Parents Outraged After Students Assigned ‘White Privilege Survey’

Parents of students at one Oregon high school are outraged over an assignment asking students to fill out a “White Privilege Survey.”

The assignment was for a Literature Composition class at Aloha High School, KATU reported Thursday.

The survey included statements such as, “I can be in the company of people of my race most of the time,” “I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me,” and “I am never asked to speak for all the people in my racial group,” asking students to score them on a scale of 0-5 based on how often they felt the ideas were true.

“I think he should be learning actual education and not be a part of some social experiment or some teacher’s political agenda,” said parent Jason Schmidt, whose son is in the class, to KATU.

“With the amount of money we pay for schools, they should be educating, not indoctrinating our students about the latest political fad or political agenda a teacher wants to get across,” Schmidt added.

School officials defended the assignment, saying that the class was meant for students to explore social issues.

“The survey is just one activity that engages students in exploring this area,” Beaverton School District spokeswoman Maureen Wheeler said to NWCN. Wheeler said that the class covers issues in relation to race, class, sexuality, and religion so students could have the ability to “gain empathy, understanding and to build bridges.”

Other parents defended the school’s statement.

“I want [my daughter] to have opinions. Whether it’s for or against, you have to create those, but you can’t without good information so I applaud teachers getting out that information,” parent Sarah Rios-Lopez responded.

Earlier this year, a public school teacher was suspended without pay for giving her seventh-grade students a privilege survey in Spanish class, The Daily Caller reported.