The California Education Department’s model Ethnic Studies Curriculum plans to teach children capitalism is a “system of power” and “oppression,” equal to “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” and “racism.”
The department will be accepting public comments on the model curriculum, which defines ethnic studies as “the interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity with an emphasis on experiences of people of color in the United States,” until August 15. Comments may be made via the Public Input Template found here.
The model curriculum may be difficult for many parents of school children to comprehend because it relies on language the radical left now considers essential to achieve its political goals.
For example, the introduction of the document uses the term “hxrstory,” instead of “history,” in keeping with the gender ideology that states “womxn” must not be defined in terms of their relation to men.
According to the model curriculum, “Ethnic studies is xdisciplinary,” and its writers add:
Ethnic Studies is about people whose cultures, hxrstories, and social positionalities are forever changing and evolving. Thus, Ethnic Studies also examines borders, borderlands, mixtures, hybridities, nepantlas, double consciousness, and reconfigured articulations, even within and beyond the various names and categories associated with our identities. People do not fit neatly into boxes, and identity is complex.
One of the recommended methods of teaching the Ethnic Studies model curriculum to K-12 students is through “democratizing the classroom.”
“Ethnic Studies educators democratize their classrooms by creating a learning environment where both students and teachers are equal active participants in the co-constructing knowledge,” the writers state, enabling “students to be recognized and valued as knowledge producers alongside their educators, while simultaneously placing an emphasis on the development of democratic values and collegiality.”
The writers of the Ethnic Studies model curriculum say their goal is to:
… equip all students with the skills and knowledge to think critically about the world around them and to tell their own stories, empower students to be engaged socially and politically, enable students to develop a deep appreciation for cultural diversity and inclusion, and aids in the eradication of bigotry, hate, and racism.
Williamson Evers, a former George W. Bush administration education department official, writes in an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal the California document “includes faddish social-science lingo like “cis-heteropatriarchy” that may make sense to radical university professors and activists but doesn’t mean much to the regular folks who send their children to California’s public schools.”
“It is difficult to comprehend the depth and breadth of the ideological bias and misrepresentations without reading the whole curriculum—something few will want to do,” he adds.
Evers, currently a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, further observed about the document’s content:
Teachers are encouraged to cite the biographies of “potentially significant figures” such as Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon and Bobby Seale. Convicted cop-killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur are also on the list. Students are taught that the life of George Jackson matters “now more than ever.” Jackson, while in prison, became “a revolutionary warrior for Black liberation and prison reform.” The Latino section’s people of significance include Puerto Rican nationalists Oscar López Rivera, a member of a paramilitary group that carried out more than 130 bomb attacks, and Lolita Lebrón, who was convicted of attempted murder in a group assault that wounded five congressmen.
The document’s writers say their work is “rooted in multimillennial people of color intellectual traditions.” They hail the “activism and intellectual thought” of individuals such “W.E.B. DuBois” and “Mary McLeod Bethune,” both of whom were well-known African Americans who supported eugenicist Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, in the development of her “Negro Project” in 1939. Sanger worked to bring birth control to blacks in an effort to reduce their population, selling it as a solution to poverty. She promoted her theory of “eliminating the unfit,” and also condemned charitable organizations that she believed were elevating the very population that needed to be weeded out.
Evers writes the California’s Ethnic Studies model curriculum has no intention of teaching “objective history.”
“Rather, it’s training students to become ideological activists and proponents of identity politics,” he says.
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