Undoctrinate Our Students – by Bonnie Snyder – Persuasion
Our nation has a problem. Recently, in both urban and rural communities, young children are being indoctrinated, bullied, and harassed by their fellow students and teachers for not falling into line on various topics.
In Arizona, Roberto Sandoval, the son of a Mexican immigrant who worked hard to achieve the American dream, was alarmed when his teen showed him her high school homework. I have an assignment that s asking me how I am privileged, she told him. The homework included statements such as My skin color gives me privileges I didn t earn & Your skin color gives you struggles you didn t deserve, and No one is asking you to apologize for being privileged; people want you to stop using your privilege in ways that require an apology.
In Seattle, meanwhile, teachers explain that Western mathematics has been used to disenfranchise people and communities of color. Then, they attempt to rehumanize math by incorporating curricular content such as explaining how math dictates economic oppression and asking, How can we change mathematics from individualistic to collectivist thinking?
Third-grade students in Cupertino, California, were told to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, ranking themselves on the intersectional hierarchy from oppressor to oppressed. One scandalized parent objected, saying, They were basically teaching racism to my eight-year-old. When questioned, the principal acknowledged that the lesson was not part of the formal curricula.
The specific topics of parents complaints in the examples above change from year to year, or even from week to week. Over the past few years, the following issues have waxed and waned in intensity: global warming, Occupy Wall Street, weapons of mass destruction, voter suppression, immigration reform, the border wall, DACA, Black Lives Matter, gun control, same-sex marriage, reproductive rights, abortion, patriotism, election integrity, and the MeToo movement.
In all of these examples, well-intentioned people of good faith can agree on underlying problems, while disagreeing on what to actually do about them. Increasingly, however, children who are too young to have developed solid or informed opinions are being forced into premature ideological conformity with some teachers and administrators who seem intent on pushing their own particular worldviews in K 12 classrooms.
These kinds of transgressions are not limited to the political Left.
A Georgia teacher was yanked from class after telling the students that President Barack Obama was a closeted Muslim.
In Wisconsin, a high school social studies teacher was placed on leave after instructing students to watch a one-sided video questioning the integrity of election results. In a shared screenshot of the assignment, he also apparently made sure to inform students that he would be protesting what he saw as unfair election results because it was too important not to do so, in a pretty clear attempt to influence them on this issue.
In Alabama, a geometry teacher actually taught a math lesson by asking students to evaluate the best angles to assassinate Obama.
No matter the specifics of the heavy-handed ideological teaching, we should all be against it. Citizens of both parties should adopt a legal corollary to the Golden Rule fight for the rights of others that you would like to exercise yourself, writes former president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and Persuasion advisor David French. And one of the most important and vital of those rights is the right to speak and act in accordance with your deepest beliefs.