Add this to Progressive hero and racist Woodrow Wilson's sins.

Woodrow Wilson High School

Williamson Evers, National Review:

Blame Woodrow Wilson for Americans’ Lack of Historical Literacy

…. We need to hold him responsible for the fact that many Americans don’t know the timeline of world or American history and don’t know much about how constitutional government works in the United States: One hundred years ago, in 1916, the Wilson administration put the clout of the federal government behind a new curricular development – social studies.

…. The new curriculum prescribed that any history taught in school should be studied because it is practical or functional: Ancient Athens was studied not as part of the political and intellectual development of Western civilization, but rather in connection with the contemporary problems of city planning. …..

The Progressive era worshipped a cult of efficiency and kowtowed before scientific management. In this vein, the social-studies report concluded that the “key note of modern education” is “social efficiency.” It postulated that whatever the value of social studies in terms of the development of the intellectual knowledge and personal potential of the individual, the social-studies curriculum would “fail” in its “most important function” unless it contributed “directly” to “the cultivation of social efficiency on the part of the pupil.” Students should be taught to look at their own future jobs in terms of overall workforce planning and should take a job based on the service the job “rendered” to “the community” and which jobs were “most necessary,” rather than choosing a job based on remuneration and the job market. 

As citizens, we need to understand history because the present comes at the end of a long chain of cause and effect stretching back into the past. Instead of recommending that students study the social sciences in order to form an independent mind knowledgeable about the past, the 1916 social-studies report effectively encouraged students to conform and adjust to prevailing views. Ever since this paradigm change, social studies has been bedeviled by fads, fashions, and indoctrination in the name of relevance. Unfortunately, many Americans educated by our public schools don’t know what happened or when in American history. Nor do they understand federalism and our system of checks and balances. For this calamity, we can place much of the blame on the Wilson administration’s intervention in the school curriculum. It gave us the abomination we call social studies.