Is history and social studies doing more harm than good these days? America appears to have lost sight of its original values, as schools are promoting agendas and young people are becoming increasingly disheartened. Patrick Garrison, a high school teacher and the founder of The True Corrective, joins the podcast to delve into various aspects of American history and social studies. He discusses how we can initiate steps to navigate away from the prevailing ideological trends that pose a threat to the well-being of our children.
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Is history and social studies doing more harm than good these days? America appears to have lost sight of its original values, as schools are promoting agendas and young people are becoming increasingly disheartened. Patrick Garrison, a high school teacher and the founder of The True Corrective, joins the podcast to delve into various aspects of American history and social studies. He discusses how we can initiate steps to navigate away from the prevailing ideological trends that pose a threat to the well-being of our children.
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GET CONNECTED WITH NWEF
Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nwef.org/
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NWEF_org
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nwef_org/
Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtdHayyOqPftVoiGEqxYdsg
To hear more from NWEF, subscribe to our other podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1898310
– WHAT IS THE NOAH WEBSTER EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION? –
Noah Webster Educational Foundation collaborates with individuals and organizations to tell the story of America’s education and culture; discover foundational principles that improve it; and advance practice and policy to change it.
Website: https://www.nwef.org
Reach out: info@nwef.org
ADAMS: So happy to have you join us today on The State of Education. We talk about all kinds of things on this podcast and today we're going to talk about history and social studies. These are very important topics. Our guest today is Patrick Garrison who's joining us and so Patrick, welcome.
GARRISON: Thank you. It's so great to be here. I really appreciate you having me on.
ADAMS: Delighted to have you. Just to start out, why don't you tell our audience a little bit more about yourself. Some of your background, how you got into what you're doing now as a teacher, and so forth.
GARRISON: Well, I have quite a storied background. I haven't always been a teacher. I started out going to film school, became a cinematographer, worked on a bunch of big Hollywood movies with a bunch of big Hollywood people. Even ended up working as a cinematographer on a B-horror movie a long time ago when I was nineteen.
I won't tell anybody anything about that except the title of it, which will tell you everything you need to know: it was called Killing Spree. B doesn't even give it credit. It's more like a Z-horror movie.
I started out doing that, quickly found out that Hollywood and everything involved that it doesn't match my values and my goals, and moved on from that to advertising, moved into photography, became a professional photographer. That's what I did for most of my adult life. That's what I did to raise my family and raise my children, I had my own photography studio.
Then as they got older and life started to slow down, I went back to school to become a teacher. Because it was what I kind of always—even though I wasn't always a teacher, I always felt like I was supposed to be a teacher. So I went back to school and had to do the whole thing all over again and ended up starting in private school first and then moved into public school.
ADAMS: Interesting. What caused you to choose history, social studies?
GARRISON: Well, initially I wasn't going to. I actually started at a private school teaching math. It's a school for severely learning disabled students. I was always great at math and I kind of felt like, okay, so I'm—you know, I was almost 40 years old, going back to school, getting a whole new degree and everything. I had to get a whole new bachelor's because for some strange reason, my BFA in cinematography didn't apply.
I thought, “Let me do what's easiest to me,” because math has always been easy to me. I had done very advanced math in high school and college. I decided to do that. But everybody in my life told me that that was a mistake. Not because there’s anything wrong with math, but because they all knew that my passion was history. They knew that that's what made me tick. That's what I cared the most about.
They all warned me that if you go and do a new career, not doing what you really love, that your career is going to suffer. So I switched gears and went straight into becoming certified as a history teacher.
ADAMS: Sounds like you've got some friends with a little experience and I'm glad they gave you that advice.
GARRISON: Yeah, they do. That's for sure.
ADAMS: That was good advice for sure.
Well, we're going to talk about social studies and history…and a lot of times we throw those terms around. Why don't you talk to us just a little bit—maybe define “what is history?” What is social studies, when we're thinking in terms of academics and teaching? Is there a difference?
Talk to us about that.
GARRISON: Well, that's a great question to start with, because I think when people hear the term “social studies”—I was just speaking with someone the other day who was talking to me about the fact that the term “social studies” sometimes gets a negative connotation because it's kind of this overall umbrella term where teachers in grammar school can teach kind of anything they want. It's not really history. It's not really civics. It's just this kind of amorphous kind of thing.
