The bill passed by North Carolina legislators to ban the teaching of “critical race theory” represents the most overt effort at ideological indoctrination in the recent history of public education. Ideology is a system of thinking applied on a sustained basis to understand the world. If Republicans get their way, the next generation of North Carolinians will be reared on an ideology of nationalism. That’s a value set, not the tools of critical thinking.

It’s never a good sign when “education” is preceded by a modifier. “Re-education” still reverberates decades later with the stench of communist oppression. Patriotism can be benign or deeply destructive depending on its context and intensity, but to inject it on an explicit basis into the education of the next generation represents a distorting influence on the cultivation of young minds. In a free society, citizens should have the right–and the capacity–to draw their own conclusions on what is right and wrong. The role of public education is to equip people with the cognitive skills to make these judgments.

Certainly, it is not the role of our schools to prescribe an unquestioning faith in American goodness. That’s antithetical to the searching inquiry that we expect from educational institutions. Many Americans believe that their nation has done the right thing at the end of the day, no matter how many exceptions must be made to draw this conclusion. But a critical-minded citizenry must know all of the facts if this understanding of America is to prevail on a basis of legitimacy rather than, yes, indoctrination.

More than anything Republicans’ favored vision of American history resembles the painting American Progress by John Gast. In the allegorical portrayal, Gast presents a woman symbolizing liberty advancing across an open plain with hardy Americans following in her wake. Natives dutifully vacate the otherwise empty land, and bears and bison likewise move out of the way before Americans’ providentially destined mission. It’s an artistic representation of Manifest Destiny.

But wait. The American West was hardly empty. To the contrary, hundreds of thousands of Natives had inhabited that land for thousands of years, and their communities were intricate and highly developed. Manifest Destiny required the destruction of millennia-old cultures and so much bloodshed that one Indian chief would declare, “I will fight no more forever.” The environmental impact of American expansion, whitewashed by the portrayals of bears and buffalo, was devastating, and continues to this day. Surely, if North Carolinians are to make an informed judgment about the past, they must learn more than the idealized vision Republicans want to prescribe for them.

At the end of the day, it is not the role of public education to instill nationalism. Schools should lay out the facts, all of them, inspiring and tragic, and teach students to interpret their panoply of meanings. The legislation proposed by Republicans in the NCGA represents not patriotism, but fear–fear of the changing face of this country and the reevaluation of the national past that must inevitably flow from a more diverse reservoir American experience. They want to freeze North Carolinians’ minds in an older, more culturally confident, and whiter era–and to have our schools fail in their fundamental mission to teach people to think.