‘Critical Ethnic Studies’, say whaat??!!

George Rebane

California’s public education system has been dysfunctional for years, and now in the age of riots and the growing socialist revolution, it is ready to take its final turns around the drain.  You will not read any of this in the lamestream, because the new curriculum to be adopted by Sacramento next spring will put a nice bow on finally acknowledging that unionized state-run public schools will become literally nothing more than finishing schools in Marxist propaganda.  However, our Left considers that the country’s remnants of traditional American thought still number enough to require the adoption of this new brainwashing initiative not be publicized.

Former US Asst SecEd and Independent Institute senior fellow Williamson M. Evers lays the whole thing out in the 28aug20 WSJ – ‘Critical’ Ethnic Studies Returns to California.  His report goes a long way to answer the perennial question of how our younger generation has turned out in the aggregate to be so uncritical, compliant, and just plain dumb.  And for the country’s hardworking Orwellians, the adoption of this new mandatory curriculum into our high schools promises that for them the best is yet to come.  No student will graduate without having passed this course.  Dr Evers makes the case that “the state’s new curriculum prefers victimization to minority achievement, and Marxism to liberal values.”

Critical ethnic studies is actually making its second appearance at California’s Board of Education.  The “radical and jargon-laced” 2019 version was sent back for a more “toned down” draft.  Well, it didn’t work.  The new and improved 2020 version not only didn’t correct any of the 2019’s “conceptual problems”, but has now been told by our state’s Dept of Education “to resuscitate” the really bad parts cut from the 2019 version.

Among the litany of dreadful stuff that our students will have rammed down their cognitive craws are the newly focused victim “groups that dominate the curriculum … African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and American Indians.”  However, “excluded from California’s model curriculum are the white ethnic groups (Italians, Irish, Poles and so forth)”.  The course will actually “boil down to vulgar Marxism, identity politics, and victimology.”  Among the identified bad people in the world will be America’s Irish and Jews; why? because they have “secured white racial privilege.”

As you might expect from such bilge water, “the revised model curriculum in California portrays capitalism as oppressive and gives considerable weight to America’s socialist critics.”  These critics are portrayed as ideologically correct and pure, without a tinge of bad parts like racism or discrimination.  Yet, as Evers reminds us, “history and political science show that the state can be used readily under socialism for racist purposes. Obvious examples include the Soviet Union’s 1948-49 purge of “rootless cosmopolitans”—that is, Jews—and its 1951-53 Doctors’ Plot attack on Jewish physicians. Under socialism, a bureaucratic elite controls all job assignments, news media, courts and the secret police. When that elite is envious, insecure or looking for a scapegoat, what chance does an ethnic minority have?”  Other horrific examples are easily obtained from Nazi Germany, Red China, Yugoslavia, Turkey, … .

All this history is omitted, and will neither pollute nor divert our high schoolers.  For our young minds the world out there will be exquisitely formed so that what they are carefully taught will stick when they hit the streets to look for a job, vote, and demonstrate.  They will have all the correct answers they need to understand and interpret what they see and experience.

Dr Evers concludes his essay with –

The proponents of critical ethnic studies are so insulated by Marxism and identity politics that they miss insights from other fields. The new curriculum doesn’t give a balanced picture of America and, in these racially charged times, it could ignite truly ugly disputes. Perhaps worst of all, it gives short shrift to minority achievement and deprives students of the optimistic view of America. Following this curriculum, students would have no basis on which to understand Frederick Douglass’s defense of the U.S. Constitution as “a glorious liberty document” and his celebration of the potential of a country based on natural and inalienable rights.

All this, coming to a California high school near you.  And some still wonder why SNAFU continues so perfectly to describe the state of our state.  Now you need wonder no more.

Comments

[Gregory]

I first heard Bill Evers speak circa '96 when he organized a meeting of Whole Language and Whole Math proponents and opponents in Palo Alto... I drove there to help me make sense of what the Grass Valley School district was doing to its students.

It helped me and it helped a generation of kids in California schools. A subsequent generation or two have since fallen by the wayside and the schools are now off the deep end. Critical thinking is Critical Theory now, Frankfurt School style.

[scenes]

C'mon George, everything is OK.

According to the 'staff edits', they've changed a few things.. 'References to “hxrstory” and “hxrstorically” were replaced with “history” and “historically.”'

lmfao.

hxrstory
hxrstorically

I'm downright embarrassed for our times.

At this point, anyone with kids should (a) move (b) put them in private schools (hopefully that can free you from the insanity) or (c) homeschool.

[scenes]

from https://edsource.org/2020/new-draft-ethnic-studies-curriculum-for-california-students-issued-after-a-year-of-study/637506

"In comments last summer, Sikh, Korean and Jewish Americans and other ethnic groups called for inclusion of their heritage and immigrant stories. That, in turn, led to a backlash from an ethnic studies coalition and others who warned against watering down the curriculum. Ethnic studies is not civics, they said; it is about Americans whose stories and struggles have been missing from history courses and the traditional curriculum, they said."

..and, as usual, some animals are more equal than others.

[Bill Tozer]

Kinda on topic, maybe. I don’t know about you, but I ain’t going along with the side that has a guillotine. Call me deplorable.

Chicago Teachers Union Tweets Out Praise For Guillotine Protest: ‘Completely In Support Of Wherever This Is Headed’

https://www.dailywire.com/news/chicago-teachers-union-tweets-out-praise-for-guillotine-protest-completely-in-support-of-wherever-this-is-headed

[Scott O]

BT 9:06 - Love that last line: "...wherever this is headed."
Shouldn't that have been 'de-headed'?
Those idiots think Bezos has all that loot in cash in his basement.