George Santayana’s famous saying “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” requires some delineation:
- Those who cannot remember the triumphs of the past are likely condemned not to repeat them, and
- Those who are told the mistakes of the past were triumphs will repeat them.
New York City parent Andrew Gutmann understands this well. Gutmann, who attracted national attention by issuing a now-viral letter addressed to Brearley School parents warning of the institution’s fatal race obsession, has sounded another alarm.
“We already do a horrific job in this country teaching history, and now we’re going to make that 10 times worse, we’re going to eradicate that,” the father told Fox News in a new interview.
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“Our country doesn’t survive not teaching history and civics, and it sure as hell doesn’t survive teaching our children to hate their country and their history.”
Gutmann is correct: What he warned of regarding posh private school Brearly, which he pulled his daughter from recently after seven years’ attendance, is a nationwide phenomenon.
Moreover, the Critical Race Theory obsession now sweeping academia — which teaches hatred of whites, America, and Western culture — is just the latest iteration of the Howard Zinn-aided, Gramscian march through the institutions that began many, many decades ago.
Gutmann said in his interview that Brearly parents — who pay $54,000-yearly tuition for the indoctrination — and their children were pressured by the school to become Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists.
This is despite BLM being a neo-Marxist organization whose members once chanted that they want “dead cops.” The group also demands the abolition of police; the “repeal of all immigration restrictions”; “the legalization of sex work”; “the destruction of the Western-prescribed nuclear family”; and, according to a report last year by commentator Tucker Carlson, “the forced reallocation of farmland” (à la Zimbabwe).
Tellingly, some of these toxic positions were featured on BLM’s website — until the group gained greater institutional acceptance and removed its older “Guiding Principles” page so it could masquerade as palatable. (The original page can still be found via an archiving service here.)
Yet many American schools are now taking a leaf from BLM’s book. As for Brearly, Gutmann says that the school “made it sound like they’re going to integrate this racial curriculum, this anti-racism curriculum, into everything — every class, into math, into gym, P.E.; it was shocking that they were taking that degree of integrating it into everything.”
Note that this is a hallmark of “ideological nations,” where the official state ideology is “pervasive,” to use a word Gutmann did when describing BLM racialism’s dominance at Brearly.
The father also mentioned that the Left’s new “Silence is violence” mentality reigns at the school. If “you just stay silent, you’re racist,” he lamented. “You have to be an activist for that. If you’re not an activist for an anti-racism initiative, for Black Lives Matter, for example, you are racist, you are a bad person, you are an oppressor, you are not doing the right thing.”
You can watch clips of Gutmann’s interview here. His original letter, which is quite compelling, was related in the video below.
One of the most striking things about the Critical Race Theory phenomenon is how unintellectual its embrace is. It basically originated last Tuesday (figuratively speaking), but “educators” coast to coast behave as if it’s enlightening, timeless brilliance from on high.
It’s a fad, and its popularity reflects a deeper problem: The prevalence of “changeist,” immature moderns who treasure the spirit of the age over the ageless, who prefer “Thursday over Wednesday because it is Thursday,” as G.K. Chesterton put it. Detached from and not believing in Truth, they’ll embrace a lie as long as it’s the latest thing on the cocktail-party circuit.
Today’s anti-American racialist lie is a destructive one, too. Author George Orwell once noted that the “most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” This is now a fait accompli in America.
When I worked with kids, I once asked a small group of them who the “Father of America” was. Their answer wasn’t George Washington — it was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. These were upper-class white children, too.
Then there was the 14-year-old I was instructing in religious education who, I discovered, hadn’t heard of Adolf Hitler. Both these incidents occurred 15 to 20 years ago, too, do note.
Now, question: If you don’t know much about American history’s arguably most important figure or are ignorant of the 20th-century’s most notorious one, what of historical importance do you know?
Studies indicate that American youth don’t know much. This matters because, harking back to my opening lines, history is essentially a record of a series of man’s social experiments. And it’s as with a scientist: He remains mindful of his field’s record of experiments so that he can say, “Oh, we tried that before and it didn’t work” or “Yes, that bore fruit; we should now build upon it.”
Of course, though, if children know nothing of history, you can easily feed them a revisionist version of it and make them think that good was bad and bad, good. And now you know part of the reason why a 2020 poll found that “70 percent of Millennials say they are likely to vote for a socialist while one in three view communism favorably,” as Campus Reform reported last year.
Moreover, “22 percent of millennials believe ‘society would be better if all private property was abolished,’” the site also related.
And this is what happens when good history and virtue are abolished. But what needs to be abolished is any curriculum reflecting so-called “leftism” and any educator advocating it. Unless there’s a patriotic march through the institutions that tramples Gramsci’s ghost, what remains of the American spirit will be relegated to the grave.
