A teacher pushes back against K-12 critical race theory indoctrination
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...nst-k-12-critical-race-theory-indoctrination/
In a June 8
YouTube video that should be watched especially by parents of school-age children, but also by everyone else, Dana Stangel-Plowe says, “Today, I am resigning from a job that I love.” She had taught English at New Jersey’s private
Dwight-Englewood School since 2014 but could not continue.
The school “has embraced an ideology that is damaging to our students’ intellectual and emotional growth — an ideology that requires students to see themselves not as individuals, but as representatives of either an oppressor or oppressed group.” She says, “This theoretical framework pervades every division of Dwight-Englewood as the singular way of seeing the world.” She is believable because the framework increasingly pervades K-12 education nationwide.
Dwight-Englewood students, “obsessed with power hierarchies,” accept this ideology “simply as fact,” which “hinders their ability to read, write and think.” She says they “approach texts in search of the oppressor,” a blinkered perspective that limits their “ability to observe and engage with the full fabric of human experience in our literature.” Students afraid of being ostracized engage in “self-censorship.” At a February faculty meeting, “teachers were segregated by skin color.” “Last fall, administrators told [the faculty] we were not allowed to question the school’s ideological programming.” At Dwight-Englewood (ages 3 and 4 preschool,
$30,220 tuition; grades 6-12, $52,100), Stangel-Plowe says, the school head told the faculty that, were it possible, he would fire them all and replace them with people of color. The school head is White.
A
compilation of faculty members’ Pavlovian statements during a “training” session makes nauseating reading. Responding to prompts such as “In the last year, I have learned _____ about race and racism,” and “One way I will work for racial equity in my work,” teachers say:
“American society makes it hard to have high hopes.” Racism infests the nation’s “entire fabric.” Everyone must “lean into the discomfort.” “Older millennials are disappointingly racist.” “Aspects of the anti racist movement have been co-opted by neoliberal corporations, and reactionarily [sic] opposed by many even mainstream conservative thinkers.” Racism is “layered into everything we do at school.” We must “share the harsh reality of the BIPOC and LBGTQI communities with our students.” “Discuss issues of equity as arising in most every book I teach.” On and on they go, bleating like sheep who have been liberated from “false consciousness.”
What can be done about the child abuse of which Dwight-Englewood is just one among thousands of rapidly multiplying symptoms? Prudent people are uneasy about state legislatures forbidding the teaching of critical race theory (CRT): Although legislatures have a responsibility to oversee the uses of taxation, and education policy, they also have a sorry history of interventions in schooling, often for the purpose of stoking cultural conflicts.
Besides, CRT’s toxic precepts — silence is violence, but debates perpetuate oppression; reason is a myth disguising power differentials; an individual is a mere fragment of a tribe; society is always and everywhere an arena of zero-sum conflict; pluralism is an instrument of “repressive tolerance”; White people who deny their racism thereby confirm it; teaching is a political act; etc. — can be rebranded and insinuated into curriculums under new labels.
Progressives, who are selectively aghast about “politicizing” education, do not object to those state and local governments that are
mandating the CRT
indoctrination that other governments are
forbidding. Would progressives object to legislatures’ banning the teaching of, say, creationism?
Or that the Earth is flat, which is about as defensible as the assertion (see the New York Times’s
1619 Project, which is being adopted in
thousands of schoolrooms) that the American Revolution was launched to protect slavery, after the
November 1775 British offer of freedom to slaves who fled to join the British army. This offer
came, however,
seven months after the battles of Lexington and Concord, which had been preceded by the Stamp Act (1765), the Boston Massacre (1770), the Boston Tea Party (1773), the British closure of the port of Boston (1774), the June 15, 1775, appointment of George Washington as commander in chief of the Continental Army, and the June 17 Battle of Bunker Hill.
Although John F. Kennedy ascribed this to Edmund Burke, it is
unknown who actually said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Never mind. A good woman has made this axiom vivid. Stangel-Plowe might be indicative of a wholesome nationwide infection of indignation among parents dismayed by political agendas occupying what should be K-12 instructional time in schools sodden with ideological conformity that stigmatizes independent thinking.
