To the Editor:

The most revered building in any small town is usually the school. The building may have seen better days, or in other cases, it represents the result of a significant financial investment. In either case, the school is the same one many of the townspeople attended as children and where parents went for teacher conferences, PTA meetings, annual band and choir practices,and athletic events, writes Robert Wuthnow in his new book on rural America.

So very much is invested — historically, financially, and culturally — in local school systems and the many memorable teachers that few taxpayers or parents are willing to criticize anything other than budgets, bonds, bullying, and union-contract specifics, if even those.

There may be, and usually are, many caring, dedicated teachers in any given school system, but they have virtually no control over curricula and textbook selection; neither do local school boards, local school administrators, and local teacher-union leaders of the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association.

Yet it is the curricula that contributes most to our huge social, moral, and political concerns — a curriculum that is dictated top-down from massive bureaucracies of the United Nations, federal Department of Education, the education departments of the states and territories, as well as the education schools and the leadership of national educational professional associations and unions.

Back in the 1940s and ’50s, “social studies” had not yet been introduced into the schools, so, for me, history, civics, logic, and geography were my avenues of learning.

History meant mainly American history, the lives of great leaders, the American Revolution, the Constitution, and the Civil War, which, along with world history, were understood as being fundamental for any thoughtful reflection in adult citizens.

Disturbingly, that original vision of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution has largely mutated from that of our original republic into an uneasy blend of a threadbare republic; over-regulated governance; and an emergent, semi-dependent mass democracy.

The Athenian democracy lasted about a century. Republican Rome about two. Our now increasingly fissured Republic, is two-and-a-half centuries old.

“We may feel that our form of political and representative democracy is stable and secure. But it too can decay. Chronic annoyance over political transgressions, combined with ignorance about our political heritage, can leave the sovereign citizenry undefended against arguments that, in slightly different forms, were considered and wisely rejected by the American Founders.

“Large losses of liberty can occur in small increments. The failure to understand the proper role of politicians begins in our schools. But, of course, schools reflect as well as mold the culture,” writes my friend Bruce Chapman, co-founder with George Gilder, of the Discovery Institute, in his new book, “Politicians.”

There is a growing awareness that conflicts over public policies and our political system derive, in part, from a growing poverty of instruction in our history, government, politics, and economics. Why should we expect respect for a system one knows almost nothing about or, worse, has been trashed?

Some school subjects are useful, some appear to be centralizing collectivist propaganda, and many are an ungrounded muddle for some unprepared minds. This leads to pushing aside such solid essentials as history, rulership, economics, civics, and logic that students require to be effective future citizens.

The decline in the study of history and civics in public schools began several generations ago, and earlier yet in the universities, according to “The Leipzig Connection” by Paulo Lionni.

In 1971, the National Council for the Social Studies issued curriculum guidelines identifying social problems as “the main concern of social studies curriculum.” This meant that students in government schools would have to study “economic injustice, conflict, racism, social disorder, and environmental imbalance … poverty, war, and population.”

Pupils should engage in “intensive and recurrent study of cultural, racial, religious, and ethnic groups” and not in a way that promotes “normative behavior characteristic primarily of white, middle-class society.”

Compounding all this is the United Nations/Lucis Trust/Bill Gates imposition of Common Core requirements, now being implemented under newly disguised labeling.

What do most taxpayers, parents, and grandparents know of the goals and textbooks, worksheets, audio-visuals, and test questioning being mandated from on high by massive bureaucracies imposing one-size-fits-all studies, which often seem more indoctrinating than educating?

What should we know? What should our posterity know?

Victor Porlier

Berne