RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/kindergarten-students-in-connecticut-learn-about-being-transgender-in-line-with-social-justice-standards/

Elementary school students in West Hartford, Conn. public schools are being forced to undergo “social emotional learning through an equity lens” as district officials have reportedly told parents they may not opt-out of the curriculum, which aims to teach students a set of “social justice standards.”

Parents from the district contacted the non-profit Parents Defending Education to share concerns over materials being used to teach elementary students about group identities, including transgender content being taught to kindergarten students. 

One parent raised a red flag about When Aidan Became a Brother, a book being taught to fourth grade students that the parent described as “full on gender theory” which is teaching students that the sex you’re assigned at birth is “wrong.”

“When Aidan was born, everyone thought he was a girl. His parents gave him a pretty name, his room looked like a girl’s room, and he wore clothes that other girls liked wearing,” the description of the book reads. “After he realized he was a trans boy, Aidan and his parents fixed the parts of his life that didn’t fit anymore, and he settled happily into his new life.”

When Aidan’s parents announce they’re having a second child, Aidan “wants to do everything he can to make things right for his new sibling from the beginning” including choosing the best name and picking out the right decor and clothes. The book asks what “making things right” actually means. 

Another fourth-grade mentor text is a book about pronouns called They She HE Me; Free to Be! 

The lessons are supposed to teach students in kindergarten through fifth grade about social justice standards including identity, diversity, justice and action.

The “identity” standard includes texts that teach students about transgender people and the use of preferred pronouns, including the inclusive singular “they.”

A mentor text for kindergarten students is Introducing Teddy which tells the story about a character and his teddy, Thomas. Thomas says, “I’ve always known that I’m a girl teddy, not a boy teddy. I wish my name was Tilly, not Thomas.” Another text for the kindergarten age group is Let’s Talk About Race.

Meanwhile, a first grade texts include Jacob’s New Dress, a story about a boy who wants to wear a dress to school and Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?, a book about a character who “prefers not to tell other children whether they are a boy or a girl.” 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/racist-crt-lessons-poison-public-school-classrooms-joseph-klein/

PEN America claims it is committed “to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide.” But PEN has taken a radical left turn in defending the teaching of critical race theory concepts even to elementary and secondary school students. PEN believes that bills introduced in at least 24 state legislatures against such racially divisive teaching are akin to censorship in violation of the teachers’ First Amendment rights. 

“These bills appear designed to chill academic and educational discussions and impose government dictates on teaching and learning. In short: They are educational gag orders,” PEN stated in its introduction to a report entitled “Educational Gag Orders: Legislative Restrictions on the Freedom to Read, Learn, and Teach.”

Far from legitimately defending free expression under the First Amendment, PEN is defending racially charged indoctrination of impressionable public school students as young as four or five years old. It is the students whose constitutional rights are being violated when they are pressured in class to internalize dogma that pits race against race and to even recite such racially charged rhetoric in front of other students.

K-12 teachers are perfectly free to advocate for critical race theory on social media and in whatever discussions they may have with other adults outside of the classroom. But the courts have not accorded educators the same freedom to force feed lesson plans based on critical race theory precepts upon elementary and secondary public school pupils.

These pupils are a captive audience. As one federal Court of Appeals decision put it, “Children who attend school because they must ought not be subject to teachers’ idiosyncratic perspectives.” The educators are not entitled under the Constitution “to present personal views to captive audiences against the instructions of elected officials.”

Under America’s federalist system, state elected officials have the authority to regulate public school education within their jurisdictions, including setting reasonable limits on public school curricula. State legislators can certainly use this authority to pass laws shielding children from being indoctrinated in public school classrooms, where they are captive audiences, with racial group identity ideology. Applicable statewide laws preempt left wing local school board decisions that are in direct conflict with those laws.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/compulsory-racist-training-kent-runnells-loyd-pettegrew/

Webster’s unabridged dictionary defines the term compulsory as “required by law or a rule; obligatory.” Welcome to the politicized world of Americans. Since words now matter more than ever before, it is important to use the correct word at all times and no “incorrect” words!  “Compulsory” should not be allowed to masquerade as “Critical” but it has.

