If one has a good idea, and wants to make it into a policy for any group or organization or state or nation, that’s all very well . . . but you’d better choose those who’ll actually implement it very, very carefully. If you don’t, they can take the best idea in the world and screw it up out of all recognition.
California’s just learned that yet again, aided by feckless politicians who just don’t care. (If you need help understanding some of the contorted, made-up labels used in the article – I certainly did! – try this article for a glossary.)
In the fall of 2016, California’s then Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a mandate to develop an ethnic studies program for high schools in California. California’s public schools have the most ethnically diverse student body in the nation, with three-quarters of students belonging to minorities and speaking over 90 languages. Luis Alejo, the Assembly member who shepherded the bill through the 15 years required for its adoption, hailed the law, the first in the nation, as an opportunity to “give all students the opportunity to prepare for a diverse global economy, diverse university campuses and diverse workplaces,” adding, “Ethnic studies are not just for students of color.”
Elina Kaplan, a former high-tech manager who had just stepped down as senior VP of one of California’s largest affordable housing nonprofits, remembers agreeing wholeheartedly with the idea at the time. “The objective was to build bridges of understanding between people,” said Kaplan, an immigrant herself, who moved to California from the former Soviet Union with her family when she was 11. “This was as welcome as mom and apple pie. It offered students the chance to learn about the accomplishments of ethnic minorities, as well as to address issues of inequality and bigotry.”
But three years later, when the first draft of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) was released, Kaplan couldn’t believe what she was reading. In one sample lesson, she saw that a list of historic U.S. social movements—ones like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Criminal Justice Reform—also included the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement for Palestine (BDS), described as a “global social movement that currently aims to establish freedom for Palestinians living under apartheid conditions.” Kaplan wondered why a foreign movement, whose target was another country, would be mischaracterized as a domestic social movement, and she was shocked that in a curriculum that would be taught to millions of students, BDS’s primary goal—the elimination of Israel—was not mentioned. Kaplan also saw that the 1948 Israel War of Independence was only referred to as the “Nakba”—“catastrophe” in Arabic—and Arabic verses included in the sample lessons were insulting and provocative to Jews.
Kaplan … was further surprised to discover that a list of 154 influential people of color did not include Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, or Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, though it included many violent revolutionaries. There was even a flattering description of Pol Pot, the communist leader of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, who was responsible for the murder of a quarter of the Cambodian population during the 1970s.
Kaplan began calling friends. “Have you read this?” she asked, urging them to plow through the 600-page document. The language was bewildering. “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. …” This was the telltale jargon of critical race theory, a radical doctrine that has swept through academic disciplines during the last few decades.
The new curriculum, which will eventually be promulgated throughout the California school system of 6 million children, would “critique empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism … and other forms of power and oppression,” according to the proposal. It would “build new possibilities for post-imperial life that promotes collective narratives of transformative resistance.”
Capitalism was classified as a form of “power and oppression,” and although “classism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and transphobia” were also listed as forms of oppression, anti-Semitism was not. Jewish Americans were not even mentioned as a minority group.
It didn’t take long for Kaplan to realize that the education offered up by the ESMC had little in common with the program described at the time of the law’s passage. Instead, it was a crude pastiche of idiosyncratic neo-Marxism that advocated the end of capitalism and divided the world into a simple polarity of victims and oppressors.
. . .
Many of the 18 people chosen by the State Board of Education’s Instructional Quality Committee to create the ESMC hail from San Francisco State’s School of Ethnic Studies, and most are adherents of the radical critical ethnic studies movement who refer to themselves as scholar-activists.
Kaplan reports that State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond admitted in a 2020 meeting with Jewish groups that there were problems with the creation of this group that allowed it to be politicized, and we have put systems in place to make sure they do not recur.
Nevertheless, in 2020, Gov. Newsom signed into law AB 1460, which requires that every student in the Cal State system—the largest four-year public university system in the country, of which San Francisco State is a part—take a three-unit course in ethnic studies. The governor’s decision defied the recommendations of the university’s own chancellor, members of the university’s board of trustees, and the university’s academic senate, all of whom opposed the bill, objecting to the government’s unprecedented intrusion into the university’s curriculum.
There’s more at the link.
Tar. Feathers. Poles. Some assembly required.
If that won’t do, there’s always rope. Anything more would be merely wasteful expenditure of a valuable asset – something California is very good at, to be sure, but we don’t need to follow their example yet again.
Seriously, why would any parent want to subject their children to having that sort of arrant nonsense pumped into their heads? If you want to know where Antifa, and BLM, and all these weird and wonderful fringe groups came from, look no further. We’ve allowed our education system to be overrun by moonbats, and we’re now enjoying (?) the fruits of our neglect. To take it back, and cleanse it of their filth, and remake it into something of worth and value to society, is going to take a Herculean effort – if it’s possible at all. It may be simpler and easier to just fire everybody in the system, close down every school and college and university, and start again by appointing teachers and educators from scratch. Previous employment in the field should probably disqualify applicants from consideration – permanently.
Peter
As youth I ignored schooling but some of it clung to me and what I recall is the words of lore that made their way into our national fabric via myth, legend and fable. And now the Cali will reap what they sewed as industry and the middle class flee the barren lands of hate and mischance always laid at the feet of the white majority which is now, not so much a majority as a tinier minority leaving behind the shiite left by liberals like Newsome and Pelosi and Feinstein and Boxer and Willi Brown and K Harris and the rest of that ilk.
You know it won't end well and they'll be getting shoved down the deep wells, still alive for the fall screaming, 'what did we do'.
I won't miss any of them. I figure my bro and his family have plenty of time to get out before the collapse or ride it into red ruin and triumph like the Nazgul.
Who here seriously believes that Kaplan would have raised a stink if the Arab/Israeli/Palestinian stuff had not been present and it was just standard issue Diversity Good / Whitey Bad material?
Any takers? 😀
Beyond that, all true re bureaucratic incompetence *and* the tendency of radicals and special interest groups to capture every organization if not regularly purged with fire and sword.
In my undergrad years, I took a course in Philosophy of Education. The first day of class, the professor asked how many in the class were from the Dept. of Education (It was one of the larger schools at the Univ.) NOT ONE student. And this was a college where every graduate had a core requirement for twelve semester hours of philosophy.
I will always treasure my classical liberal arts education, though I've spent many years overcoming some of the tripe I encountered even way back then. We did learn how to think and read critically, and the academic skills I learned are invaluable today. And it is no wonder at all that those who majored in education haven't a clue about the brainwashing they've been fed. The Gramscian march through the institutions has been enormously successful.
Words have meanings. It’s impossible for 3/4ths of your students to be from a ethnic minority. That would only leave you 1/4th left. Which would, mathematically speaking make that 1/4th left also be a minority. You are either a majority or a minority and 1/4th can’t be a majority.
The war hasn't gone hot here but there is a war happening. The only thing holding up our economy is belief. That belief is failing rapidly.
Heinlein had wrote about how colleges (in particular UC Santa Cruz), were no longer a means of getting a good education, but rather just 4 years of glorified babysitting. And this was back in the 1970's.
Just makes me think some of what he wrote is slightly prophetic.