This week marks the 400th year anniversary of the Mayflower Compact – But, will Kentucky’s students ever learn about this important advance in democracy and self-government?

As Joseph Loconte writes in “Resisting the Leviathan: The Mayflower Compact,” this week marks the 400th year anniversary of the signing of the incredibly important Mayflower Compact.

Loconte writes:

“The Mayflower Compact, signed on November 11, 1620, broke ranks with English political theory and practice, in which unelected monarchs issued decrees and ruled by divine right.”

Now, the freedom and security of the Mayflower Pilgrims would depend upon their ability to govern themselves, to submit to laws that they themselves had written.

As Loconte says, this “introduced into the West an unprecedented experiment in consensual government, involving not a monarch but individuals acting on their own initiative.”

By creating the Mayflower Compact, the Pilgrims laid a foundation for democracy that would continue and build into the US Constitution and beyond. It’s a foundation that every Kentucky child needs to learn about. But, will they?

You see, Kentucky’s hugely inadequate social studies standards never mention either the Pilgrims or their highly significant Mayflower Compact. In fact, the standards ignore Thanksgiving, as well.

To put this in perspective, current social studies standards from Massachusetts, which has always had a highly regarded public education system, and even those from Mississippi, a state not usually considered to have strong schools, both specifically mention the Mayflower Compact and Thanksgiving, too.

Why is it that states at both ends of the education spectrum find it important to explicitly cover the compact and the somewhat related holiday in their social studies standards while Kentucky’s standards ignore them? Is that in the best interests of our children?

For still more about the mess with Kentucky’s social studies standards, check out the new BIPPS report on “PRESERVING HISTORY, Problems with Kentucky’s Social Studies Standards, Must be Redone.”