Freedom of speech enshrined in and protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution has finally come a cropper, at least for conservatives. CRT, or Critical Race Theory, spawned by the Marxist intellectual elite in our colleges and universities, has taken hold of how we think, speak, and act in our everyday lives. It is enforced by the cancel culture that is no longer limited to progressive imbeciles spewing divisive drivel on social media and has been speciously elevated (by the legacy media) to extend it beyond academics to society at large. Its proponents believe it constitutes a legitimate and worthy social construct. The time has come to call it out for what it is—an effort to disingenuously reset the premise of all issues of race so desperately needing an honest debate in these challenging times.

As the CitiJournal’s John Sailer has written, “Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) [CRT’s first cousin] has almost single-handedly propounded the pedagogical concept of ‘social and emotional learning’ (SEL).” To hell with objectivity in math and the sciences. Three times three is no longer permitted to equal nine, because that microagresssively ignores the needs of eight and ten, themselves some secret code for race, gender or other self-identifications that only the truly Woke can perceive. As long as the left is permitted to write the rule book, the right will never have a level playing field.  

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/education/missouri-teachers-told-white-supremacy-includes-english-only-calling

Training materials for the Springfield, Mo., school district told teachers they could be engaging in white supremacy simply by insisting the English language be used or calling police on a black suspect, according to records released under a freedom of information request.

The materials, provided to Just the News, include a 40-plus slide training deck that proclaimed its goal was to train teachers on how to address “systemic racism and xenophobia” in the school district and to understand the difference between oppressors and the oppressed. Critics say the slide deck is part of a larger Critical Race Theory curriculum that parents are increasingly rejecting.

It included an “oppression matrix” that identified privileged social groups capable of oppression as including “white people,” “male assigned at birth,” “gender conforming CIS men and women,” “heterosexuals,” “rich, upper-class people” and “Protestants.”

The victims of oppression, the slide stated, included minorities, gays, transgender people, working class and poor Americans.

Instructing teachers that “systemic racism” was a real phenomenon in America, the training defined systemic racism as a system characterized by “public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other social norms that, while not practiced consciously, reinforce and perpetuate racial group inequity.”

“It identifies dimensions of our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with ‘whiteness’ and disadvantages associated with ‘color’ to endure and adapt over time,” one slide declared.

The training also gave a broad definition of white supremacy as “a culture which positions white people and all that is associated with them (whiteness) as ideal.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/lefts-big-lie-about-critical-race-theory-sara-dogan/

In the recent governor’s race in Virginia, won handily by Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin, the debate over teaching Critical Race Theory in public schools played a crucial role. Parents concerned by the racially charged lessons being taught in their children’s classrooms rallied around Youngkin and his pledge to remove CRT from Virginia schools. Through it all, Democrats illogically maintained a bald-faced lie, claiming that CRT in public schools is a non-issue, that it simply doesn’t exist.

“It’s not taught in Virginia, it’s never been taught in Virginia,” Democrat candidate Terry McAuliffe said in an interview, adding that Republican’s claims about CRT were “racist” and a “dog whistle.”  

So what is the reality? Have conservatives across the nation really colluded fight a straw man?

The answer is obviously, no. Critical Race Theory is a real threat and it has increasingly been taught in public schools.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a radical revision of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream that each American be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” While Dr. King and the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s promoted “colorblindness,” CRT insists on the exact opposite view, teaching that our character, our beliefs, and our place in society is predetermined by our skin color. By this reckoning, Whites are deemed to be inherently racist, born into a framework of “white supremacy” which infiltrates all American institutions. By contrast, racial minorities, and especially Blacks are regarded as perpetual victims of the “white supremacist” society into which they were born.

Bari Weiss and other independent thinkers are right in thinking that it’s time for a new approach to college. But the war on wokeism will require more than just advocacy for open discourse.

As toxic as Twitter can be, sometimes the orgies of abuse and mockery for which the social media forum is so well-known can tell us something important. When the woke world is competing to see which blue-checked left-wing wiseacre can come up with the most cutting and condescending snark about a subject or person, it’s often a sign that the object of their contempt is on to something important. That’s exactly the case with the reaction to the announcement of the formation of a new institution of higher learning: The University of Austin, whose avowed purpose is to create a haven for open discourse at a time when academia has become best known for the way cancel culture enforces the new left’s aversion to debate about its orthodoxies.

The public announcement of the effort earlier this week by former New York Times editor Bari Weiss, who is a member of the proposed school’s board of advisors, set off a tsunami of derision from many of the usual suspects in journalism and academia who think there’s nothing wrong with shutting down those who raise questions about woke sensibilities.

