President Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at combating what he referred to as “radical indoctrination” in public schools, part of an initiative to promote “patriotic education.”
In the executive order issued on Wednesday, Trump asserted that public schools in the United States were indoctrinating children with “radical, anti-American ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight.”
The order states, “Imprinting anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on our Nation’s children not only violates longstanding anti-discrimination civil rights law in many cases but usurps basic parental authority.” To address this issue, the Trump administration plans to cut federal funding for any K-12 schools supporting “indoctrination,” which includes “gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.”
The executive order reestablishes the 1776 Commission, an entity created by Trump during his first term to provide a pro-American interpretation of U.S. history for educational implementation. President Joe Biden dissolved the commission shortly after taking office in 2021.
The order continues, “The Department of Education shall provide funding and administrative support for the 1776 Commission, to the extent permitted by law and subject to the availability of appropriations,” adding that the commission will terminate two years from the order's date unless extended by the President.
In 2021, just before its dissolution, the commission released a report denouncing the “distorted histories” propagated by progressive intellectuals since the 1960s. The report conveyed, “This new education replaced humane and liberal education in many places, and alienated Americans from their own nature, their own identities, and their own place and time.”
The report further argued that it “cuts students off from understanding that which came before them,” and criticized how educational practices forced students to conform to current theories about history.
The commission's report claimed, “While this country has its imperfections, just like any other country, in the annals of history the United States has achieved the greatest degree of personal freedom, security, and prosperity for the greatest proportion of its own people and for others around the world.”
However, the report faced criticism from the American Historical Association (AHA) and other organizations. “The report actually consists of two main themes. One is an homage to the Founding Fathers, a simplistic interpretation that relies on falsehoods, inaccuracies, omissions, and misleading statements,” stated the AHA at the time.
“The other is a screed against a half-century of historical scholarship, presented largely as a series of caricatures, using single examples (most notably the ‘1619 Project’) to represent broader historiographical trends.”
