Brian Kemp easily won reelection as Georgia’s governor. It’s rumored that he has his eye on the White House. However, when you consider the draft English language standards that his education department just issued, it’s apparent that he does not understand conservativism at all.

Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, is unhappy with what Kemp’s government intends to do to education in Atlanta. In an essay at American Greatness—which boasts the powerful subtitle that “The Georgia governor is an empty suit when it comes to understanding the education and culture issues that matter so much to conservative voters”—Bauerlein explains just how badly disconnected Kemp is from American conservativism.

Bauerlein notes that the draft standards look like bureaucratic sleepwalking, making it the kind of regulatory notice everyone ignores:

The document is exactly what we’ve come to expect from educationists and state bureaucrats: a bunch of basic verbal skills dressed up in pseudoscientific language, while the traditional content of English, the literary-historical knowledge that kids used to acquire in high school—some Shakespeare, the Great American Novel, etc.—is nowhere to be found. 

The absence of our linguistic and cultural heritage matters. It means the standards have a cultural and political impact because, after all, that’s what educational bureaucrats are obsessed with—they want to change the culture and society. That means trouble for conservative, tradition-loving Americans.

Image: Gov. Brian Kemp. YouTube screen grab.

Dr. B asks the obvious question:

Why would a Republican governor with national ambitions produce an education roadmap that is wholly devoid of conservative beliefs and goals? How did his administration come up with a pedagogy that maintains the very progressivist ideals that have dominated the public schools for decades and turned the youth vote into a heavily Democratic bloc?

Dr. B warns that if you hand to anti-conservative educators a curriculum that is devoid of history and great literature, those same educators fill the void with the new anti-conservative priorities—especially diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Suddenly, the values-free guide is

A knowledge-free roadmap of standards frees educators to favor contemporary literature and current social affairs—in other words, a Woke gospel that can be peddled to 15-year-olds who have no exposure to novels and poems that might reveal just how warped that gospel is.

Bauerlein states out loud what all conservatives instinctively understand: There There is great power in great literature from great minds, creating great traditions that become an antivenin for identity politics, utopian socialism, and indoctrination.

We know why the educators have kept it out. They wish to abolish the American Way, to deny the youth a glorious past so that those youths grow up with no inclination to defend their country.

And what about that original question Bauerlein asked, namely, why would this kind of educational policy come from a Republican administration? Bauerlein answers that Kemp has a purely business background and seems not to know or care about education.

The left loves to exploit conservatives’ ignorance and lack of sense, and Governor Kemp gives them that opportunity.  Dr. Bauerlein, therefore, makes the obvious recommendation: “The Florida standards are there for Kemp and other Republicans to emulate in their own states, though it may be too late for Georgia.”

What a depressing reminder that John Dewey, the early 20th-century progressive, who articulated his rules for inculcating leftism into American education more than 100 years ago, is currently turning out to be the big winner.

John Dale Dunn MD JD is a retired emergency physician and inactive attorney in Brownwood, Texas.