Their contempt for Weiss, who is best known for leaving the Times last year after claiming that the same forces were making it difficult, if not impossible, to report about anti-Semitism or have an open discussion about issues like the Black Lives Matter movement, is already well-established. But as historian Niall Ferguson, another of those who are involved in this project, wrote in Bloomberg, the plague of illiberalism on college campuses is destroying the modern university:

“Trigger warnings. Safe spaces. Preferred pronouns. Checked privileges. Microaggressions. Antiracism. All these terms are routinely deployed on campuses throughout the English-speaking world as part of a sustained campaign to impose ideological conformity in the name of diversity. As a result, it often feels as if there is less free speech and free thought in the American university today than in almost any other institution in the U.S.”

EXCERPT

What rights do parents have in directing their children’s education?

Parental Rights at the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court of the United States first upheld this right of parents in a series of landmark cases in the mid-1920s. In Meyer v. Nebraska (1925) the Court struck down a state law prohibiting instruction in German to students before the ninth grade; in the lesser-known decision of Farrington v. Tokushige (1927), the Court overturned a similar law in Hawaii that forbade instruction in Japanese. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), the Court struck down an Oregon law that effectively outlawed private schools.

The primary motivation behind these laws was the nativist impulse to assimilate the children of immigrants, to “standardize” children, into white, Protestant, American culture. In Oregon, for example, the Ku Klux Klan was among the most powerful and vocal supporters of the law forbidding private (read: Catholic) education. In a pamphlet widely distributed in Oregon, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan wrote of Catholic parents and their school-aged children: “somehow, these mongrel hordes must be Americanized; failing that, deportation is the only remedy.” “Democratic education,” he wrote, is the “one unfailing defense against every kind of alienism in America.”

In overturning these laws, the Supreme Court established what William Galston has described as “a rebuttable presumption” in favor of parental liberty: parents have the right to direct their children’s education for the simple reason that parents typically know the unique needs and capacities of their children and desire what is best for them. As the Court wrote in Pierce, “those who nurture [a child] and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.” At their best, parents “recognize” what “additional obligations” their children are capable of and called to and then “direct” them to these ends.

In these same decisions, the Supreme Court also upheld the general authority of the state to compel school attendance and require schools to teach, in the language of Pierce, “certain studies plainly essential to good citizenship.”

The Supreme Court was able to balance the specific rights of parents to direct their children’s education and the general authority of the state to form educated citizens by drawing from seven decades of state supreme court decisions on the issue. Indeed, the Meyer Court alludes to this rich history when it identifies the right of parents to direct their children’s education as one of “those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/the-new-loyalty-oaths/

It’s a growing trend in academia that those who fail to pledge their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion need not apply.

A merican universities’ commitment to merit as the basis for hiring and tenure continues to erode as they increasingly demand adherence to progressive ideology.

The sciences are far from immune to this trend. As reported by Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald in City Journal, earlier this month University of Texas astronomer John Kormendy withdrew an article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences after a draft “drew sharp criticism for threatening the conduct of ‘inclusive’ science.” His book on the same topic has been placed on indefinite hold. Kormendy’s fully peer-reviewed work describes a sophisticated model he developed “to reduce the role of individual subjectivity in scientific hiring and tenure decisions” by predicting scientists’ long-term research impact from early publications. Though he didn’t intend for his model to replace a holistic approach to hiring or granting tenure, as Mac Donald explains, his offense was to focus on the merit of the candidates’ work rather than their race or gender.

Kormendy’s experience is becoming typical. Last month, the American Geophysical Union, the world’s largest society devoted to the study of earth and space, declined to name a winner of its most prestigious award solely because all of the rigorously vetted final nominees were white men. In September, MIT abruptly rescinded its invitation to University of Chicago geophysics professor Dorian Abbot to deliver a talk in its prestigious lecture series. Abbot’s offense was an essay for Newsweek that defended the importance of merit in academic evaluations and expressed the view that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) “violates the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment.”

This trend, which is most pervasive in the humanities, includes Europe. For example, Italian physicist Alessandro Strumia was fired from Europe’s particle-physics consortium, CERN, for observing that, because of inclusion efforts, women were being hired with thinner research records than those of men. Even a visiting dance professor at Oberlin College alleges that she lost out on a permanent position after being told “we can’t just hire another white woman from the Midwest with a husband.”