It’s no longer a surprise to hear about public schools using their access to impressionable children to push divisive ideas about politics and race. But now it has escalated to a new level: using their taxpayer-funded budgets to shape the views of adults who live nearby.
City Journal’s Christopher Rufo reports that the Wake County public school system, which operates in the state’s Raleigh area, recently held an equity training session that advised teachers on the inclusion of critical race theory in curricula. The unsubstantiated theory teaches that systemic racism is baked into the United States and the West in general, and calls for the dismantling of allegedly white supremacist structures.
California’s Board of Education is expected to pass on Thursday a divisive and radical educational curriculum that would force a series of courses into the public school system based in critical race theory and the social justice agenda of the Left.
According to the organization’s website, the “Mathematics and Racial Justice” workshop will take place over two weeks beginning June 9. Thus far, the organization has announced four different seminars entitled, “Bias in Algorithms and Technology,” “Fair Division, Allocation, and Representation,” “Public Health Disparities,” and “Racial Inequities in Mathematics Education.”
School districts across the country have adopted Marxist critical race theory, but few have done so to the degree of Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) in the Washington, D.C, suburbs of northern Virginia. LCPS adopted curriculum from the far-Left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and removed Dr. Seuss books from its library shelves in the name of combatting racism. LCPS recently instituted a plan to combat “systemic racism” that includes training for teachers.
Christian prayer in public school is prohibited, but now the Marxists in California are trying to force millions of students to chant to the Aztec gods of human sacrifice and cannibalism.
California’s proposed “ethnic studies” curriculum calls for the “decolonization” of American society and a “counter-genocide” against white Christians.
The detailed guide recommends using the terms “grown-ups,” “folks,” “family” or “guardians” as alternatives to “mom,” “dad” and “parents.” It also suggests using “caregiver” instead of “nanny/babysitter.”
I have been telling parents for decades that sending a child to almost any college is playing Russian roulette with his or her values.
But it is a different version of Russian roulette. In the traditional version, only one of the gun’s six chambers contains a bullet. In the college version of Russian roulette, 5 of the 6 chambers contain a bullet. If your child attends almost any university in America (or Canada or anywhere else in the English-speaking world), the odds are that your child’s decency, intellectual acuity, faculty of reason, character and moral compass will be damaged, perhaps permanently.
The worse news is that sending your child to almost any elementary school or high school — public or private — is fast becoming equally toxic. More and more schools are being taken over by left-wing ideologues and by nonideologues who lack the courage to confront the ideologues.
My awakening to the new orthodoxy began during this past summer of discontent. In mid-June, a few weeks after the George Floyd protests began, the head of Riverdale Country School, the New York City private school my wife and I entrusted with the education of our two young children, sent a memo apologizing for unspecified past wrongs. “We have the responsibility to use our privilege to fight for change,” he explained. “We are also free to shift some aspects of our culture more quickly than other institutions and organizations.”
More than a decade ago, I purchased a number of gay-themed books for children, wanting to see what parents and educators were reading to their little ones. Recently, I became aware of The GayBC’s, by M. L. Webb, published in 2019 and as extreme as any children’s reader I have seen. Yet these days, books like this are celebrated while the beloved Dr. Seuss is deprecated.
While most would consider topics like science and math to be essential components of an elementary school education, the principal of East Side Community High in New York City believes students and parents need to spend more time considering their “white identity.”
A Gallup survey published last week reveals that LGBT identification among Americans has grown, increasing to 5.6 percent of the population from 4.5 percent in Gallup’s previous update in 2017.
But LGBT identification across groups is not constant, with liberals, young people, and women skewing more heavily towards LGBT identity.
There is an epidemic of anti-white racism and anti-free speech censorship at many high schools across Canada. If you don’t believe that, then it’s worth looking into what happened at Strathcona high school, Edmonton, when students voiced that exact sentiment: emails to parents, a witch hunt orchestrated by the administration and school board, official condemnations from school authorities, a police report filed by the principal, libelous accusations by the media, and much more.
The Oregon Department of Education is encouraging teachers to use a toolkit that emphasizes challenging “the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.”
h/t Marvin
Fifth-grade students at William D. Kelley School were tasked with completing an assignment that described Davis as a “black communist,” and that focused on Davis’ fight against “injustice and inequality,” Rufo reported, based on whistleblower documents and a source within the school.
