New curriculum in Oklahoma schools teaches conspiracy theories about 2020 election
Under the state's new curriculum, high school students will be taught to "identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of 'bellwether county' trends."
The standards also contain passages directing teachers to ensure that students can "identify the source of the COVID-19 pandemic from a Chinese lab," and "explain the effects of the Trump tax cuts, child tax credit, border enforcement efforts."
The curriculum change is just one of a battery of recent attempts to inject partisan politics into public school curricula. While blue states have faced criticism from the right for injecting critical race theory into the classroom, many red states have engaged in far more galling efforts to politicize classroom instruction. Louisiana attempted to mandate that classrooms display posters of the Ten Commandments before being stopped in federal court. Oklahoma, under Walters' tutelage, has gone so far as to require classrooms to stock Bibles—and teach from them.
https://reason.com/2025/05/06/new-oklaho...spiracies/
Under the state's new curriculum, high school students will be taught to "identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of 'bellwether county' trends."
The standards also contain passages directing teachers to ensure that students can "identify the source of the COVID-19 pandemic from a Chinese lab," and "explain the effects of the Trump tax cuts, child tax credit, border enforcement efforts."
The curriculum change is just one of a battery of recent attempts to inject partisan politics into public school curricula. While blue states have faced criticism from the right for injecting critical race theory into the classroom, many red states have engaged in far more galling efforts to politicize classroom instruction. Louisiana attempted to mandate that classrooms display posters of the Ten Commandments before being stopped in federal court. Oklahoma, under Walters' tutelage, has gone so far as to require classrooms to stock Bibles—and teach from them.
https://reason.com/2025/05/06/new-oklaho...spiracies/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
