Louisiana public schools are closing the door to woke ideologies in social studies curricula and turning instead to American exceptionalism.
“If you look throughout the course of American history, you see that we have always been on a quest for freedom, whether it was the signers of the Declaration of Independence or the abolishment of slavery,” Louisiana Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley told The Epoch Times.
Brumley oversaw the process that led to the adoption of the Louisiana Department of Education’s new social studies standards, which were approved by the Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in March 2022 and will go into effect in 2023.
Though content standards are supposed to be revised every seven years, Brumley said they hadn’t been changed since 2011.
“That’s something I wanted to take on because, frankly, the children deserve better,” he said.
The current standards made it difficult for students to look at history chronologically, Brumley said, with fourth graders learning about the American Revolution, then not studying the French Revolution until late in the fifth grade.
Because of this, better sequencing of content became one of the goals for the new standards, as well as the incorporation of multiple historical perspectives that told “the whole story,” he said.
Accessibility for the public was also a top priority, Brumley said.