We all know the classic three R’s – reading, (w)riting, and (a)rithmetic. With all the changes that have taken place in education during the past few decades, I believe it’s time to update. The new three R’s: (w)recking, rioting, and revolution. And anyone who votes for candidates endorsed by the teachers’ unions is voting to turn over your children, your grandchildren or, if you aren’t a parent, everyone else’s children and grandchildren, to the state to be miseducated, indoctrinated, and possibly transgendered. As Dennis Prager has commented, sending your children to public schools, let alone to practically any college, is playing Russian roulette with their values.
So, what is being taught in the nation’s public schools (and many private ones as well)? I was astonished to find an article saved on my computer stating that as far back as September 2012, the Lexington Institute published nine essays under the title “The Radicalization of Teacher Education Programs” that read like a preview of our current situation, and I find it both infuriating and appalling that nothing was done about it at that time. Apparently the ‘60s and ‘70s Baby Boomer radicals have taken full control of the nation’s universities, including preparing K-12 teachers, while the rest of America was asleep, for which we are now paying a terrible price.
What are our schools teaching?
From Hannah Gal’s blog at The Times of Israel: “‘Our children aren’t learning as they should be,’ explains [James] Lindsay. ‘This much is clear: Their mastery of Reading, Writing, Science, Math and History has declined to crisis levels, while their social activism is at an all-time high – they are learning to become activists for Marxist left-wing causes, to turn their backs on their society, nation, and even on their parents.’
“According to Lindsay, instead of core knowledge subjects that will set them up for life, their curriculum is loaded with Social Emotional Learning, Critical Race Theory, Cultural Competence, Queer Theory, Radical Gender Theory, Decolonisation, and even drag queens.
“They [Indiana teacher training] teach the teachers to make the curriculum political, so that unless you were in the classroom witnessing it happening, you would never know this took place. Teachers learn how to transform a mundane mathematics word problem at the second-grade level into a plethora of political conversations.
“The teacher who relayed this example to me told me that at the end of about a few months of this training, they could have turned any academic material that you can possibly imagine into an excuse to have these political conversations.
“Importantly, you’ll notice that at no point while you’re having your conversation about Socialism, or feminism, or critical race theory or environmentalism, or parental authority, or any of these other topics, you ever actually learn to solve the math problem. You end up with politically engaged, radicalized, and brainwashed students, who don’t know how to do math – large numbers of our children are politically active, they want to protest, but less than a third of them can read at grade level… I forget the exact number but in some districts it’s under 20, and sometimes even under 10 percent can read or do mathematics at grade level… They kept the school and classroom facade, but the core knowledge content is all taken away. They are not just indoctrinated – they are brainwashed.”
Let us look at specific examples:
- Beginning with its publication in 1980 (revised in 2003), Howard Zinn’s Marxist textbook, A People’s History of the United States, has become the most widely used textbook in its field, with 160,000 teachers currently on board. So generations of students have been taught that America is permanently tainted with racism and capitalist exploitation. Following Zinn, Nikole Hannah-Jones’ widely acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize-winning The 1619 Project, written under the imprimatur of The New York Times, proclaimed that America was founded not with the Declaration of Independence in 1776, but with the arrival of the first slave ship in 1619; that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery; and other shibboleths. (It should be noted that the Leftist obsession with slavery overlooks the fact that every society, even Israel, had slavery in its distant past; that Britain, France, and America led the way in abolishing the institution in the 19th century; and that some Islamic and African nations still buy and sell human beings.)
- Following rewriting history came Critical Law Theory, one of whose disciples was a young community organizer named Barack Obama, which essentially held that the entire American legal system is rigged against people of color. From that premise evolved Critical Race Theory, which completed the transformation of Marxism from an economic basis to a sociological one. Simply speaking, CRT holds that every society is divided into two groups, oppressors and oppressed; in America, whites are the oppressors and non-whites are the oppressed, who can only escape their oppression through a total transformation of society. A 2021 report issued by the Heritage Foundation found that over 40% of teachers wanted Civic Education to focus on CRT; by now the percentage is likely higher. Moreover, since Jews are identified as white and Arabs as people of color, CRT can be used to justify anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Not surprisingly, there has been a coast-to-coast explosion of antisemitism.
- The pedagogy we have described has been extended throughout the curriculum. In Oregon, with funding from Bill Gates, the state Department of Education has decreed that the concept of math problems having only one answer is racist. So is the use of proper English grammar and spelling. Gifted and talented programs have been attacked, so that the Seattle school district is closing theirs in favor of some vaguely defined individualized instruction.
- Prager U sent out an email with ten sample questions from the U.S. citizenship test, which 90% of legal immigrants are able to pass, but only 30% of adults and only 3% of children can. The bar is set low: 60% is passing.
