Hans Bader wrote in some depth about changes to Virginia’s educational focus, requiring its teachers to demonstrate a “commitment to equity” as part of its performance standard and educational criteria.
This standard is full of vague buzzwords and ideologically-charged phrases that can be used to punish conservative teachers, or reward bad teachers for mouthing politically-correct platitudes. Its adoption will make it even harder to get rid of bad teachers and attract good teachers.
A “commitment to equity” sounds nice until you learn that “equity” means something very different from equality and non-discrimination, in “Virginia’s Roadmap to Equity.” In that book, “equity” is about racial “outcomes,” and it is not about equal “opportunities” or achievement based on “ability.” It describes “culturally responsive educators” as those who fight “injustice,” not just “racism,” or effectively teaching minority children.
For many, this sounds glorious. Reading and writing and ‘rithmatic is for squares, and shouldn’t public education focus on broader social issues, like whether you’ve met Jesus you’re culturally obsequious? You may well believe that this is what we expect of teachers, that they believe in things you believe are good and right, and dedicate their academic services to pursuing the indoctrination of their “good” beliefs to their students. But what if other people believe differently? And why is public education involved in the teaching of ideological purity rather than, say, math?
There was a time when the student’s answer to the teacher’s question of what that picture shows, “just two people chillin’,” would have not only been acceptable, but the best one could hope for, even if it’s unclear why either the picture or the question belonged in an academic setting. But as the teacher makes clear, that time is no longer now, and that answer is not only unacceptable, but wrong.
In updating his “Catching up with Coddling,” FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff talks about how curriculum has become catechism.
Problem w/ adopting social justice as absolute truth is that colleges are meant to be testing & questioning so-called "truth," not parroting it uncritically. As Lyell Asher observed, “It’s the difference between a curriculum and a catechism.” 4/11https://t.co/ne93ZDBiRx
— Greg Lukianoff (@glukianoff) March 29, 2021
On the one hand, the rigors of education have been dumbed down to accommodate more diverse students who lack the skills needed to do math. On the other hand, the curriculum has shifted away from subject matter mastery (who’s to say what the right answer to a math question is?) to morality. Maybe not your morality, but the morality of the people who will grade children, who spend the day talking to and judging children, and in whose hands their futures reside.
For many parents, there is no other option but to send your child to a public school, where they will be taught what the school, what it’s teachers, deem correct. This was a problem when they were being indoctrinated into an exceptionalism that extolled patriotism even when the facts upon which it was based were “whitewashed.” This is a problem when the pendulum has swung way beyond reality to making equity an inherent component of all academics.
The problem, as Greg notes, is that this is hardly some flash-in-the-pan fashion trend, but rather a decade long trend in the educational institution, where the premier teacher factories such as Teachers College at Columbia University have been dedicated to shifting the pedagogy paradigm away from academics and into equity. The issue isn’t equal opportunity, but equitable outcome, and the problem is the children who, they are certain, must recognize and confess their sins.
It’s one thing for this to prevail at the college level, where one would hope students would be sufficiently far along in their adolescence to grasp that they are being weaned off one side of racism in order to be compelled to accept the other side of racism. But grade school kids? Kindergartners? And race is but one of the tenets at stake.
Last Wednesday, Brauer College in rural Victoria forced its male pupils, some only 12 years old, to stand at a school assembly, face the girls and apologize for rape, sexual harassment and all the other facets of male wickedness. All this was apparently some ghastly effort to promote gender reconciliation through gender self-incrimination.
‘I had girls behind me crying,’ one student said. ‘We had to apologize for stuff we didn’t actually do.’
No, it’s not this bad in all schools or classes. No, every teacher isn’t on board with either this ideology or the requirement that they teach it to their students. And most importantly, not every teacher has forsaken educating students in their academic studies, mastering the skills for which public school exists. No doubt there are plenty of teachers who just want to teach their students how to spell words correctly and, yes, that two plus two equals four in fifth grade.
But as Hans’ post shows, the educational institutions are formalizing this commitment to equity, and teachers will find their jobs and career prospects held captive to their personal commitment to woke ideology. At the same time, new teachers are steeped in the belief that this is not only good pedagogy, but the only “moral” way to teach their students. Parents and priests may be awful, so it’s their duty to instill a belief system that prays to their god of choice.
Once the educational establishment has been fully consumed by ideological zealots, and the future teachers of America embrace their duty to see that the charges believe the right things, this could prove almost impossible to undo. Own the minds of the children when they’re young and you own them forever. For those who believe that this is wonderful because this is morality, decency and justice (and what’s wrong with that?), enjoy the revolution until it’s your turn.
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I think this is just part of a larger issue – to be blunt, I think something has gone seriously awry with the transformation of teaching into a formal profession. Two hundred years ago, being a physician was considered a skilled trade, dentistry was performed by barbers, and the chief treatment for most ailments was bloodletting. Now our professionally licensed doctors can do in-utero surgery to repair heart defects, and reattach severed hands. One hundred and fifty years ago, electrical engineering didn’t really exist as such. Now, our whole civilization has gone digital, with smart phones connecting us instantly to people across the globe and to vast storehouses of online knowledge. A quick perusal of Sovereign Citizen filings will illustrate what the practice of law might look like if divorced from the profession’s established body of knowledge and practices.
