… and avert race war.

Dan Gelernter writes at American Greatness:

The New York City public school system spends $28,800 per student per year—more than anywhere else in the world. A brand-new public school teacher with a master’s degree and zero prior experience starts at $65,000 a year, plus benefits. And the children can’t read. …

A seven-year-old girl’s school teacher asked everyone in class to say what they wanted to be when they grew up. The girl said she wanted to be a mother. Her (female) teacher said her choice was wrong, apparently making her feel that it was not just incorrect, but morally unacceptable. The teacher actually made the child stand in front of the class as an example of a bad girl. …

This incident is not simply a questionable decision on the teacher’s part, nor is it a bad yet defensible judgment. It is child abuse. It is criminal behavior. The teacher should be in prison. She definitely shouldn’t be a teacher. And yet, given the lifelong protection she enjoys as a union member in the public school system, she will most likely go on doing her share to ruin the lives of dozens or hundreds or thousands more children—children from poor neighborhoods with no one to protect them. Children who are being sentenced to permanent lower-class status and a life of menial work, to depression and frustration and worse, by the sick, demented, and obscenely expensive criminal enterprise that is the New York City public school system.

Public expenditure on education has nothing to do with education …

Public education is a failure in every city across the entire country. ...

Every child should have an education. It does not follow that we need public schools. And in practice, public schools do not educate. It’s easy enough to see this from the national literacy and numeracy rates. The more schools spend, the less they succeed in teaching. This is without even touching on the dastardly political indoctrination that exposes our children to the socialist biases of their hardly-less-ignorant teachers.

If you were to abolish the Department of Education and also abolish every single public school in the nation, education would not cease. On the contrary, it might actually start happening. You would see, in short order, hundreds of new schools funded by donations both of money and of time—charity schools in the most basic and most important form of charity. These would be schools certified not by the government but by a demonstrable ability to teach children. Demonstrable, that is, to the parents themselves, not to a corrupt licensing board. …

If we took the future of the nation seriously, we would end public schools tomorrow. We would then take our young children, sit them down with the first and simplest of McGuffey’s English textbooks from the 1880s, and teach them to read.

Instead, right now, they are being taught that all races must hate the white race and avenge themselves upon it.

Public “education” is becoming intensive incitement to race war.

Example: California.

John Murawski writes, also at American Greatness:

California has struggled for five years to create a politically palatable “ethnic studies” curriculum that would teach high schoolers how systemic racism, predatory capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and other “structures of oppression” are foundational to American society.

Now, after more than 82,000 public comments, and four major rewrites, the state board of education is expected to approve the latest version this week, clearing the way for lawmakers to make a semester-long course in the material a graduation requirement for all of California’s 1.7 million high school students. …

The material emphasizing whites’ subjugation of nonwhites is not a conventional textbook subject, but an ideology with an activist political agenda. Revisions may never satisfy parents and teachers who believe public schools shouldn’t be in the business of teaching kids how to develop a “social consciousness” or using class time to pinpoint a student’s intersectional identity to determine where they fit on a hierarchy of power.

At the same time, ethnic studies activists are furious that their efforts at promoting social justice, and centering “voices of color” are being diluted by, as they put it, power structures such as “whiteness”, Zionism, and assimilationism.

The state’s guidelines grant teachers wide flexibility in how they teach the subject. Ethnic studies activists—including those who wrote the first, rejected draft of the curriculum—say high school teachers will have an escape clause to teach a watered-down version that the activists deride as a “Foods, Heroes & Holidays” and “all lives matter” pabulum. These advocates insist on hewing to a heroic narrative about how people of color have suffered from and fought against European capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. …

Practitioners have formed their own organization—the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Institute—to promote an “authentic” ethnic studies, a discipline born in the late 1960s out of student campus protests led by the Third World Liberation Front to end Eurocentrism in education.

We recommend our readers see for themselves what the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Institute is all about.

For the past year, these activists have been meeting in online sessions to hash-out strategy, expound upon their “liberatory” and “transformational” ideology, and encourage educators to teach the full-strength curriculum that the state has flunked. Their unguarded comments in numerous videos convey the combative tone and spirit of ethnic studies already evident in some California classrooms, and likely to be adopted by many more teachers regardless of the model curriculum approved by the state.

“Inside of the United States, native people have been actively fighting a long war to dismantle the United States,” said Stevie Ruiz, who teaches in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the California State University, Northridge, during a May 2020 online strategy session. “So then we can actually think about what happens if we honor native people’s acknowledgments and begin to tear apart the United States internally … What if we decide to call this place the United States no longer?” …

Ethnic studies is not a traditional school subject, but a movement and a philosophy best described as “narrative medicine,” “radical healing” and even a “way of life”. It’s distinguished from traditional classroom instruction by its emotional, immersive pedagogy designed to deprogram kids from European cultural assumptions, to make teenagers conscious of systemic inequities, and to reconnect them with forgotten ancestral knowledge.

