Who gives a shit about educating kids when the point is turn them into political activists for the Left.
And don’t kid yourself that this is not happening in New Zealand

Looking at the first two posts on this subject – “When The Culture War Comes For The Kids – A New York City Tale” and “a Left and Right response” – I couldn’t help thinking of a famous school experiment conducted in the 1960’s, The Third Wave, which was turned into a movie in 2008. That link is to the teacher who, for one week, as part of studying Nazi Germany, basically turned his class into a totalitarian mob. In a 1972 essay he describes encountering one of his 200 students years later:

We just stood there exchanging smiles when without a conscious command I raised my hand in curved position. The salute was give. Two comrades had met long after the war. The Third Wave was still alive. “Mr. Jones do you remember the Third Wave?” I sure do, it was one of the most frightening events I ever experienced In the classroom. It was also the genesis of a secret that I and two hundred students would sadly share for the rest of our lives.

Read that essay, and then look again at that Tweet from a NY teacher in 2021. Book burning, or at least its equivalent in 2019 is also part of the scene:

Melissa Barnett, a supervisor of English Language Arts in the Washington Township School District in New Jersey, caused outrage on Twitter by tweeting out a photo of hundreds of books in dumpsters. “This week, dumpsters were filled with books that should have left decades ago @TWPSchools and replaced with engaging, relevant, culturally diverse literature.”

Books “that should have left decades ago” included “Hiroshima”, a famous book about six survivors by Pulitzer Prize winner John Hersey, “The Ox-Bow Incident” by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, a harrowing novel about ordinary people drawn into a murderous lynch mob, Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, Nineteeen Eighty Four, by George Orwell, Slaughter House Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, Dante’s Inferno, and Night, by Elie Wiesel.

It was claimed that they’d been re-ordered – possibly along with new books that were boasted of by the teachers, such as Educated, about being abused in a homeschooling survivalist family, The House on Mango Street, which is full of child abuse, sex, and rape that CSM  calls “gritty material”, I Am the Messenger, “loaded with swearing and sexual references and fantasies”, and Bodega Dreams about a very Christian girl discovering her sexuality. Now these all may have positive attributes in this day and age – but why was the first list dumped?

Because reading that first set might cause kids to think critically about mobs and tribes, which doesn’t help produce collectivists, as was clearly happening across the country on the West Coast where things are likely even worse, The Child Soldiers of Portland:

There are only a few places on earth where radicals and their children ritualistically burn the American flag and chant “Death to America”: Tehran, Baghdad, Beirut, Kabul, Ramallah—and Portland, Oregon.
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Famously the “whitest city in America,” Portland has become the unlikely headquarters of race radicalism in the United States. The city has elevated white guilt into a civic religion; its citizens have developed rituals, devotions, and self-criticisms to fight “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.” The culminating expression of this orthodoxy is violence: street militias, calling themselves “antiracists” and “antifascists,” smash windows and torch the property of anyone transgressing the new moral law.
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By perpetuating the narrative that America is fundamentally evil, steeping children in race theory, and lionizing the Portland rioters, they have consciously pushed students in the direction of race-based “revolution.” In the language of the Left, the political education programs in Portland-area districts constitute a “school-to-radicalism pipeline”: a training ground for child soldiers. This is not hyperbole: some of the most active and violent anarchist groups in Portland are run by teenagers…

Who gives a shit about educating kids when the point is turn them into political activists for the Left.

That’s hardly surprising, given that nearby Washington State birthed the Struggle Sessions of Evergreen University back in 2017, but which were already exploding at universities across the land. And that naturally includes teacher’s colleges:

More than half of public school teachers in the United States have earned an advanced degree in education. Master’s programs in education have on average churned out nearly 150,000 teachers annually over the past seven years. These programs are increasingly focused on changing how educators and students view American history.

At Harvard, aspiring teachers “learn to change the world” in courses like Critical Race Theory in Education. Graduate students in education at UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania are required to take diversity, equity, and inclusion courses. Penn also offers diversity and inclusion as a focus for graduate students. Harvard’s Graduate School of Education—the nation’s top program for future educators, according to U.S. News and World Report—offers courses such as “Emancipatory Inquiry”; “Power and Pedagogy: Self, Society, and Transformation”; and “Race, Education, and the Roots of Inequality in the United States.”

Ah yes, good old Critical Race Theory (CRT), which leads to crap teaching in multiple ways:

Once, in a course on education policy and pedagogy, Kinnett argued that teachers shouldn’t be afraid to fail students who don’t perform to standard. A peer chimed in and said Kinnett was “blinded” by his white privilege, as white teachers can’t understand obstacles that minority students must overcome to succeed in school. The lambasting went on for about five minutes.

“I was confused,” said Kinnett, who is part Cherokee. “She went off on why white educators needed to second-guess themselves in everything they’re doing.”

CRT, primarily expounded by the piece of human excrement known as Ibram X. Kendi, and which I’ve written about in a number of posts but which a single 2021 article captures well, was being ripped apart even back then in articles such as A Partial List of Errors (Reason Magazine):

Kendi’s antiracism ideology is pernicious. He divides the world into segregationists, assimilationists, and antiracists. The assimilationists, like the segregationists, are in Kendi’s telling all racists (pages xii-xiii). This includes almost everyone prominent who has ever worked for civil rights, including Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois (at least until he became a Communist), Martin Luther King, Jr., and more. Any book that depicts these individuals as racists should raise more than a few eyebrows before getting assigned to middle-schoolers.

