Hijacked: Hillsdale College Takes Over Social Studies in South Dakota
Hijacked: Hillsdale College Takes Over Social Studies in South Dakota
A relentless quest to reshape American history with a Christian nationalist vision
Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn is trying his best to become the next Jerry Falwell - an evangelical kingmaker in the Republican Party. He already has acolytes in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee.
Hillsdale’s antics in South Dakota further expose the school’s aggressive agenda and broad reach.
Here’s how one member of a state commission tasked with revising social studies standards describes the process and Hillsdale’s involvement in it:
“The process was hijacked and reduced the commission to essentially proofreading or randomly interjecting content to a bulleted list of exhaustive curriculum topics while the Governor’s Chief of Staff not the Secretary of Education had to approve each change of the document,” said Walder in a set of prepared remarks for the Board of Education Standards.
It has also been noted that there is significant public opposition to the standards revision:
Aside from the protests by members of the commission assembled to revise the state’s social studies standards, there are also concerns shared by the public at large. The DOE received 682 public comments online and in the mail; 615 were in opposition to the standards and 67 were in support. There are also concrete differences between how this revision process differs from others.
Why all the fuss about a private, Christian college from Michigan shaping South Dakota’s social studies curriculum?
Hillsdale is also a private, conservative, Christian college whose president served on the 1776 commission created by former President Trump, which produced the 1776 report, which was widely panned by historians.
In fact, a review of the new standards by the South Dakota Education Association 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.
This seems to be just what Hillsdale and the GOP governors consulting Larry Arnn want: A revision of history that favors evangelical exceptionalism and a lack of any critical inquiry.
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