Or what we would call atavistic superstition.

According to one of the Liberated Institute leaders, Theresa Montaño, a professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at Cal State Northridge, the group’s K-12 lesson plans should be available online for free this spring. … [Its]  material will be based on five themes: racialized intersectional identity, collective narratives, systems of power and oppression, resilience and resistance, and solidarity among people of color. …

In repeated expressions of frustration, [these] advocates attribute the state’s political compromises to a common enemy: “whiteness”—what they call the oppressive force that their movement and its precursors have been seeking to disempower for 500 years. “All of the attacks against the ESMC [Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum] came from the realms of whiteness and authoritarian whitesplaining,” read a statement Los Angeles public school intervention counselor Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona posted during her May presentation on ethnic studies and teacher preparation.

“Well-funded attempts at whitewashing the ESMC ranged from right-wing white nationalists at Breitbart, to Wall Street Journal white capitalists who deny the climate crisis, to white moderates who superficially may say they support ethnic studies, but only if it’s done in the way they ‘as gate-keeping white moderates’ say it needs to be done.” …

[They refer] Palestinian resistance to the state of Israel as an example of ethnic studies in action. The removal of those references from the state’s revised curriculum, and the addition of lessons about anti-Semitism, is seen by the advocates as emblematic of the way white power structures erase the histories of those they oppress. … [They expect] an anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions lesson to be included in the Liberated materials that the group is developing.

[Guadalupe Carrasco] Cardona is a longtime public school teacher and a veteran of California’s ethnic studies skirmishes, having been fired from a teaching position three years ago after some parents found out she was a member of a Marxist organization [Union del Barrio] that advocates political revolution, emulates Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, and vows “to crush all forms of oppression and reactionary tendencies”.

She was fired for that – then! But would she be now, in the Biden era? Almost certainly not.

Rejecting the state’s assimilationist bent, Cardona suggested that ethnic studies has a totally different focus than the current equity push to get people of color into middle management positions.

“They just want little youth to want this little piece of this American pie because that’s what they think social justice is: put black, brown, indigenous bodies in college, put them into these corporate positions and have them do the same old thing that this country does,” she said in a May podcast. “And we’re saying, No, there’s something wrong with this system. We want black, brown, and indigenous bodies in universities to learn about it and to transform and to end all of this oppression, not to continue the roles of the oppressor.”

Another flashpoint in the 2019 model curriculum was the exclusive focus on people of color, with no mention of European ethnicities that were subject to discrimination and genocide. The experiences of European groups, including Jews and Armenians, deserve to be studied, the advocates say, but they have no connection to the ethnic studies movement, whose true focus is the worldview and struggle of people of color against white supremacy. …

According to one of several definitions of “race” provided, American society comprises two opposing racial factions: “In the United States today, races very broadly break down as people of color (POC) and white people.” …

It is assumed by many in the field that California’s standards could serve as a national model for years to come.

California’s push to make a semester-long ethnic studies class a graduation requirement for all of its 1.74 million high school students in 1,322 high schools would be an exponential expansion for a course taught to 20,500 students in 314 high schools during the 2018-19 academic year.

Ethnic studies advocates … see encouraging signs in President Biden’s choice of education secretary, Miguel Cardona, considered a champion of the cause who will be well-positioned to put federal muscle behind it. As Connecticut’s commissioner of education last year, Cardona oversaw that state’s adoption of a requirement that all high schools offer courses in African American, Black, Puerto Rican, and Latino studies. …

Some warn that the ethnic studies curriculum amounts to political indoctrination, violates state anti-discrimination policy, and at times borders on child abuse.

These critics are concerned that kids won’t be required to just study the material, take a multiple-choice test, write a paper and move on; they may be required to espouse progressive politics as a condition of passing the class and graduating from high school.

“It’s a totalitarian worldview that is every bit as much a faith community as any religion,” said Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, director of AMCHA Initiative, an anti-Semitism watchdog group in Santa Cruz, California. “In a public school, it really is the imposition of a state religion,” she said. “This kind of proselytizing has no place in public schools.” …

Students are taught to see themselves not as individuals but through their identity. And after they start seeing themselves through the prism of race, gender, and other intersectional modes of power and oppression, they are taught that their identity is exposed and vulnerable to malevolent external forces.

And what follows from that? Tolerance? Peace and loving kindness?

Or an attempt at the genocide of Whites on the continent of America?