RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2022/08/08/walkout-at-milton-academy/

One of us, Harvey Silverglate, recently got “cancelled,” in a sense, for publicly mentioning a notorious term, often used as a slur. In one of those great ironies that characterize our historical moment, the impugned utterance was contained in a lecture on the importance of free speech in academia.

The situation unfolded on April 27th at Milton Academy, a prestigious private high school in Massachusetts. A student group, the Public Issues Board, had sponsored a multi-day series of panels and lectures on subjects of the students’ choosing. Silverglate was invited to give a talk on free speech and academic freedom, a subject in which he specializes.

Approximately two-thirds of the way into the lecture, Silverglate held up before the audience two books. One was entitled The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses, which Silverglate co-authored in 1998. The book focused largely on the struggles to protect free speech in higher education. The other book was authored by a Harvard Law School professor, Randall Kennedy (the co-author of this article). The title of that book is Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, published in 2002 and recently updated.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/will-republicans-make-education-campaign-issue-larry-sand/

It just doesn’t stop. In Portland, OR, the kindergarten curriculum includes an anatomy lesson featuring “graphic drawings of children’s genitalia.” The words “Boy” and “Girl” are eschewed in favor of “person with a penis” and “person with a vulva,” because, according to the curriculum, girls can have penises and boys can have vulvas. In a West Chester, PA middle school, boys were encouraged to wear dresses at the school’s Gay Pride Month celebrations. And in a New York City middle school, students are encouraged to keep a list of all the “microaggressions” they witnessed – both at schools and at home.

And while kids are getting indoctrinated into the gender and Critical Race Theory cults, their traditional learning has become an afterthought. According to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, the Nation’s Report Card, only 37% of U.S. public high school seniors are proficient in reading and 24% have reached proficiency in math. Additionally, proficiency is at just 22% in science and a pathetic 12% in U.S. history. This is pre-COVID data, and we can only guess how horrific the scores will be after the prolonged union-orchestrated school shutdowns.

The good news is that the American people have finally awakened to the abuse. A May poll by the American Federation of Teachers revealed that 39% of voters reported that they have more confidence in Republicans on education matters, compared with 38% for Democrats. While the Republican edge is not exactly overwhelming, it still is important, as Democrats have always prevailed in public opinion because of the perception that they were the education party. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess notes, the Democrats’ “broad support for more education spending, outspoken embrace of public education, and close ties to teachers unions and the education establishment have usually added up to a hefty advantage, one that became more significant in recent decades as education assumed a more visible, national profile.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/woke-maine-school-board-gets-busted-first-lawrence-lockman/

The slumbering giant is stirring.

I’m referring to the no-longer-silent majority of Mainers who are beginning to understand that our state is in trouble.

Serious trouble. And it begins in our schools. Government-run K-12 schools.

We’re in trouble because we’ve allowed politicians and bureaucrats to transform these public institutions into indoctrination camps, churning out graduates who are unprepared either for the workplace or for further education. The dumbing down has been so successful that most Maine high-school graduates who apply for admission to local community colleges need to take remedial courses before they’re ready for entry-level college work.

But that’s not the worst of it.

Not only are most of our recent high-school graduates well below minimal expectations in reading, science, and math – they’re woke, and proud of it.

Barely literate in civics and profoundly ignorant of history, these kids are woefully unprepared for the obligations of American citizenship.

After years of K-12 indoctrination in the radical Left’s malignant narrative of America as a systemically racist nation, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s no exaggeration to say that many of these kids are better prepared for a lifetime of picketing and protests than for responsible citizenship – much less any acknowledgement or appreciation of American exceptionalism.

https://www.city-journal.org/san-diego-schools-gender-extremism

San Diego Unified is the latest school district to adopt the principles of academic queer theory and translate them into K-12 pedagogy, with the ultimate goal of dismantling “heteronormativity” and promoting a constellation of new sexual identities, such as “genderqueer,” “non-binary,” “pansexual,” and “two-spirit.”

