Iowa lawmakers bill would teach America's 'praiseworthy history' but ignore our failings

The bill shows Republicans' fear a nation learning it's history isn't a Disney fairytale

Our dear Iowa Legislature, Who Art a Perfect Incarnation of the Appearance that Leaders Should Have, want Iowa students to know the United States is great, has always been great, and anyone who tries to say otherwise hates America, burns the flag on July 4th, and eats their boogers.

Hawkeye State lawmakers want to revamp the social studies curriculum in public schools to teach the “study of and devotion to the United States' exceptional and praiseworthy history.”

Praise be to our state legislators, who know all and commune directly with God for they shall deliver us from the discomfort brought about by unpleasant realities such as the murder of Emmett Till, the Sand Creek Massacre, and the Tulsa Race Massacre.

The latest gift from our General Assembly is House File 2544, who want the Iowa Department of Education to reboot the way the school is taught, especially social studies.

The bill seeks to teach the workings of the federal, state, and local levels of government.

Yet, strangely, lawmakers contradict themselves on this point. The social studies bill would also ban “any advanced placement course that requires action civics.”

Action civics is a way of teaching how government and society work by asking students to examine issues in their community, research the problem, debate the issue, and develop strategies to solve the problem.

Goodness gracious, what are educators thinking asking students to take an active role in the political process?

The next thing you know schoolchildren will be asking Gov. Kim Reynolds, our Great Leader who Descended from Heaven, tough questions about why she refused to take federal money to help struggling families buy food during the summer months when kids weren’t getting breakfast and lunch at school.

Nobody wants those kinds of people. Critical thinkers ruin everything.

The bill calls for the teaching that “emphasizes the good, worthwhile, and best achievements of these ideals and institutions of liberty.”

For example, the bill would require the teaching of the Pennsylvania Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery and the Emancipation Proclamation.

This 1780 Pennsylvania Act stopped the importation of more slaves into the state. The act also permitted Pennsylvania slaveholders to keep their slaves “unless they failed to register them annually.”

I mean that’s only fair, right? Those people had paid real money to human traffickers for the right to hold Blacks in bondage and forced labor. You can’t cheat a white guy out of their investments.

The act also allowed for “the eventual freedom of individuals who were newly born into slavery.”

“Eventual freedom” for the children of slaves is one of those “exceptional and praiseworthy” legacies of the United States.

To be fair, the bill includes some good ideas, such as increasing education about the Holocaust, which is something poorly understood by younger generations now nearly 80 years removed from the end of World War II. That’s needed and necessary, but the Department of Education is staffed with smart, knowledgeable people who could do that without a new state law.

The bill states “History shall be viewed as factual, not constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable … and shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”

Except when Thomas Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal,” he didn’t believe that.

He meant white men who owned land. Jefferson owned slaves, as did 41 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Does that mean we shouldn’t look at how Jefferson and other founders shaped this nation?

No, it means we should look at historical figures as people, who are by nature flawed, rather than infallible legends. This bill wants history taught like a Disney fairytale: sanitized and devoid of context.

We need to teach our students to be able to hold more than one idea in their mind at a time.

The founding of this nation benefited a lot of people, mostly white men who owned land.

You would hear the story told from a different perspective if you talked to Native Americans or descendants of slaves.

Those perspectives are the ones our lawmakers want to bury.

Slavery? Get over it already.

Genocide of the native people of this nation? Hey, somebody had to take over this place, it might as well be white men.

The legislature would have us believe history is “factual, not constructed,” yet they seek to construct a history in which America was always right, just, and fair.

That’s a lie by omission, and worse a state-ordered one.

Here’s the real problem with this bill: It shows how weak our lawmakers think this country is.

They are so afraid of the whole history of this country that Republicans are willing to use the power of the government they claim to hate so much to force people to learn our history on their terms. Without their benevolent and patriotic intervention, they seem to believe, the republic will fall.

I believe the republic will crumble because of bills like House File 2544.

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Daniel P. Finney, a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative, wrote for newspapers for 27 years before being laid off in 2020. He teaches middle school English now.

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