That may be the case in the lower grades, but when you get into middle to high school—so, seventh through 12th grade—social studies is just an umbrella term that encompasses a whole set of different courses.
Social studies includes all history courses. It includes economics, civics, government, even psychology, law—all of that is included. All of those courses come under the umbrella of social studies. That's what we really mean when we say social studies. That includes history. We don't really have to use them separately.
ADAMS: Okay, that's great. Good answer there.
If I'm hearing you correctly and just kind of as a recap for our audience: social studies is that whole collection of study that helps us understand how our society functions, both past and present.
History obviously tends to be directed toward what happened in the past, but [in] law and so many other things, it's about the systems that hold us together now that define our social structure and that enable us to continue an effective history.
GARRISON: Right. Our national shared values and principles are being destroyed, eroded—however you want to put it—across all curricular disciplines.
We can talk later about what I mean about those “shared values and principles,” but they're being destroyed in all curricular disciplines in school. But the discipline that we really have to pay attention to is social studies, for all the reasons that you just expressed, because it's in those courses—history, economics, civics, government law—it's in those courses where those are the most influential in how our children are going to develop their understandings of themselves and of the world, that they're going to take through them throughout the rest of their lives.
They're going to affect everything they do and how they interact with each other. It's in those courses where they are introduced to and struggle and wrestle with the big ideas and concepts that humanity has developed over thousands of years. Like you alluded to, it's in those courses where they learn what their roles and responsibilities are in their society and to each other.
Therefore, it's in social studies courses where the real war for the hearts and minds of our children is being waged. It's why those courses are such a flash point. It's why everybody rushes to the state that is developing a new history curriculum and says [there’s] something in it that they don't like. Because everybody, left and right, understands, innately, that how we teach our kids social studies is going to directly affect our future.
ADAMS: Yeah. Ideas have consequences and whoever is doing the teaching—I use this statement a lot: “We are what we think. We typically think as we are taught.”
Particularly so in these areas of social studies, because that helps us develop that framework and that structure of identity, community, all of those things that are so essential to being human and to coexisting in a social structure.
GARRISON: Right. When we don't instill those values and principles that come with all of that—when we actively tear them down in our society—what we're doing is we're not tethering our children to their society.
We're unmooring them from it. We're dumping them out of the education system into a society that they don't understand. They have no ability to connect to and feel a part of it. And then we're shocked when they're rushing out trying to fill that void with all these other damaging ideologies.
It's really no wonder why our kids are so susceptible to things like CRT, Marxism, gender ideology and more and more suicidal ideation, right now, because we have not given them anything else to hold on to in their society. We have separated them from each other and torn down the institutions, the social institutions, that are meant to give them a lesson.
ADAMS: So as I'm hearing you say that, I'm hearing somebody that's listening say, “Now, wait a second, are we really doing that? What is he talking about?”
We've all been hearing about “rewriting of history.” Let me just give an example and let's just use that example. The whole new idea that this country was started for the very purpose of slavery and “building a nation on slaves.” Our starting date…all of that stuff, that theory that was thrown out here in the last couple of years.
What's the consequence of teaching that and embracing that? We want to teach kids what's true, the good and the bad. If a false narrative gets taught, then that false narrative becomes the foundation, a framework of thinking, even about our own nation and its value and purpose and mission.
We see people say, “I hate America.” Well, wait a second, why do we hate America? Well, often it's because of what they've been told about America. You want to dig into that a little more?
GARRISON: Yeah, well…I think that when we hear the phrase “rewriting history,” most of the time—most of the time—we're not really talking about teaching wrong facts or teaching things that you made up.
It's really more about interpretation. Almost everything in history can be interpreted in a multitude of ways. There is a true interpretation, there is a correct interpretation, and then there is a false one. The false ones are generally the ones that are not based on the primary source material. The false interpretations are the ones that are made based on incorrect understanding of the facts or not knowing all of the facts.
The false ones are generally the ones that are not based on the primary source material. The false interpretations are the ones that are made based on incorrect understanding of the facts, or not knowing all of the facts. One of the things that we're focused on in what we do over at The True Corrective is all of our instruction is based on the analysis of primary source material.
