“Dear Americans- ”

Oklahoma Turns the Blackboard Into a Billboard for Bunkum

BALTIMORE— The latest dispatches from the territories beyond the Mississippi bring news so singular in its absurdity that one’s first instinct is to dismiss it as an elaborate jest. But no—my sources are cruelly sober. The public officials of Oklahoma, in their infinite innocence or boundless ambition, have ordained that schoolchildren now study not history, but hallucination.

I refer, of course, to the state’s freshly minted academic “standards,” under which the 2020 presidential election—settled by court, count, and common sense—is to be re-litigated in the minds of adolescents. These young scholars, just now mastering the Monroe Doctrine and the miseries of Reconstruction, will henceforth be required to hunt for imaginary “discrepancies” in an election more thoroughly audited than a banker’s ledger.

Among the curiosities now enshrined as educational gospel: pupils must scrutinize the “halting” of vote counts in battleground cities, the sinister mechanics of mail-in ballots, and the ominous phenomenon of “batch dumps.” It is all very thrilling, if one’s idea of scholarship derives from the wailings of tavern cranks and the pamphlets of professional patriots.

The maestro of this charade is one Ryan Walters, the state superintendent, whose vision for public instruction seems lifted from a tent revival rather than a teacher’s lounge. Mr. Walters, in the finest tradition of pedagogical autocracy, unveiled these changes mere hours before a board vote, assuring his colleagues—falsely, it appears—that delay would spell doom. The standards passed, of course. In Oklahoma, bluster has the gravity of law.

What followed was legislative theater of the lowest order. Some Republican senators made a show of concern—not for the content, mind you, but for the process. The standards, they said, came too fast. They did not say they came from the fevered precincts of delusion.

These gentlemen are brave enough to challenge a calendar, but not a lie.

Even the local educators, poor souls, were reduced to spectators. Their months of deliberation were discarded like an empty cigarette tin, replaced by the handiwork of national ideologues—gentlemen from Washington think tanks and the darker corners of the wireless who Mr. Walters invited to define what an Oklahoman child should know. That these scholars could not find Tulsa on a map did not disqualify them from dictating its curriculum.

The justification offered, naturally, is “critical thinking”—that noble pursuit which, in this instance, means asking students to evaluate baseless suspicions as if they were rival theorems. This is not education, dear reader, but catechism. It trains not the mind, but the reflex. The reflex to distrust, to doubt, to believe that ballots are suspicious, facts are flexible, and every election is but a prelude to betrayal.

One trembles to think of what’s next. Shall biology classes begin with a debate on whether frogs are truly amphibians, or merely misunderstood reptiles? Will geography lessons cast doubt on the roundness of the Earth?

And so, in the year of our Lord 1925 - no, pardon me, 2025 - we find ourselves staring not into the radiant dawn of enlightenment, but into the dull twilight of nonsense.

Yours in high dudgeon,

J.P.D.F.

The Evening Clarion