How the left is further taking over public schools in Minnesota
This sort of educational project is being exposed more and more now, but for a long time such things have been happening outside of people’s awareness. And that was part of the left’s plan.
It’s hard to say how many states have experienced this degree of change in the goals of public education. What percent of the whole? Is it happening only in bluer-than-blue states, or has it penetrated elsewhere? My guess is the latter, at least to some extent.
Here’s part of the story in Minnesota (MDE stands for the Minnesota Department of Education):
When MDE appointed the standards drafting committee, it took the unprecedented step of excluding academic subject matter experts in history, civics, geography and economics. Instead, it stacked the committee with political activists, community organizers and their allies, who dominated the process.
These activists’ goal was not to revise and improve “rigorous standards” in “core academic subjects” in our state’s K-12 public schools, as law requires. On the contrary, they view Minnesota’s public education system — as drafting committee member Jonathan Hamilton, of Education for Liberation Minnesota, has described it — as a “white supremacist puzzle that must be taken apart and exposed for the lie it is (emphasis added).”
Activists’ weapon of choice in taking our schools apart is Ethnic Studies. Forget about teaching students about the historical leaders and events that shaped our democracy, like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and America-led victories in World War II. MDE’s new “fifth strand” trains K-12 students to view our nation’s social and political institutions with suspicion and hostility and seeks to enlist them in what Hamilton has referred to as a “political struggle” to change the social, economic, and cultural system that underlies our polity.
How will Ethnic Studies play out in Minnesota classrooms?
When the Minnesota Legislature adopted our state’s social studies standards in 2004, it authorized MDE to revise them every 10 years to “raise academic expectations for students, teachers and schools.” By law, state standards must be both “objective” and “measurable,” and “consistent with” the U.S. and Minnesota Constitutions.
But MDE’s proposed standards fail on all these fronts. Under the new Ethnic Studies standards, one of which is entitled “Resistance,” for example, students are instructed to “organize” to resist America’s “systemic and coordinated exercises of power” against “marginalized,” oppressed groups.
“Education for Liberation Minnesota” – Minnesota is in need of liberation, but not the kind that Jonathan Hamilton seeks. No wonder the left is so against Florida, DeSantis, and what’s happening there, as well as demonizing writers such as Christopher Rufo who have been hard at work exposing the left’s racist education game. The left is well aware that most Americans are against this sort of pedagogy, but the hope was to accomplish it under the sneaky guise of something that sounds righteous such as “ethnic studies.” Now more and more of America is becoming alerted and alarmed.
I am reminded of some passages from Allan Bloom’s prescient 1980s book The Closing of the American Mind. He knew what was happening and what it meant, and tried to warn us. Here’s a passage of Bloom’s that I quoted in this previous post:
Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more or less explicit, more or less a result of reflection,; but even the neutral subject, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person…Over the history of our republic, there have obviously been changes of opinion as to what kind of man is best for our regime…A powerful attachment to the letter and spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each man’s reason, was the goal of the education of democratic man…
But openness…eventually won out over natural rights, partly through a theoretical critique, partly because of a political rebellion against nature’s last constraints. Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new. What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders being charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests. I asked my first history professor in the university, a very famous scholar, whether the picture he gave us of George Washington did not have the effect of making us despise our regime. “Not at all,” he said, “it doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” To which I rejoined, “But you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” He got angry, and that was the end of it. He was comforted by a gentle assurance that the values of democracy are part of the movement of history and did not require his elucidation or defense. He could carry on his historical studies with the moral certitude that they would lead to greater openness and hence more democracy. The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.
In my post, I added this observation:
I find that passage about the obtuseness of Bloom’s history professor astounding as well as very descriptive of how we got here. The complete dominance of the radical professors as far as numbers go are a more recent manifestation, although there have long been some. But Bloom was a student of that history professor back in the mid-1940s, having been born in 1930 but having also been precocious enough to get his undergraduate degree at the age of eighteen from the University of Chicago after having entered at fifteen. The unnamed history professor Bloom describes in that passage was almost certainly not a radical. At most he was probably only mildly liberal. Perhaps he even passed for what was then known as conservative. If so, he was also unaware of the lessons to which Bloom refers to in that last sentence I quoted, even though – as Bloom notes – they had just experienced those lessons in WWII. The professor did not see any relation between what he was saying about the Founders and what would ultimately undermine our republic and all the values he probably held dear.
But Bloom, his student, saw it, even back then, even at so young an age.
Note also the tone of barely-restrained sarcasm; Bloom seems to have had a certain amount of contemptuous anger at those academics who could have been so stupid as to not have realized the effects of their throwing out the precious baby and leaving the dirty bathwater (it seems his first history professor was none too happy with his challenges, either). As the book goes on, some of the best passages involve Bloom’s description of the faculty’s craven abdication during the student uprisings of the 1960s, when he was one of those who tried (in vain, as it turned out) to hold his finger in the dike of the best traditions of Western Civilization.
So here we are.