And How to Talk Yourself into Believing a Lie (Commentary Magazine), which traced its beginnings…

Long before that term was popularized outside of academic circles, American Civil Liberty Union volunteers were publicly lobbying the organization to abandon its “rigid stance” in favor of free-speech absolutism and to ditch the notion that “colorblind logic” could deliver true racial justice. Before it was CRT, it was the University of California system seeking to stigmatize “microaggressions,” including ideas like “America is the land of opportunity,” “I believe the most qualified person should get the job,” and “gender plays no part in who we hire.”… We didn’t quite have the term for it yet when universities were establishing “safe spaces,” by which they meant racially segregated spaces. 

… what it had become…

It’s now a pedagogy, the “multifaceted and interdisciplinary field of critical whiteness studies, the study of white racial identities in the context of white supremacy, in education.” Under the guise that “children between the ages of 2 and 4 can start showing racial biases,” elementary school children are being taught that a person’s external features tell us all we need to know about their histories, personalities, behavior patterns, and, ultimately, their futures (by their instructors’ own admission).

… and noted the rising counter-blast to this crap from parents themselves after the 2020 C-19m lockdowns revealed to them what their kids were being taught:

The backlash against CRT is very real. The notion, for example, that the incensed parents who are descending on school-board meetings in droves have been bamboozled by the Heritage Foundation betrays an unfamiliarity with both how local politics is conducted and the attention parents pay to their children’s education. NBC is one of the first national outlets to even address what has rapidly become a national phenomenon: the outrage over a consensus forged behind closed doors during a once-in-a-century pandemic. On the local level,  dispatch  after  dispatch  after dispatch chronicles this organic phenomenon and the surprise with which it has taken supporters of a race-conscious curriculum.

So bad was it that by mid 2021 Kendi himself was backtracking, claiming that he had never wanted to teach that White parents were “inherently racist”. The article at the link demonstrates what bullshit that claim is.

But it’s not just academics, activists and then teachers that have resulted in this. We also reached this point because of ordinary people on school boards, All The Lovely People:

I know many of these people. They’re all lovely. Boards everywhere are populated with delightful, successful people who would be wonderful table partners at a dinner party. Politically, they are largely centrists. And yet, woke perversities and the insanity of Critical Race Theory are being institutionalized on their watch.
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First, about a decade ago, boards made a laudable effort to diversify themselves. In the process, they got what they asked for, which was not merely skin color diversity but opinion diversity. At least, they thought they wanted that. Or perhaps they thought their new members would smile and keep to themselves, just happy to be there.
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But this time was different. You see, if the extremist voices are “of color,” it changes the social dynamic entirely. Remember, we are dealing with Lovely People here. Lovely People are virtuous. Lovely People don’t make a fuss. Lovely People embrace diversity, and they want to be sure you know that. So much easier to go along. Plus, these new advocates for social justice were just so damn passionate. They pushed their agendas with vigor.
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Conservatives don’t do these things. Or rarely, anyway. They get outworked, out hustled, and outshouted.

‘Twas ever so. Welcome to the National Party. I loved this bit:

Many of the radical changes that have happened in our institutions also happened during the Trump administration. This is no coincidence. You see, Lovely People couldn’t be seen to be Trump supporters. In places like Manhattan it was social suicide. Lovely People didn’t approve.

As such, the propaganda that parents were being deceived in their reactionary ways didn’t hold up too well in 2022 when CRT proponents (including the MSM) tried to imply that Muslim parents had been tricked into opposition by those nasty old Christians. and by the end of that year the results began to show in practical ways via elections such as one in South Carolina between a Democrat, Lisa Ellis, with twenty two years of teaching (“Ellis maintained that those who profess to be hunting down proponents of C.R.T. in schools are “chasing ghosts.”) vs. one Ellen Weaver, with no teaching experience who advocated for public funding of charter schools, private-school vouchers, homeschooling, and micro-schools:

The latter won, and it wasn’t even close: as of this writing, Weaver has fifty-five per cent of the vote to Ellis’s forty-three.

Well that’s all great, and Kendi has since fallen from grace badly, as grifters often do – but the theory lives on, as do those teaching courses, as they have for decades (read the whole thing):

 Thirteen years ago, [2009] I wrote about the University of Minnesota’s short-lived requirement in its education programs for all future teachers to confess their woke sins as a condition of getting credentialed. Columnist Katherine Kersten blew the whistle on this effort almost exactly 13 years ago, in fact:
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Future teachers must also recognize and denounce the fundamental injustices at the heart of American society, says the task group. From a historical perspective, they must “understand that … many groups are typically not included” within America’s “celebrated cultural identity,” and that “such exclusion is frequently a result of dissimilarities in power and influence.” In particular, aspiring teachers must be able “to explain how institutional racism works in schools.”

To me the key takeaway from that report is that athough the effort was stopped by an outcry the advocates moved ahead anyway, quietly, to deliver what we’re dealing with today, as FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) predicted in 2009:

If the Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group achieves its stated goals, the result will be political and ideological screening of applicants, remedial re-education for those with the “wrong” views and values, and withholding of degrees from those upon whom the university’s political reeducation efforts proved ineffective.

In the face of that the real question is whether the schools, especially the Public Schools, can be rescued from all this?