If the “teaching in school today will become the politics of tomorrow,” as the apocryphal saying goes, there’s much cause for alarm. A case in point is a bisexual Nevada middle-school teacher who claims that white people are “problematic,” education is “inherently racist,” and that our response should be to “start a riot.”
The only saving grace with “educator” Jennifer Leja, of Hyde Park Middle School in the Clark County district, is that she’s not exactly subtle. In fact, reported Fox News last Thursday, in a series of TikTok videos, the teacher sang “start a riot” in support of the following propositions (as presented by Fox):
- “Dress codes are sexist”
- “Education is inherently racist”
- “History is white-washed”
- “White teachers are problematic”
Though white herself, Leja nonetheless castigated the “white majority” in education. For this means, relates Fox, that “‘everything in education from our suspensions and our detentions to the way that we handle conflict, from our textbooks to our curriculum, everything is going to be handled with a White perspective rather than a multicultural one.’”
Regarding suspensions and detentions, Leja was likely alluding to the notion that the system is “racist” because black and Hispanic students are suspended (and expelled) and sent for detention more than white kids are. Of course, unmentioned is that whites and boys suffer these punishments more than, respectively, Asian-descent youths and girls do. But, oddly, no one calls these phenomena racist or sexist.
(Note: The Barack Obama administration, also singing Leja’s tune, actually pressured school systems to equalize the punishment between whites and blacks/Hispanics — but not between Asians and whites or boys and girls.)
According to Fox, Leja then lamented that her school’s teaching staff and administration are “all white” and prescribed an affirmative-action solution: “Hire more minority educators and … encourage students who are BIPOC to try to go into more higher education fields.”
Leja further stated, according to Fox, that
- “teachers are either the most woke humans on the planet or the most garbage humans — there is no in between”;
- Christopher Columbus was a “Christian colonizer”;
- not only is the education system inherently “racist,” but that “many of the things we’re required to teach continue to perpetuate racism too”; and
- that she was close to getting into fisticuffs with another teacher — whose sin was “misgendering” a student.
Here’s the kicker: Leja posted her woke videos, reports Fox, back in October 2021. Apparently, though, they’re only making news now. Yet is this surprising? Insanely woke teachers are now common enough, after all, so that a Leja may not stand out.
Just consider, for instance, the sampling of sexual devolutionary “educators” in the videos below.
The teacher in the following video states that she must use subtlety when indoctrinating her students because she works in a “conservative area.”
Sadly, you could spend days watching such videos and still have missed plenty. They’re legion.
Returning to Leja, this isn’t the first time she has made news. In 2020, she protested a school-board ruling that she couldn’t display a “pride” flag in her classroom because it constituted political speech. “I think that being able to have a rainbow flag is as much a part of my identity as anything else,” BuzzFeed News quoted her as saying at the time.
(Note: Buzzfeed stated that Leja worked in the Washoe County School District, not, as Fox did, in Clark County. It’s unclear if she changed districts after the 2020 controversy or if one of the news sources is in error.)
Of course, it’s easy, and sometimes maybe even appropriate, to roll one’s eyes or mock the world’s Lejas. Yet as is man’s lot, she’s a product of her time and environment, and one statement she made gets at this deeper issue. To wit: Her lamentation about how having a “white majority” in education means that “everything is going to be handled with a white perspective rather than a multicultural one.” The problem?
It’s not that she’s implicitly demeaning a “white perspective” (whatever that is). The problem isn’t that she’s advocating a multicultural perspective (whatever that is).
It’s that she believes “perspective” is all there is.
This is for a simple reason: She doesn’t believe in and apprehend Truth.
Leja has much company in this. Years ago already, New York Times management announced they could no longer report news from (I’m paraphrasing) a “white, male, heterosexual perspective.” This is the thinking a person descends into, too, when falling victim to moral relativism/nihilism. Explanation?
Someone grasping Truth’s existence will try to discern what it dictates when making value-based (moral) decisions. But when people lack this eternal arbiter, which can be used to qualitatively judge perspectives, all they perceive are perspectives — and they won’t logically be able to say one is better than the others or logically be able to choose among them. But they won’t be logical. Rather, divorced from Truth, they’ll most likely use the most compelling behavior/values yardstick they have left: emotion. Hence our time’s feelings-orientation.
What does this mean for education? Truth-oriented people will understand that universals exist and, since they are universal, that all kids need them. In particular, they’ll know that the universals called “virtues” should shape curricula.
Moral relativists/nihilists proceed differently. Perceiving only perspectives, preferences, or opinions — but still having to choose among them and operating on emotion — prejudice becomes their guide. And since their emotions have been shaped by woke indoctrination, this means that anti-white, anti-Western, anti-Christian, anti-goodness perspectives “feel” right.
So it’s ironic. Woke moderns rail against prejudice and judgmentalism, but their tendency to make everything relative to their emotion-governed selves ensures that they, more than anyone else, will be defined by prejudice and judgmentalism.