But in the hundred or so years since the professionalization of teaching began, we haven’t seen anything like the kinds of dividends that accompanied professionalization in engineering or medicine. Further, children schooled at home by amateurs don’t seem to be markedly worse off than those taught by accredited professionals. Not that there aren’t talented and effective professional teachers – there are – but the question is whether their effectiveness has anything to do with what’s been taught to them as being the foundational knowledge of their profession.
There has always been some element of indoctrination in schools. Trying to shift that to an impractical ideology whose acolytes are irrational extremists will result in more people finding a way to not send their children to school.
Some number of people can survive by peddling ideological shit as their profession. However, it won’t work if everybody, or even a majority of people, try to rely on this parasitic strategy. This means that most children are going to need real life skills, and not just a headful of duck-speak. Parents who care whether their children succeed in life will find a way to block ideologues from using the schools to destroy the children’s futures.
You assume that most parents will be aware of, and care about, what’s happening in schools. That’s a dubious assumption.
Parents with Bourgeois values will, and then other parents can bitch about that when their children come back home to live their adult lives in the spare room over the garage.
One “benefit” of the covid hysteria has been the awakening of parents who overhear the garbage that is being pumped into their kids. Some schools have tried to make parents promise that they won’t listen in on their kids’ online classes, because teachers know that many parents would disapprove.
When I went to school 50 years ago, my parents were religious fundamentalists. They would have been horrified and dismayed had they known what garbage I was being indoctrinated with, even then. Now it is so bad that even liberal parents are objecting. Between the “woke” nonsense and the “anti-bullying” promotion of the gay/trans agenda down to the preschool level, public schools (and many private schools) have become places to which no responsible parent can send their children.
Watching their kids teachers doing online class has been eye-opening for a lot of parents, although that was a thing for a while but like most things these days, it appears to be forgotten now.
You should think of the education system as providing re-education services, to undo any wrong-think by the parents, and to prevent that wrong-think from spreading.
Unwinding all of this mess will be very difficult and unpleasant.
The woke version of original sin foisted upon the enrollees in the form of school prayer, without actually being school prayer. A double whammy, and the message has some tendency to pervade most of the major religions. Or not.
Could this be a sign of a failure in the various faiths? Nah, but having the power to steer the boat, whether the course is the destination or more fuel for ones power jones sure feels good, and can be self sustaining, to a degree.
You lost me on this one.
It would be funny if it wasn’t such a serious issue. The racist teacher calling out the non-racist student for not being a racist is an inversion of everything fought for 50-70 years ago.
“I have a dream that my four little children will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” has morphed into “I have a dream that my four little children will never judge or be judged by anything BUT skin color.”
These people are a cancer. This isn’t well meaning ignorance, this is an active movement to divide the population and provoke a civil war.
For those of us who fought racism for decades, the idea that old racism was bad but new racism is good is disgraceful.
Take Kenneth Clark’s doll study, the famous one cited by the Supreme Court in Brown as demonstrative of the evils of segregation. If Loudoun County thinks that race is highly relevant and racial literacy needs to be taught in great detail to students, and, as you correctly note, the best answer to “Which doll do you prefer?” is no longer “Neither, they are the same to me”, what, then, is the best answer according to the people teaching this binary antiracist pedagogy?
^^^ This.
When the student already knows more than the imbecile posing as a teacher, at least the damage will be limited to a bad grade.
Agree.
I’ve tried to warn young parents, but they’ve convinced it’s just “racial sensitivity” training.
It’s all couched in such benign, if not benevolent, language, which is what makes it so insidious and dangerous.
It’s the kinder, gentler, paternalistic, white-man’s-burden racism, but it’s still racism. When the state imposes it, it’s unconstitutional, state-sponsored, racism. These mooks are so falling-down stupid, they don’t even realize they are part of the problem.
I agree if i was a parent or a taxpayer in the school district i would be at that school and finding exactly what mental midget made the decision and then proceed to beat the idiot to death.
All of the idiots running and working in education now are acting false information. It is NOT their job to teach students values or behavior that is their parents job. Their job in this time is to teach two things. FACTS and quick and simply ways to find and VERIFY them. This is the information age and pretty much every including children have a smart phone that want on to do so.
In this situation if forced to go beyond two women in a picture, I’d say the woman on the right is an Ivy League college graduate working as lobbyist in DC and the woman on the left is the single mom with a GED who cleans her luxury condo and walks her dog. I would hope that this causes the interlocutor to fly into a rage.
When you said “cleans her luxury condo,” did you mean the woman on the left cleans the luxury condo of the woman right? Pronouns matter.
If I understand the current state of woke affairs (which is doubtful), we’re not allowed to assume the genders or pronouns of the two individuals, but we are required to identify, and apparently stereotype, them by race.
I noticed some ill-used grammar in one of the statements from the teacher:
Teacher: “No, it’s not. Because you can’t not look at, you can’t look at the people and not acknowledge that there are racial differences.”
Using a double-negative and then immediately contradicting his double-negative. I would prefer the sentence, “Because you can look at and not acknowledge that there are racial differences.”
But what do I know since I’m just a restaurant manager.
Grammar is so bougie.
So says the notorious and revolutionary misspeller.
Och. My ancestors were champion misspellers. If you look at a MacLeod of Lewes Crest badge, you will see the motto: “I BIRN QUHIL I SE,” with a representation of the sun. Time out of mind, there are various theories as to what it means, depending on whether it is misspelling Gaelic, Norn, Latin, Scots English, or some combination of some or all of them. Today, many of us simply say, “We shall hold a light,” but literacy is a major thing among my folk. Even Donald J. Trump learned how to read.