In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire, an avowed Marxist, dismissed arguments that curriculum in the public schools be balanced, contending that there really is no such thing as a neutral educational system. Instead, schools should be a tool to make students into agents of social change.
Along with the indoctrination pervasive in the liberal mainstream media, the popular culture of “entertainment,” and college campuses, this attempt to radicalize the young begins in the early grades.
A prime example is found in Santa Barbara, California, where parents have opted to sue Just Communities, which they contend is a left-wing hate group promoting anti-white, anti-male, and anti-Christian propaganda in the Santa Barbara Unified School District (SBUSD). The parents have formed a nonprofit organization, Fair Education Santa Barbara (FESB), to fight the curriculum in federal court, arguing that it is “radical, discriminatory, and illegal.”
“Teachers, parents and students have confidentially expressed their concerns that … [the] discriminatory curriculum has led to increased racial animosity toward Caucasian teachers and students,” Eric Early, Fair Education’s attorney, wrote in a letter to the school’s lawyer.
The curriculum promotes the typical left-wing view of America — the country systematically oppresses certain groups such as non-whites, women, non-Christians, homosexuals, and the poor. Early expressed hope that the lawsuit would curb a “creeping, social justice warrior, alt-left takeover of the Santa Barbara Unified School District.”
Such propaganda is not cheap for the district and its taxpaying parents. The lawsuit argues that Just Communities has been paid more than a million dollars since 2013. The contract has been renewed for another year at a cost of nearly $300,000.
Fair Education contends that the district is in violation of the U.S. Constitution and Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act “as they discriminate on the basis of … race” by “intentionally supporting, promoting and implementing [Just Communities] programming in [the Santa Barbara] schools with knowledge of its racially discriminatory content and application, which has created a racially hostile educational environment for many teachers and students.”
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Additionally, Fair Education argues that the contracts for Just Communities’ curriculum were not submitted for public bidding, despite California statutes that require that practice. Just Communities protests that it is only trying to close the achievement gap between Latino and white students.
It appears that the method of closing the achievement gap is not so much to raise the achievement of Latino students, but to denigrate and lower the achievement level of white students. According to Just Communities material, whites enjoy white “privilege,” simply because they are white and therefore gain an unearned “access to resources that enhance one’s chances of getting what one needs or influencing others in order to lead a safe, productive, fulfilling life.”
The “oppression” suffered by non-whites is “pervasive in U.S. society and many other societies and hurts us all,” the material claims.
Lest one think that the material is just against whites, it also promotes Marxist rhetoric, defining “classism” as a “system of oppression,” and “refers to the economic system that creates excessive inequality and causes basic human needs to go unmet.”
Jarrod Schwartz, the executive director of Just Communities, attempted to downplay such accusations. “It’s not who we are, not what we do,” he said in the Santa Barbara Independent newspaper. “The work is not about blame or guilt. We’re very intentional about not saying people are oppressors. It’s systems that are unequal.”
What system is he talking about, if not the free-enterprise system and the abundance of the country that attracts millions of immigrants to our shores?
Many who read about such Marxist-tinged curriculum in Santa Barbara might be inclined to rationalize that, well, that is California, so what do you expect? Unfortunately, the problem is not contained to California, nor to other liberal states.
For example, James Coursey, a high-school philosophy teacher at Norman North High School in Oklahoma, stirred controversy a couple of years ago when he told his class, “To be white is to be racist, period.”
Coursey, who is white, expanded on his theme: “Am I racist? And I say, yeah. I don’t want to be. It’s not like I choose to be a racist, but I do things because of the way I was raised.”
The teacher reportedly used a YouTube video about imperialism to make his point that all whites are racist. In the video, a man uses white-out on a globe as an illustration of the spread of European influence around the world.
One student at the school said the “all whites are racist” philosophy is a common theme at the school — and it is almost certain that students across the nation are subjected to such verbal floggings on a regular basis — in a public school supported by taxpayer dollars.
While white children are called names in Oklahoma (a “red state”) and across the nation, parents and taxpayers in New York State are furious about a lesson that “promotes Islam,” and whitewashes terrorism. And this is not just one isolated school district — the program was promoted by the New York State Department of Education for use in the classroom.
The right of Americans to keep and bear arms is also under assault in many public schools. Schools have suspended children for playing with Nerf guns on the school grounds, others for drawing a picture of a firearm, or even shaping their fingers like a gun and saying “bang!”
Conservative critics also charge that authors of the Advanced Placement (AP) American History standards have as their goal to indoctrinate students to take a favorable view of big government, as well as other important causes of the Left. The private (but federally subsidized) College Board is essentially developing a nationalized left-wing history curriculum.
AP American History classes, offered in high school, allow students an opportunity to obtain college credit without having to take the class in college and pay tuition — thus making the course enticing to cost-conscious parents. Larry Krieger, a retired AP history teacher, is considered the man most responsible for calling attention to how these tests are being used to promote a secular-progressive agenda.
After examining the new “framework” of the revised curriculum, he was shocked. He said the AP framework “ignores the philosophical underpinnings of the Declaration.” Reading the practice questions and the proposed “correct” answers, Krieger said it was obvious that the intent was to indoctrinate students into a liberal, big-government viewpoint. For example, he noted a question that showed an image of a family living in poverty conditions, in which the student was asked to give an interpretive response as to what should be done about it. The “correct” answer, according to the College Board, was, “Government should act to eliminate the worst abuses of industrial society.” A suggested answer, which was the “wrong” answer, according to the College Board was, “Capitalism free of government regulation would improve social conditions.”
Kids are essentially being propagandized to be believers in the secular-progressive agenda. They are not being taught to think critically, but rather are being propagandized into what to think, and automatically accept whatever they are told by these secular progressives. This is why no other viewpoint is allowed to even be heard by children on such topics as atheistic evolution and their propaganda on climate change. The schools are not going to teach Americanism, as defined by the Declaration of Independence — our Creator endowed us with certain rights and the purpose of government is to protect those rights. After all, it is considered “unconstitutional” to even teach that God exists.
It should not be surprising that a secular and socialistic worldview is so pervasive among younger Americans. Considering the persistent liberal indoctrination that they are subjected to in the public schools (and far too many private schools), not to mention what is found in the popular culture, higher education, entertainment, and sadly, often in the church pulpit, what might be surprising is that thing are not worse.