This has been a long process starting with Bill Ayers. It shows how determined and patient the left is. First step, take over all the Education debts in higher education. I didn’t notice the change until about 2005 when the older members of the Ed department at my college retired. They were a great group who I worked with regularly. All of a sudden there 3 out of the closet communists running the show. The Ed curriculum became a model of indoctrination where like many Ed debts, they filtered out any students who didn’t have “correct attitude”. They been cranking out K-12 indoctrinators ever since. Ingenious and insidious. There’s been now almost a generation of woke teachers implanted in K-12 and school boards.
This is the legislature being otiose.
Whenever I read about this stuff I remember an acquaintance from the early 1980s. A left-wing activist, she was quite open about her intentions to propagandize the young by getting between them and their parents, who were “hopeless.” I recall my wife and me being mildly shocked by her absolute certainty that she had the right to do this. Last I heard of her she had divorced her decent, intelligent, hard-working husband and was studying for some sort of “ministry” in a progressive Christian denomination.
No doubt doing it in many other states
I read Bloom’s book in 1987. I had been in college in 1956 to 61. I saw none of this although I was an English major for a while. I am convinced much of this was caused by the Vietnam War and student deferments. Leftist students were anti-war and sought deferments. Normal and conservative students tended to allow themselves to be drafted or, like I did, join the military reserves. The result was that the leftists students stayed on, got PhDs and became the next generation professors. Some, growing up with too much money like Bill Ayres and Bernardine Dohrn, became radicals and have been rewarded.
Nothing about this story surprises me. Such is the state of public K-12 education, particularly is blue environs (but depressingly, many red ones as well).
Mac’s example is quite common I would say. Who goes into K-12 education as a career? Disproportionately, people who are above average in intelligence, but not geniuses or anywhere close. Majority female, they likely have a strong desire to help and uplift. Some are radicalized into leftism in their own K-12 years. But many others go into university largely a blank slate. Oh the mischief the Ayers of the education departments do to them (and at this point I am guessing no more than 10% of all education departments in the country are even liberal dominated…none are conservative…they’re virtually all controlled by cultural Marxists.
More than any other civil institution, K-12 education shapes and formulates our social and cultural norms…in monumental ways. And more than almost any other institution (except for universities), it is utterly and completely in the grip of the left.
What is the solution? I don’t know.
John Heyward aka Doc Zero has posted two recent Calls to Arms for the parents of America, mostly for Republicans / conservatives, but also pertinent to Democrats who have not yet gone over to the Dark Side.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1517150710898470923.html
April 21, 2022
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1517484286273900546?refresh=1650667109
April 22, 2022
*”Talk about disinformation” refers to a recent conference on that topic, in which Democrat speakers (there were no bona fide conservatives) discuss all the alleged instances perpetrated by the Right while studiously omitting any of the actual hoaxes of the Left.
Every major conservative pundit has covered it, generally with the focus of praising the few genuine reporters left in the country — students at the University of Chicago.
https://thechicagothinker.com/the-chicago-thinker-staged-a-media-regime-takedown-this-week-heres-how-we-did-it/
I am convinced much of this was caused by the Vietnam War and student deferments. Leftist students were anti-war and sought deferments. Normal and conservative students tended to allow themselves to be drafted or, like I did, join the military reserves. The result was that the leftists students stayed on, got PhDs and became the next generation professors.
Graduate school deferments were discontinued at the end of 1967. Student deferments were replaced with the draft lottery at the end of 1969. Not seeing how this could have such a profound effect.
They were a great group who I worked with regularly. All of a sudden there 3 out of the closet communists running the show. The Ed curriculum became a model of indoctrination where like many Ed debts, they filtered out any students who didn’t have “correct attitude”. They been cranking out K-12 indoctrinators ever since. Ingenious and insidious. There’s been now almost a generation of woke teachers implanted in K-12 and school boards.
This happened at my old employer. Again, the problem is trustee nonfeasance. They should have noticed what was happening and shut the education department down. Faculty do not have a right to continued employment in those circumstances.
I don’t have much sympathy for Russia. They were mostly responsible for WW1 and they were co conspirators in WW2. Hitler and Stalin deserved each other. Too bad they both couldn’t lose.
Graduate school deferments were discontinued at the end of 1967. Student deferments were replaced with the draft lottery at the end of 1969. Not seeing how this could have such a profound effect.
By 1967 I was finished with medical school and was an intern. I saw this effect early in the 60s. Maybe you are not old enough to have seen this. I went to basic training in 1959.
Whatever degree it’s taken hold, it is far too much. I’ve spilt a lot of ink here on other matters and I stand by what I said, but part of what I said is that the US’s problems are of far greater urgency and threat for American patriots (and frankly most of the world) than almost anything else that happens elsewhere. Some may call it rash, but I fear Vladimir Putin and all of his however many nukes less than I do the DNC and the corrosive radicalization going on here.