Because that's where we can make those proper interpretations and understandings, so we can arrive at some kind of conclusion of what is true based on reality. As opposed to based on what someone wants to tell you about the story. You know what I mean?
ADAMS: Yeah, so let me recap that just a little bit to clarify—make sure I'm hearing you well and maybe for our audience.
While there may be information that is brought out, it may not be a true reflection because they don't know the whole narrative. They were not there and they didn't speak into the vision and the mission as it was. They're looking back over their shoulder and telling us what they thought was happening. Is that what you're saying?
GARRISON: Yeah, and I think we all understand that you can manipulate a narrative in two ways. You can manipulate it based on the information you give to the person. And the other way is what you don't give to the person, the information that you don't tell, the facts that you leave out.
ADAMS: Correct.
GARRISON: Now, I'm not going to say that all teachers intentionally twist and manipulate history—but when they choose to leave out certain things that give the bigger picture and enable a student to really understand what the founding values and principles were all about and that it wasn't just slavery, slavery, slavery, slavery.
When you give them this other information, then they can form this more complete picture. They may arrive at an interpretation that understands that something like slavery—which you had mentioned—something like that, was a universal human evil. It wasn't something unique to the United States. It wasn't something that the United States developed or even did more than anybody else in the world. We weren't even like the biggest purveyors of it.
It's just this human evil that existed for 10,000 years of civilization that everyone agreed and accepted was perfectly fine. Until the United States brings together all these new ideas, enlightenment ideas and Judeo-Christian values, and brings them all together and says, “You know what? There's a better way to do this. It's going to take some time, and it might take a hundred years to pull this off, to change 10,000 years of thinking.”
But that was our starting point. You can teach history in that way, or you can teach it as the terrible racist white supremacist founders. But the real truth is, I think that American history is not a story of injustice, a story of immorality.
Every nation, every society, every village, every person practiced this universal human evil of enslavement. Those are things that exist in America's history. They're not what our history is. It would be ignorant and negligent to put those things as something unique about the American story.
What's unique about the American story is that upon our founding, we immediately started taking steps to end those universal human evils.
ADAMS: Yeah, so well said. I think that's very well said.
While some people…they shun so much away from the strong reaction recently in our society to specifically emphasize the injustices, particularly to the African-American—the reality is, those things happened. It’s important to acknowledge those things, it's important for us to learn from those things.
But at the same time, that's not necessarily what defined us then as a nation, or what defines us now as a nation. There are bigger and important social studies, concepts that really lead us out of those evils into a new and better world. Which we are clearly experiencing today.
GARRISON: Well, I think there's, for some reason—I don't know the reason for this—but there are a lot of people in America who don't want to believe in our goodness. Who just want to continue to believe that it's still 1600 in the United States—or, it wasn't the United States then—but that it's still that time period.
It's not. Not even close. You can't even make an argument like that, but for some reason, there are a lot of people that want to just keep us in that period.
ADAMS: Well, clearly we're not, and people who do that are doing it for their own narrative and some kind of an agenda that they're trying to advance.
The reality is all education promotes ideas, concepts, some people would say some form of ideology, right? It's a transfer of knowledge, it's a transfer of value. It's about choosing those things, ultimately, that are not in denial, but ultimately will help us to form a better union.
Let's get off of that track for just a little bit. Okay, so there are many important and foundational disciplines. Of course we've got…when we start out just early childhood in the elementary school framework, we go into middle school, we go into high school, we go into college, university and so forth.
Certain of these disciplines tend to be introduced at different levels. What would you say are some of those absolutely critical and foundational areas of study that must be done well for society to flourish?
GARRISON: I wouldn't say that they exist in a particular course or even one or several areas of study.
I would say that there are three pillars of American society. It's from those pillars that we have derived our shared values and principles. Those pillars, to me, are American founding principles, Judeo-Christian values, and Western thought. Those three need to be supported, advanced, and celebrated in education.
It doesn't matter what course it is. Now, of course, it's a little more difficult to advance or celebrate those in a math class, for example. But since we've been talking about social studies, that's where those need to be advanced.