- The New York State Department of Education is lowering its high school graduation requirements, subject to a State Board vote in November. Students will no longer need to pass five Regents exams; instead, “all students will have to show nebulous ‘knowledge and skills’ in seven areas, including ‘critical thinking,’ ‘cultural competence,’ and ‘global citizenship.’”
- As reported by Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell in The Daily Signal, “Minneapolis Public Schools passed a new ‘gender inclusion’ policy allowing boys who identify as girls to share restrooms, locker rooms, and overnight-trip hotel rooms with females… The Minnesota district stated priorities in determining transgender students’ preferred facilities are maximizing the transgender students’ ‘social integration’ and ‘comfort,’ and ‘minimizing stigmatization,’ rather than protecting the safety of female students in restrooms, locker rooms, and other facilities.” (And they put tampons in boys’ bathrooms.) Moreover, a new law allows the state to take away children from parents who refuse to gender-transition them.
- Similarly, school districts in Michigan exclude parents from being informed of their children’s changing gender identity, given names, or pronouns, even though parental permission is required for children going on field trips or being administered medication. As Thomas Jipping and Sarah Parshall Perry write, “The upshot is that Johnny needs his parents’ permission to visit the zoo, but his parents need Johnny’s permission before even being informed that he’s undressing in the girls’ locker room.” And the U.S. Department of Education is pressuring schools nationwide to adopt its gender identity policy.
- Book publisher Scholastic has published a “Pride” guide encouraging educators “disrupt the status quo” to indoctrinate students with pro-LGBTQ+ ideology.
- Frontline News reported that “Incoming Fairfax County [Virginia] School Board Chairman Karl Frisch took his oath of office as he placed his hand on several books while they were held by his male partner…Those books, which are currently available to underage students in Fairfax County and other U.S. public schools, depict graphic same-sex sexual activity.”
- Author Peachy Keenan posted, “Long before it was trendy, Crossroads [a super progressive private school in LA] was forcing kindergarteners to choose their own pronouns and announce them in class when they spoke.” Like many other children, [Elon Musk’s son] Xavier was transitioned below the age of consent.
- As reported by Dion St. Pierre in The Algemeiner, “A civil rights complaint… filed [by the ADL] with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), recounts dozens of incidents that have occurred at SDP [School District of Philadelphia] since the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Teachers allegedly propagandized in the classroom, students chanted ‘kill the Jews,’ and swastika graffiti emerged across the district, the complaint says, adding that parents’ concerns have gone unheeded and that Jewish teachers, beleaguered by acts of retaliation, are retiring in droves…” The ADL charges that, ‘at SDP, teachers contribute to intimidation and shaming, using their power and monopoly on class discussions to denounce Israel as ‘exterminators’ and stream videos accusing the Jewish state of ‘making Palestinians homeless.’”
How are America’s teachers responding to the decline in academic skills? The American Federation of Teachers is working with NewsGuard to censor information coming into the public schools, especially from Prager U. In Chicago, where only 15% of 8th-grade students are proficient in math, and 21% proficient in reading – although the district spends $29,000 per student – the teachers organized a student parade in favor of a referendum (which failed to pass) to raise the real-estate transfer tax, ostensibly to combat homelessness but, as The Wall Street Journal explained, “The measure would supposedly raise funds to combat homelessness, but the union has identified it as a revenue source for subsidizing teacher and student housing as well.” Despite the failure of the Chicago school system, in contract negotiations the union proposed an increase in teachers’ average annual salaries from $110,000 to $144,000. Do they really think that K-12 teachers should be paid nearly as much as members of Congress?
Apparently, the teachers’ unions, relying on the clout of millions of dollars in political contributions, are unconcerned about their students’ deficiency in academic skills because they will be socially promoted, take watered-down standard tests for graduation, be awarded diplomas that are in effect participation trophies, and admitted to college under lowered academic standards. For society, however, the consequences are likely to be disastrous.
Where do we go from here? Ian Oxnevad summarizes the dilemma in the National Association of Scholars’ Antisemitism newsletter: “Today’s antisemitic student mobs, encouraged by professors and administrative enablers, are more than agitators. Today’s graduates will someday have power inside our nation’s courts, corporations, and culture. That pipeline from college to decision-making power has triggered a justifiable alarm within various sectors of American economic and cultural life. In an opinion piece published last December, John Ellis, a professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, argued that higher education has metastasized into a ‘threat to America.’ Rather than function as a beacon to help build an ‘advanced society,’ academia has become an ideological cesspit.”
As I wrote in The Jewish Press last summer (“The Charter School Solution,” August 25, 2023), one possibility is creating publicly funded Hebrew charter schools (two of which already exist, Ben Gamla Charter School and Hebrew Public), thereby reducing Jewish day school tuition to covering religious subjects, thus making day school more affordable.
