It seems that the Massachusetts Secretary and Commissioner of Education do not think Bay State students should learn about their civic or literary heritage any more. The Secretary once did as chair of the state board of education in 2001 when he voted for the 2001 Massachusetts English Language Arts Curriculum Framework and in 2003 when he (and Governor Charlie Baker, then on the state board of education) voted for the 2003 Massachusetts History and Social Science Curriculum Framework. But in 2016, they seem to have decided that the "roots of Western Civilization" have to go.
When a Republican has been in the presidency for eight years, as George W. Bush was, Democrats run against the Republicans. When a Democrat has been in office for eight years, as Barack Obama will soon have been, Republicans run against Republicans.
This is a year in which the multiple failures of the Obama years should be irresistible for Republican presidential candidates. Democrats, correspondingly, should be awkwardly sidestepping and tightrope walking to avoid a too-close association. Instead, partly due to the eccentric obsessions of Donald Trump, we've seen Republicans reprising debates about the wisdom of the Iraq War while ignoring the greatest foreign policy debacles of the Obama years. If the Iraq War was a mistake of over-engagement (and there is a good case that it wasn't), Syria illustrates the perils of under-engagement — hundreds of thousands killed, a region destabilized, the metastasis of ISIS and the worst refugee crisis since World War II.