The present is a covenant between past and future, and the Left has worked so very hard to destroy that now. Our inheritors will suffer for it, as will the wider world. But some would rather rule over the ashes…
@Robert Shotzberger I agree except for “mostly responsible for WW1.” That, I think, quite firmly belongs to the Central Powers of Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary, with honorable mention being to the Serbian terrorist network(s) that actually committed the Sarajevo Murders.
Germany and Austria-Hungary on some level realized that the Triple Entente powers (and some of their other hates like-strangely enough- America) had more functional economies than they did and could to some degree simply wait them out. So they started making a lot of very aggressive and brinkman type courting of war in stuff like the Agadir Crisis, while the head of the Austro-Hungarian Military ( a truly deranged lunatic named Conrad von Hoetzendorff) proposed “Preemptive War” every year, for more than a decade.
The Sarajevo Murders just seemed like the right opportunity to try and force a decision by- among other things- obliterating Serbia.
What I also note is that the German government outright lied to its people and the Reichstag about what the Russians told them and were responsible for widening the war (indeed, the Germans declared war on Russia, France, and Belgium before Russia had declared war on Austria-Hungary).
“The complete dominance of the radical professors as far as numbers go are a more recent manifestation,” Subject-verb agreement failure.
The only reason this huge political battle is taking shape right now is that the dumbass arrogant “experts” forgot that when they locked you in your house with the kids for a year or more, you were inevitably going to notice what they were getting via “remote learning.”
So no, the indoctrinators will not look at an epic electoral drubbing in the next election and think: “Gee, the public is really opposed to our agenda, and they just proved they’re serious. I guess we should heed the will of the people and go back to teaching math and stuff.”
They will think they have a pretty good chance of beating your new elected representatives into submission. They’re already redoubling their efforts to make you feel isolated and overwhelmed with their media domination, nicely setting the stage for Republican Failure Theater.
This. Many of the people upset about this situation refuse to grasp how long it has been going on. Most of them went through similar brainwashing, it just wasn’t as extreme in their day. In order to admit to themselves the depth of the problem in the current reality they will need to call into question many concerns that go to the very fiber of their being. It’s like changing both a religion AND a culture. Very, very few have the stomach for it.
There are multiple avenues that are available to fight the radical influence over K-12. Number one, and seldom thought of, don’t hire anyone with an Ed degree as a teacher. Only hire prospective teachers with Math, Physics, Biology, History, etc. degrees. Then provide them with six weeks training on how to set up a teaching plan, how to run a class, and the other nuts and bolts of dealing with children.
Second, and much harder, nuke the book publishers. I have no idea of how to do this. A possible strategy, which requires taking over the school board, is to select books that are more aligned with the community.
There are probably other ideas out there, but the important part is very local control forcing the radicals to work on many fronts.
And finally, every high school in America should teach “The Gulag Archipelago” and the “Black book of Communism”. It should also be made clear that Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism were all brothers under the covers. The greatest evils by far of the 20th century were all committed by the left. Much as people hate Putin, he had the good sense to make the GA required reading for all Russian students.
Soviet designed templates back to the 70s
http://invisibleserfscollar.com/
Frog already roasted send othersx
https://dailycaller.com/2022/04/22/california-parent-third-grade-teacher-lgbt-crt/
Even in red states
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/04/22/the-desperation-of-democrats-surfaces-in-effort-to-block-ga-representative-marjorie-taylor-greene-from-reelection/
Evil walks the halls of our schools, doesn’t it?
After reading this article, I went to AceOfSpades and scrolled down a few screens to the heading “Standardized English is Racist.” While it may prove painful to do so, read the article following that heading and be sure you get all the way down to the three videos of college students participating in “debate” tournaments. While the first is bizarre, and perhaps can be dismissed because it’s so ethnic-focused, do view the other two, one of which is a debate pitting Berkeley v Harvard.
Words fail me.
After the above, I went to AceOfSpades and scrolled down to the goose picture, kept scrolling down to “Racism is Everywhere . . .” scrolled a little bit more and clicked on “continue reading” and then scrolled down to the heading “Standardized English is Racist.”
I wish Ace had permalinks to the contents.
While it may prove painful to do so, read the article following that heading and be sure you get all the way down to the three videos of college students participating in “debate” tournaments. While the first is bizarre, and perhaps can be dismissed because it’s so ethnic-focused, do view the other two, one of which is a debate pitting Berkeley v Harvard.
Words fail me.
A Necessary but not sufficient solution is school vouchers where the funding follows the student does not go to the government schools. Unfortunately, many private school teachers are also leftist bent on indoctrinating children so parents really have to investigate what is being taught.
An alternative is homeschooling and although that has increased dramatically in the last year or two it’s still only a small fraction of students. I’ve always been surprised how highly educated people do not feel competent to educate their children.
If you want to support homeschooling consider donating to the homeschooling legal defense association hslda.org.
@ Cap’n Rusty – AceHQ is hard to navigate sometimes.
The direct link to the post you mentioned is what you get when you right-click “continue reading” and open it in a new tab.
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/398733.php#398733
There is no easy way that I know of to link to an internal segment of a post.
Thanks, AesopFan