This is going to be a rant. There will be swearing. I apologize for that in advance.
The Biden administration, Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, the National School Board Association, the major teachers unions, and their blue check lickspittles have inspired, for me, a rage so towering and incandescent that it rivals the sun. The ongoing displays of arrogance truly disgust me, especially given how categorically wrong - and dishonest - all these people are.
Critical race theory is not being taught in primary and secondary schools? Bullshit, Terry. Great heaping
loads of foul, stinking bullshit. It doesn't fucking matter that it's not the original papers that were first taught in our law schools. What we're seeing in K-12 is, in fact, an
application of those supposedly abstruse academic ideas to schooling as described in texts like
this or
this. Schools are still demanding that kids classify themselves by race and then recognize either their "privilege" or their "disadvantage" according to that classification. Schools are still teaching kids that they should feel guilty for history they personally took no part in -- or that they should feel aggrieved and hopeless because of that same history. Instead of teaching
all the facts without accompanying editorials, schools are imposing
one interpretive schema on many children that
erases the complicated truth (like, for example, that slavery was a human norm in the 1600's, that some freed Africans even owned slaves of their own, or that most whites
didn't) -- a schema whose particulars have been disputed by many celebrated (and not necessarily right-leaning) historians whose careers span decades.
Whatever all this should be properly called, it's indoctrination, and it's wrong, full stop. The public school teacher's job is not to become a creepy social engineer; it's to deliver the democratically-established curriculum to the children of tax-paying parents who don't have the time to do so themselves. You, teachers, do not have the remit, the intelligence, or the professional qualifications to psychologically assess your students for the purpose of unearthing their (or their parents') crimethink -- or to guide them through contentious conversations without parental input.
Hell, many of you don't even have the qualifications to adequately cover the state-mandated subjects your were originally hired to teach! Are you fucking kidding me? Math teachers don't learn real math, ELA teachers don't learn real English language and literature, history teachers don't learn real history -- and no teachers learn the actual science of learning and cognition. Education schools, for some ungodly reason, have been segregated from the rest of the university -- and have been captured for decades by Weather Underground types who'd rather feed young teacher candidates Freire-inspired garbage than consult with the neuroscientists across campus about the limits of working memory.
You, teachers, can barely spell or read a simple pie chart. (Trust me, I know; I've seen your so-called "educational" materials and even tutored some of you on the Praxis.) So when I see shit like the tweet below...
... you'll have to forgive me if I immediately make a sound like I'm barfing up three feet of intestine. Parents - many of whom are professionals themselves with far more legitimate, more rigorous credentials - are infinitely more qualified than you are because they haven't been poisoned by literal anti-teaching propaganda (like, for example, the notion that kids can "construct" mathematical knowledge by floundering around, with minimal guidance, in endless discussions with their classmates) and radical political nonsense. Indeed, only journalists outpace you when it comes to the extent of your deliberately cultivated ignorance. Is it any wonder, then, that very few of our students exit school proficient in English and math?
And yet, despite your manifest incompetence and piss-poor training, you, public school "educators" and school board members, have still far exceeded your designated bounds out of an unsupportable belief that you should be treated as unquestioned "experts". Not only have you approved the peddling of false history (as described above), you have further abused your authority by 1.) encouraging, through curricula or library book selections, age-inappropriate discussions of sex, gender, and sexuality that confuse young children; 2.) tyrannically imposing restrictive health measures on our students that are not based on real-world data and effectively treat kids like plague vectors instead of like little people who are entitled to dignity (not to mention developmentally crucial playtime and normal interactions with their peers and supervising adults); 3.) hiring data miners to spy on students and their families under the guise of "social-emotional learning"; 4.) conspiring against parents who demand transparency and/or their rightful say when it comes to curricula and school procedures -- and even subjecting such parents to legal harassment; and finally, 5.) shutting down nonviolent democratic debate because you wish to duck the inevitable heat your have brought upon yourselves through the other actions previously described.
The parents whose trust you've broken aren't the aggressors here. You are. Parents are simply defending themselves and their children. And I hope they ultimately triumph.
