Rep Chuck Owens was singin’ some high praise of the Louisiana Dept of Education’s guidelines for K-12 social studies classes just the other day.  After taking a look, we would beg to differ somewhat.

The trouble actually starts with Dr Cade Brumley’s introductory remarks that preface the document containing the standards.  He makes the ‘quest for freedom’ as the reason-for-being of America:

‘The quest for freedom is a hallmark of the American story. From the signing of the Declaration of Independence, to the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, to the ratification of the 19th Amendment, the journey towards freedom has been one of struggle and sacrifice.

‘We must, and we shall, teach our children the fragility of liberty.

‘ . . . President Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is one of the deepest and noblest aspirations of the human spirit.” I believe these standards create a Freedom Framework for Louisiana educators to cultivate those aspirations every single day.’

Individual freedom as its own end, not in service to another higher goal (freedom to cultivate the virtues in our lives, freedom for the sake of working out our salvation in Christ), begets horrible things.  Freedom, unrestrained by some kind of guiding and uplifting metaphysical framework, devolves necessarily into personal and social destruction, throwing down any traditions, laws, etc., that inhibit the desires of individual men and women from being attained, whatever those desires may be:  from a ‘right’ to using psychedelic drugs to stealing others’ property to redefining marriage to transgender surgery to assisted suicide.

That is the error of the standards writ large.  But there are some smaller problems that need to be addressed as well.

One of them is the wokeness present in the document, which shows in a couple of ways.  First is the use of the words ‘enslaved people’ and ‘freed people’ throughout the standards instead of older, more familiar words like ‘slaves’ and ‘former slaves’.  That’s right out of the handbook of political correctness, of forcing Orwellian standards of wrongthink/wrongspeech onto people (Leftist media operatives openly discuss their preference for the ‘enslaved people’ jargon here).  There is also the inclusion of Juneteenth in the lists of major US and Louisiana holidays like Christmas Day and Thanksgiving Day.  That is laughable; this ‘holiday’ is about as phony as anything one can conjure up, as recounted quite well by one of the essays at the Abbeville Institute (‘Juneteenth:  A Celebration of Nothing’).

Will it be permissible to point this out in Louisiana’s classrooms?

The Civil War gets a lot of attention in the document.  There are problems here as well.  First, the name itself is misleading.  A civil war is a war between two factions for the control of a national government.  That is not what happened in the US from 1861-5.  First, the United States aren’t a nation; our union is a voluntary federation of nations.  Furthermore, the Southern States peacefully withdrew from the union (they weren’t trying to conquer Washington, DC), but Lincoln and his immediate successors used the military to force them back in and keep them there.  Thus, a more appropriate name for this conflict would be the War between the States or the War of Northern Aggression.

Nevertheless, the Social Studies Standards frame the War mainly within the context of the issue of slavery, but economics were just as big a factor, if not bigger, than the moral/metaphysical issue of slavery.  Tariffs that favored Yankee industry and harmed Southern agriculture weighed heavily on Southern minds at that time; they also stirred up plenty of Northern angst and greed for fear of losing their Southern cash cow if the Southern nation-States left the union.  But there is no mention of the antebellum tariff issue in the document.

Likewise, racism seems to be presented as appearing only in Dixie (Jim Crow, etc.), while ignoring the rampant manifestations of it in the Yankee States.

Will it be permissible to point this out in Louisiana’s classrooms?

There is an attempt in the guidelines to valorize the feminists who agitated for the 19^th Amendment (granting women the ability to vote).  Yet the suffragettes pressed for ‘reforms’ and held beliefs that are detrimental to society:  e.g., supported easy divorce, attacked the divine origin and authority of the Bible, advocated for women in the role of pastors and priests, desired the complete secularization of government (all this from only one of the suffragettes mentioned multiple times in the document, Elizabeth Cady Stanton).

Will it be permissible to point this out in Louisiana’s classrooms?

Meanwhile, Christianity gets short shrift, being mentioned a measly four times, and the focus often seems to be on the most violent episodes of her history (Charlemagne’s reign, the Crusades, Spanish conquest of the New World).  Christian monasteries, one of the most effective and peaceful means of evangelizing the peoples of the world with the Light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, are mentioned only once.

Fifth graders will hear about some of the earlier (medieval) history of the Church in Europe (which limits the depth of what can be taught), while high schoolers (who are capable of deeper learning) will be limited to the learning of Christianity from 1300 AD onward.  These are the only opportunities for in-depth learning about Christianity that we noticed in the guidelines.

There are real-world consequences for such decisions.  They are plainly seen in Morehouse Parish, for instance, where parish schools were closed for a time due to a bomb threat, only to be followed quickly by the vandalism of Morehouse Elementary School.

This is the kind of thing we will continue to see with our society’s irresponsible nattering about freedom as an end in itself, the not unexpected result for human beings who see themselves as having been liberated from the ‘shackles’ of traditional Christianity or any other ancient religion.

But if man is made in the image of God, as Christianity teaches, then it becomes necessary to channel the energies unleashed by freedom to the highest calling God has given man:  to acquire the fulness of the image and likeness of God by living the liturgical and ascetical, the mystical and the practical, life in the Church established by the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ and the descent of the Holy Ghost.

Thus, in addition to units that focus on the early leaders of the United States or the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, etc., there ought to be units in the Social Studies Standards that focus on the saints of the Church, especially those who lived in Europe before the year 1300.  Those times, the days of the First Europe, were pre-eminently the Age of Faith, with all their heroism and beauty and holiness, before rationalism, skepticism, and naturalism crept in and gave birth to Modernity with all of its crises and insanities (the Second Europe, in which we now live).

Looking only at the major saints of France for January and February, one winds up with quite a list:

St Eugendus/Oyend of Condate (1 Jan), St Odilo of Cluni (1 Jan), St Genevieve of Paris (3 Jan), St Melanius of Rennes, Apostle of France (6 Jan), St Lucian, Apostle of Beauvais (8 Jan), St Vaneng (9 Jan), St Hilary of Poitiers (13/14 Jan), St Maurus of Glanfeuil (15 Jan), St Honoratus of Arles and Lerins (16 Jan), St Fursey (16 Jan), St Sulpicius II of Bourges (17 Jan), St Paulinus of Nola (23 Jan), St Projectus of Clermont (25 Jan), St John of Reomay (28 Jan), Sts Evroul, Medard, Honoratus, Bathildis (30 Jan.), St Sigebert II (1 Feb), St Amandus (6 Feb), St Vedast (6 Feb), Silvin of Auchy (17 Feb), Eucherius of Orleans (20 Feb), Pepin of Landen (21 Feb), Sts Romanus and Lupicinus (28 Feb).

Why this focus on the saints, though?  Because they are the pre-eminent archetypes for how to successfully use the potential of human freedom to become ‘a mature man, . . . the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ’ (St Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians 4:13, NASB) – the goal that is the birthright of every human being.

Does Louisiana wish to have a society that will amount to anything good and praiseworthy in history and in eternity?  Then this is the direction in which she will have to turn herself.  With Christ, there is life.  And not just bare existence, but Abundant Life.  Apart from Christ, there is death.  And not simply bodily death, but Eternal Torment and Regret.

If we will not teach these things to our children in our small family homes or in the schools of our big family – the ethnos, the Nation of Louisiana, l’Etat de Louisiane – we do not really love them.