Oklahoma’s top education official Ryan Walters praises right-wing media figures as among “the best minds” to develop the “best history standards in the country”
Published
On July 9, Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction Ryan Walters announced that a number of people — many of them key figures in right-wing media — would be rewriting the social studies curriculum in the state. The list includes right-wing hosts with ties to Walters like Steve Deace, Dennis Prager, and Stacy Washington, as well as Kevin Roberts, the head of The Heritage Foundation, which has organized Project 2025. (For more on the right-wing figures helping guide Oklahoma's curriculum, see here.)
Walters appeared on the July 11 episode of Jenna Ellis in the Morning and discussed the plans for a new curriculum, using rhetoric that appears to mirror Christian nationalism and expressing excitement with the group of right-wing figures that will help develop the curriculum.
Oklahoma’s top education official Ryan Walters praises right-wing media figures as among “the best minds” to develop the “best history standards in the country”
Citation From the the July 11, 2024, edition of American Family Radio's Jenna Ellis in the Morning
JENNA ELLIS (HOST): I’m speaking with Oklahoma state superintendent Ryan Walters, who is overhauling the curriculum for schools to simply reflect the truth of our national heritage, to explain civics.
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And yet, the left, who clearly they haven't read the Bible because they think that this is just, you know, a bunch of fairy stories that have nothing to do with reality. They don’t understand that the Bible is actually a history text. It’s actually so much more than that that gives a chronology of world history up until, of course, the New Testament, but then we also have Revelation, the end of all things.
I mean, they just think of this as a purely religious text that is trying to push the Christian religion onto students rather than, as you rightly point out Ryan Walters, the Bible actually is so much more than that and should be studied if kids actually want to understand our American heritage.
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And so talk about this curriculum more that you have proposed, and I know that people like my good friend Steve Deace are already working on this. What was the design for, you know, bringing in some of these really great — I think just civics philosophers — like Dennis Prager, Kevin Roberts, Steve Deace?
RYAN WALTERS (OKLAHOMA STATE SUPERINTENDENT): Yes. What we’ve seen in education is education has been controlled by the radical left, by these left-wing institutions. You see them all the way down. You see it at the federal level with the Department of Education, but you see it all the way down to the local level. You see it embedded in state departments of education.
Jenna, when I came into the office, I fired 130 of the staff there. And we had embedded left-wing bureaucrats. And so we’ve come in and said, listen, you know, the left has completely tried to control everything, all the way down to curriculum.
So what I want is I want folks that understand American history, understand how to articulate that in a way that kids are going to be able to understand it. And we’re going to come in here, and we’re going to have the best history standards in the country. We’re going to find the best minds from around the country to come in here and help us develop out that story of America. We want our kids to be able to truly understand it. We don’t want any of our history censored from our kids.
We want them to truly understand that because, you know, you look at it too — And when the left has taken away any type of moral, religious reference in our history, you know, you look at folks like Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, who were very clearly — you know, you think about some of John Adams quotes about, you know, this constitution was made for a moral or religious people. And part of — so much of what they articulated was an equation that, yes, our rights come from God, we maximize those individual liberties. And there’s also the citizenry has to be moral or religious so that they can self govern. That’s how maximizing individual rights work.
Well, generally, we don’t tell half of that story. We’re lying to our kids. Our kids aren’t getting that picture. And Winston Churchill said the further back you look is the further ahead you can see. And how in the world are we going to move this country forward and continue to be the greatest country in the history of the world if our kids don’t even understand the history of where we came from? And that’s where we are so excited with this group that we have to help us develop these standards.