Facebook CEO and billionaire Mark Zuckerberg has successfully continued his quest to mine data, but this time, via schools. Zuckerberg partnered with leftist elites to get into schools by convincing educators they needed big tech to make children go woke, according to a new book.
Author Kenny Xu explains in his new book School of Woke how big tech, big money, and left-wing political elites have played a role in getting Critical Race Theory established in schools across the country, according to a report by New York Post.
Critical Race Theory is a woke academic movement that teaches children the United States is fundamentally racist, and that they must view every social interaction and person in terms of race in order to be “antiracist.”
In his book, Xu explains how Alexander “Xan” Tanner — a Zuckerberg acolyte, and the husband of Merrick Garland’s daughter — co-founded Panorama Education, which bill itself as a software company, but is actually an educational technology company whose lead business model is data, specifically data about children.
Tanner had teamed up with his fellow Yale graduates Aaron Feuer and David Carel, to create a student-surveying platform focused on the concept of “social-emotional learning,”
Xu explains in his book:
There’s nothing technologically savvy about Tanner’s product, which could have been created on SurveyMonkey. But strangely, Zuckerberg chose Tanner out of many potential investment opportunities and elected to fund him. Tanner ended up raising more than $16 million personally from the tech billionaire and $76 million from others by using Zuckerberg’s name between the years 2017 and 2021, as Forbes reported.
Zuckerberg had a very intense interest in “fixing” public schools, and his $1 billion Startup: Education fund, which he established in 2012, was actively looking to invest in educational do-gooders like Tanner. The fund was made to “[improve] education for the nation’s most underserved children.” Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, believed that they could “solve” education in America by leveraging what he knew best — the power of big business.
Once Tanner took the job, Zuckerberg assigned him his first task:
Zuckerberg asked him to tackle what had previously been an intractable problem: how to persuade America’s public-school boards to give the fund access to private data about their children. After all, the last time Zuckerberg spent big money on education — in a widely publicized takeover of the Newark, NJ, public schools, in 2012 — he watched his $200 million disappear into a black hole of mismanagement and graft.
After years of pitching and trying to persuade school boards to adopt his Zuckerberg‑backed surveying product, Tanner discovered that the way to get his foot in the door was to go woke.
He targeted the most progressive school districts in the country, and ended up convincing schools that they needed data on “racism” in order to help children with their “social-emotional health.”
New documents leaked from Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) in Virginia revealed that Panorama had signed a five-year $2.4 million deal with FCPS to conduct surveys asking students about how they are being targeted due to their race and gender.
Panorama even asked questions like “Some people describe themselves as transgender when their sex at birth does not match the way they think or feel about their gender. Are you transgender?”
Breitbart News will continue to report on Big Tech’s efforts to turn schoolchildren into woke zombies.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.