Without that, we end up producing citizens who not only are incapable of preserving their republic, but don't even know why they should, because they have no concept of what's holding together that fabric. You know what I mean? Without that, they don't have any way to keep themselves free.
ADAMS: Let's take a quick break. We'll be right back.
GARRISON: I’m throwing out these words: values and principles. But I just want to expand a little bit on what that means, because I think when people hear that, they automatically think religion, and that's not what that's about.
We can get values and principles through our religion, whatever one that is that somebody worships. But when we talk about a nation's shared values and principles…every nation throughout every society—throughout all of human history—has had a set of shared values and principles that they share amongst them, that make them who they are, that define them as a people.
That includes what makes Italians Italian, what makes Nigerians Nigerian, what makes Americans Americans, is that they share these things, whatever those are. Every group has a set of those that are unique to them. Every single one of those groups makes it a purposeful intention to preserve them and to make sure that their children learn them so their entire society, everything they're based on, can be preserved for future generations. All societies do this.
We have a set of these values and principles as well. I would say that it's a great set, maybe the best set ever devised by humankind. But it's ours. It's what makes us uniquely American. When we don't instill those in the next generation, each successive generation becomes less and less part of our society.
That would be fine, I guess, if what we were turning into was something better without those values and principles. But it isn't. It almost never is when a society loses its shared values and principles. They always devolve into something negative, where their culture is eroding. We have to make sure that those are instilled.
I'll just rattle off a couple of them. I mean, there's a very long list, but some of those shared values and principles are things like natural rights, the freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the inherent value of all human beings made in the image of God.
These are values and principles that everything in our society—the way we function, the way we treat each other, the way we interact—is based on an understanding and acceptance of these sets of values and principles. We have to make sure that those are advanced.
Unfortunately, the education system has not only stopped advancing them, but very often it intentionally tears them down.
ADAMS: Yeah. There's a lot—what you just said—there's a lot to think about. My mind is just whirling here.
First of all, let me just go back. What you said about when every nation has their set of values…that always happens at the formation, right? I've lived in a number of countries around the world. I've lived in countries who've been experiencing revolution and overthrowing governments that were seen as tyrannical or whatever…the people had had enough.
A new strong person came in—military or whatever, and then kind of tore everything apart. Then it's like, “Okay we're going to rebuild and we're going to redefine, we're going to set up a new constitution, we're going to set up our new values. And what does that come from? That comes from past experience and it comes out of shaping the ideal society that we can form out of our collective past.
Then that becomes the framework, the mission statement—the vision statement, so to speak, of the country—from which everything then is supposed to function out of that learned negative past experience. I think the danger we always see is when time goes by and people have never had that negative past experience, their new realities—and in every society there are going to be negative experiences whether they are national or whether they are local—and people tend to react negatively against whatever that experience is.
Where we get in trouble is when we lose focus on those foundational things like you talked about. Like freedom of speech, freedom of religion and all of those foundational things. When we lose track of that and we decide, “I'm going to impose my ideals on that person or that other person,” that's when we start breaking down a society until it truly breaks and has to be completely busted up and rebuilt again. I agree with that.
Let's jump in here a little bit because we're going to run out of time. You mentioned that you started an organization called The True Corrective. Why did you start it and what do you do, just as we kind of start moving into wrapping-up-mode here. Talk about what you're doing, talk about the service that you are providing for families, for schools
GARRISON: Okay, we have two curricular tracks. It's an education service, we have two curricular tracks. One is for homeschool families and those are full courses, full year, full credit courses.
The other track is for parents of children who still have their kids in public and private school. Now, we're launching in September and we haven't completed our homeschool curriculum yet, since that's much more involved.
What we're starting with is this separate curriculum for parents of children in public and private schools. We call that the Spirit of Resistance curriculum. Basically, what it's designed to do is…we believe that restoring these shared values and principles is the most important thing that we can do right now.
All of the great things that are being done by so many groups and organizations to affect that such as flipping school board seats, rewriting curricula, even some passing legislation—all that is important. But all that is going to take time. Years, in fact. Years to get it done, and then years after that just to implement it.
I don't know if anybody really understands what happens when a new curriculum is written. First of all, it takes a long time to get it written, then it has to be approved by dozens of people. They all have to check it out, and that takes forever. Then it has to be given to administrators and to school districts, and the school boards all have to learn them.
