Posted on 09/24/2019 9:00:24 AM PDT by DeweyCA
But next, we note that it's not just America's colleges and universities. As I said in the beginning, there is a pass down, a filter down process throughout the rest of the culture and of course that means high schools and even middle schools and elementary schools as well. As a matter of fact these days, many of the same ideas and intellectual agendas show up in pre-school. But now I want to turn to an article by John Murawski entitled, “Woke History Is Making Big Inroads in America's High Schools.”
He writes, "Like growing numbers of public high school students across the country, many California kids are receiving classroom instruction on how race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship status are tools of oppression, power, and privilege. They are taught about colonialism, state violence, racism, intergenerational trauma, heteropatriarchy, and the common thread that links them. Students are then graded on how well they apply these concepts in writing assignments, performances and community organizing projects."
Now we have seen the proposed ethnic studies curriculum in California, but this article tells us that much of the same kind of curriculum is already being taught in many California high schools. Murawski writes, "At Santa Monica High School for example, students organize and carry out a systematized campaign for social justice that can take the form of a protest, a leaflet, a workshop, play or research project. They demonstrate,” we are told, “their mastery of the subject matter by teaching about social justice to middle school students."
Now talk about a filter down. Here you're not just looking at a generalized pattern, here you're looking at the university is producing the teachers, the teachers teaching the high school students, and the high school students being assigned a project to influence middle school students.
The author also takes us to the Environmental Charter High School in Lawndale, California, where students, "Are assigned to write a breakup letter with a form of oppression,” that is the student writing about the student’s break up in a breakup letter, but not breaking up with a human in a relationship, but rather with a form of oppression. What might those be? "Such as toxic masculinity, heteronormativity, the Eurocentric curriculum or the Dakota Access Pipeline." Students are asked to, "Persuade their audience of the dehumanizing and damaging effects of their chosen topic." Now you'll notice here this isn't about teaching high school students how to think, it's about training them of a certain determined way of thinking and then force feeding this not only to the students but to all of those within the students influence.
And speaking of the agenda here, recall that conversation we had on The Briefing about the proposed California ethnic studies curriculum. As a follow-up to that in this article, Melina Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, she's a board member of the National Association for Ethnic Studies, said clearly, "We don't want students to have the option not to take ethnic studies. It is as important as taking a lab science." Well, of course you have to ask the question as important to whom, but more importantly, doesn't this take us back to Dr. Goldfarb's article in The Wall Street Journal where you have the same concerns about medical education? Here you have the argument that taking ethnic studies on the part of 14 to 18-year-olds is as important as taking a lab science.
Well, let's not just ask the question important to whom? But let's ask the question important for what? One of the frustrating realities about education is that it has to be focused and it always is limited. When you're looking at a curriculum, a battlefield for sure in almost every educational environment, you're looking at the fact that to add this means you have to subtract that. And when you're looking at this kind of argument, what gets subtracted are the traditional disciplines that have at least in previous eras of human understanding led to human knowledge and success, even foundational to that success.
But here you have the replacement of many of those disciplines and curriculum subjects with the new agenda that is being driven and is being driven by a larger agenda for social change. Let's change the issue here from the training of medical doctors to let's just say for example the training of engineers, the kind of people who design, oh, I don't know, a major suspension bridge. The fact is it might actually be far more important to society that those who are going to be designing massive suspension bridges over which we will drive, that they have another lab science class or they have another class in the hard sciences or at least what are considered to be the hard sciences.
We have already seen over the last several decades that many lawyers are complaining that the education in law schools has been primarily towards again, an agenda for social change and apart from the traditional training of lawyers, but it's one thing for that to happen when it comes to the law, it's another thing for that to happen when it comes to engineering. If I'm going to cross that bridge, I want the engineer to have a classical engineering education and again, if I'm going to drive over that bridge, I'm going to hope that that engineer graduated near the top of the class.
But the article by John Murawski makes clear it's not just to California problem, He takes us to Wake County in North Carolina where he tells us, "10th graders were asked at the beginning of the school year to answer a diversity inventory worksheet, asking them to identify the gender, race, ethnicity, age, sexuality, ability, religion and socioeconomic status for themselves as well as about their friends, neighbors, teachers, and others." That teacher’s initiative was at least temporarily blocked after parents complained, but the fact is that many parents never even know or know far long after the fact that their offspring have been trained and taught in just this way.
“Not surprised. They are still using books by Paul Ehrlich and the man has quite literally NEVER been right about anything he’s predicted.”
Julian Simon’s winning bet against Paul Erlich holds up in the long run.
:
This nonsense is nothing more than nazi propaganda recycled for a new generation.
Look up “The poisonous mushroom” online; there is a college that has an English translation online; this children’s book is a graphic example of how the kids in nazi Germany were taught hatred of Jews — and hatred against non-Germans and others that were deemed racial inferiors was part of the curriculum as well.
This nonsense is no different; substitute “Jew” for “white” or “rich” and see what you get.
I dropped an Astronomy class decades ago after the instructor spent most of the first lecture trying to convince a majority of the class that a feather and a bowling ball would fall at the same rate in a vacuum.
I wonder what little Greta's opinion on this matter is? She is a scientific expert, at least according to liberals.
I can’t imagine an Asian parent - or White parent - subjecting their kids to this - in place of such classes as biology, AP Calculus and Algebra II and AP Physics and Chemistry - all of which my kids took (and passed) - and are being systematically eliminated.
I see an opening for private schools here to concentrate on STEM subjects and honors classes w/o all the social justice nonsense.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.