories to discriminate against content advisers.

“And so engaged in illegal racial discrimination in creating its standards,” the report said.

So convoluted was the end result that there is a nine-page section on “How to Read the Standards,” the report charged.

And it gets worse, the report said, “The standards’ subordinate social studies education throughout to ‘action civics,’ also known as ‘protest civics,’ which uses the pedagogy of ‘service-learning’ to substitute vocational training in progressive activism for classroom civics education. They push the narrative that an ‘engaged citizen’ can only effect change through ‘demonstration’ (p. 100) and protest, and they also conflate action civics with progressive advocacy: ‘Recognize historic inequalities in the United States and Alaska and evaluate proposed solutions to correct them.'”