A Challenge to Hillsdale in South Dakota
Education association speaks out on new standards based on Hillsdale curriculum
Hillsdale College is on the march around the country - attempting to expand its charter school network and to gain adoption of its “1776” social studies curriculum. In Tennessee, this has created a bit of a circus around the state’s charter school commission.
In South Dakota, the state has adopted new social studies standards aligned with Hillsdale’s curriculum.
Here’s what a review of those standards by actual educators found:
The South Dakota Education Association’s first glance at the Michigan/Hillsdale standards for South Dakota’s K-12 social studies curriculum indicated the same problem the American Historical Association sees: the proposed standards focus too much on rote memorization and short-change critical thinking. “The lower-grade standards call for a level of memorization that is not cognitively appropriate for our state’s early learners,” SDEA chief Ryan Rolfs wrote the day after the state published the proposed standards, “and the upper-grade standards fail to challenge students’ critical thinking skills through standards that encourage analysis and evaluation of the world around them.”
The SDEA added:
The proposed social studies standards discourage inquiry-based learning and emphasize rote memorization. They wildly deviate from current social studies standards and will upend the curriculum for every teacher, every classroom and every school.
SDEA noted that current standards provide both a robust review of history and do so in a concise, efficient manner. Hillsdale’s curriculum does neither.
The controversy in South Dakota is the latest in a series of attempts by Hillsdale to advance a Christian nationalist agenda. The Michigan-based private, Christian college seeks to advance this agenda either through curriculum adoption (as in South Dakota) or through operating charter schools (privately run, publicly funded schools).