Then they have to bring them to the school, then the teachers have to be trained on them. It's years before a new curriculum has any effect inside of a school. Parents—they need help right now. Their children are in classrooms every single day, getting these false narratives and damaging ideologies, and being exposed to these things. These misinterpretations of the past that are affecting the rest of their life, how they're going to interact with each other and the ways that they're going to interact with their society.
They can't wait three, four years. Their kid’s going to be out of school. If their kid is in ninth grade right now and they have to wait four years before this new curriculum or new law has really any effect, it's too late. They need help immediately.
That's what we're trying to provide. Our Spirit of Resistance curriculum is designed to be, for lack of a better term, an add on to your child’s in school course. As history and social studies teachers, we know where in these courses kids are going to be manipulated. We know which facts are going to be twisted, we know which facts are going to be left out, we know which topics are the most rife with this kind of manipulation and distortion.
Throughout your child’s course, in our Spirit of Resistance curriculum, we are constantly throwing into that course a way to counter all of that. A parent can easily dismantle what’s happening in their child’s classroom. Tear it down, step by step, then rebuild it with truth in its place.
It’s very simple to use. It goes along and parallels their child’s in-school course. For example, right at the time when their child is learning about American expansion and their child is being taught that the United States stole Texas from Mexico, we’re living on stolen land, white Europeans are inherently evil, and expansion and growing.
As soon as their child is learning that, our material drops right around that time. The parent can easily prevent or reverse that kind of indoctrination in their classroom.
ADAMS: And you do that by bringing forward original documents and giving instructions so the parent can help them understand what was really happening, what the real plans were, and what all of that is, from an original perspective. Rather than somebody looking back over their shoulder and interpreting?
GARRISON: Right. Everything that we do is based on primary source material. What we’re trying to do most is to teach students, and model for them, how to analyze evidence and draw conclusions from it.
Because that’s where they grow up not being a slave to somebody else's interpretation of that past. If they can do that on their own, if we can teach that, that’s probably the greatest skill they can ever have to take throughout the rest of their life.
That’s what this material is designed to do. Parents can use it any way they want. They can look at the material themselves and then teach it to their kids. They can have their children do it by themselves and then have a discussion afterward about it.
We provide a complete discussion—questions, answers they should expect to hear, ways to connect it to the world around them. They can have that discussion, or they can do it together. However they want to do it. They can have these discussions at the dinner table, in the car, on the way home from soccer practice…but parent’s need to be involved in this.
I think we see a clamoring of parents wanting to know what’s going on inside their kid’s classroom, and how can I do something about it? If your child were to come home and you were to find out that they are being taught that the United States stole Texas from Mexico, what do you do about that as a parent?
You don’t have a drawer full of primary documents to pull out and say, “Hey, Johnny or Susie, look, this is what really happened.” You probably haven’t learned any of that stuff in twenty years. It would take you hours to figure out even how that’s being taught to your child, and hours more to figure out how to even correct it.
We try to make that easier for parents. What we’re saying is, assume your child is being manipulated. That they are being presented with false narratives and damaging ideologies. Assume it’s happening and this is what you can do to prevent that.
ADAMS: Okay. Well, that’s a very important service that you’re trying to provide. A lot of parents contact us, “Hey, what kind of resources and so forth…” So it’s good to know about what you’re trying to do.
We’ll be sharing more of this with our audience. Even in the footnotes of this, we can put some stuff in there so people can follow up and access those resources for themselves.
Do you have a website or any kind of thing you’d like to share with us?
GARRISON: Yeah, everything that we do, whether it’s our website or social media—everything is True Corrective. TrueCorrective.com. If you want to look us up on social media, it’s always @truecorrective, everywhere that we are.
That’s where you’ll find information about what we’re offering in September, about how this program works, and how to get involved in it.
ADAMS: Super.
Well, Patrick, thank you for taking time to share with us today. Thank you for what you’re doing to try to bring resources to parents. At the end of the day, that’s what all of us are trying to do. To give those resources, provide stuff so that people, as they’re working with their children, their grandchildren, their students, their classrooms…at the end of the day, we want them to have the tools they need so their children can succeed.
Thank you for being with us.
GARRISON: Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.