Goldwater Endorses K-12 Standards That Teach Children About Liberty

There’s a troubling trend taking place in far too many public schools nationwide: Children aren’t being taught the founding principles of liberty and equality for all that make this country great. Instead, they’re being indoctrinated with destructive falsehoods that teach them America is fundamentally based on racism; that insist American Dream is a lie; and that demand they be judged by the color of their skin rather than by the content of their character. It’s all happening under the guise of diversity, equity, and inclusion—and on the taxpayers’ dime.

That’s why the Goldwater Institute has joined a coalition of organizations endorsing American Birthright: The Civics Alliance’s Model K-12 Social Studies Standards. The new standards, created by the National Association of Scholars’ Civics Alliance and released last month, recognize a simple truth: To be prepared for college and their future career, students need to know about their birthright of liberty.

These days, bias-filled ideological frameworks guide many public school curricula, and as a result, children are emerging with ignorance of our liberty and hatred for our history. But the American Birthright standards are focused on educating children about American’s founding ideals. The Civic Alliance news release notes:

American Birthright teaches students to identify the ideals, institutions, and individual examples of human liberty, individualism, religious freedom, and republican self-government; assess the extent to which civilizations have fulfilled these ideals; and describe how the evolution of these ideals in different times and places has contributed to the formation of modern American ideals.

Above all, American Birthright teaches about the expansion of American liberty to include all Americans, the contributions that Americans from every walk of life have made to our shared history of liberty, and America’s championship of liberty throughout the world. Students will learn of heroes of liberty such as Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ronald Reagan.

The model K-12 standards provide “comprehensive content knowledge in History, Geography, Civics, and Economics, as well as sustained coverage of Western Civilization, World History, United States History, and Civics,” the release adds, with a significant focus on integrating primary sources.

The American Birthright standards do not constitute a curriculum. Rather, state education departments can use them to offer guidance to public school districts as districts create their own individual K-12 curricula. And the standards can also serve as a guiding curricular resource for private schools to adopt and home-schooling families to seek out.

But that’s not all. The model standards are “for governors, state legislators, school boards, grassroots activists—indeed, for every American citizen,” the Civics Alliance says. “Every American needs to know what a proper social studies instruction should be, not least to be prepared for the political battles needed to reclaim our schools. American Birthright is a myriad of slings for the army of Davids who face the Goliath of the education establishment.”

Goldwater is proud to stand alongside the families fed up with the woke indoctrination and unaccountability running rampant throughout the public education establishment. And we’ll never stop defending every child’s right to receive the education they deserve.

You can read the American Birthright standards in full here.