I have obtained a range of publicly accessible documents from San Diego Unified that reveal the district’s new ideology. The materials follow the basic premise of queer theory: white Europeans created a false “gender binary” and used the categories of “male” and “female” to dominate racial and sexual minorities. A San Diego Unified training for facilitators of LGBTQ student groups argues that this system of “heteronormativity” forces students to conform to these norms: they are “assigned” a sex at birth, pressed into the identities of “man” and “woman,” and expected to have heterosexual relationships culminating in “marriage (and kids).” This “gender binary,” however, is arbitrary, socially constructed, and harmful. It is, in the words of the presentation, a “limited system [that] excludes and oppresses trans, nonbinary, intersex, and gender-nonconforming people.”

According to the district, the gender binary has created an unjust society that distributes “heterosexual and cisgender privilege,” the sexual analog to the concept of “white privilege.” In the presentation, administrators explain that “a heterosexual/cisgender person automatically receives” this privilege, which “benefits members of dominant groups at the expense of members of target groups” and “results in institutional power” for straight men and women. Furthermore, the district claims, this sexual privilege is connected to a broader range of privileges and oppressions via the theory of intersectionality. “Racism, classism, heterosexism, etc. do not exist independently,” the presentation reads. “Multiple forms of discrimination interrelate creating a system of oppression.”

https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/01/public-schools-are-cesspools-of-wokeness-and-theres-no-bringing-them-back/

Kendall Qualls is a Republican candidate for Governor of Minnesota. Prior to his candidacy, he was president of TakeCharge, which is an organization committed to supporting the notion that the promise of America works for everyone regardless of race or station in life. He is a former Army officer and healthcare executive.

The DNA within the school systems has been radically altered along with administrators, teachers, and many students.

Teachers’ unions are pushing a radical Marxist-inspired agenda that is destroying public education in America.

Over the past several years, the left has aggressively infected the minds of the youngest children with the tenets of critical race theory (CRT) and gender ideology, while academic excellence has been shoved to the back of the bus. As a result, public schools are hemorrhaging students.

In my home state of Minnesota, 2022 “marks the second consecutive year the state’s public school system has lost thousands of students,” the Center of the American Experiment, a Minnesota think tank, reported in February. Why should parents in Minnesota or any other state keep their children in public schools?

In 2021, the Minnesota Department of Education’s statewide test results showed another drop in the number of students meeting or exceeding grade-level criteria. Overall, reading scores fell 7 percent, math scores dropped 11 percent, and science scores shrank 8 percent.

In another example, New York City public schools — which compose the nation’s largest school district — have already lost about 50,000 students over the past two years and are expected to lose nearly 30,000 more by the time school begins this fall.

https://www.city-journal.org/in-portland-the-sexual-revolution-starts-in-kindergarten

The city’s public schools teach K-5 students to subvert the sexuality of “white colonizers” and begin exploring “the infinite gender spectrum.”

Portland Public Schools has launched a war against the “gender binary” and adopted a radical new curriculum teaching students to subvert the sexuality of “white colonizers” and begin exploring “the infinite gender spectrum.”

I have obtained a cache of documents from a source inside Portland Public Schools that exposes the nature of this curriculum. The lessons seek to turn the principles of academic queer theory into an identity-formation program for elementary school students. The premise is simple: privileged white heterosexuals have created an oppressive gender system in order to dominate racial and sexual minorities. As the curriculum explains, “gender is colonized,” and Western societies have used language to erase alternative sexualities.

“When white European people colonized different places, they brought their own ideas about gender and sexuality,” the curriculum reads. “When the United States was colonized by white settlers, their views around gender were forced upon the people already living here. Hundreds of years later, how we think and talk about gender are still impacted by this shift.” (When reached for comment, Portland Public Schools wrote: “We make certain that our curriculum is LGBTQ+ inclusive for students who identify as transgender, gender non-conforming, gender-queer, and queer to create a safe and inclusive environment for all of our students.”).

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/black-studies-cultural-reparations-jason-d-hill/

In current conversations regarding reparations for blacks, few consider the phenomenon of cultural reparations as a sufficient contender.

This legacy of the civil rights movement is not to be taken lightly. Indeed, cultural reparations were an enormous contribution of the United States of America to bring blacks fully into the domain of what may be termed the sovereign mass that constitutes the citizenry of our republic.

One reason, among several, that reparations discussions today are uneven, is that they overlook the important fact that cultural reparations in the form of Black Studies that began in the 1960s were a hugely reparative moment for blacks in America.

Soon after tasting the victories of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which civilly and criminally outlawed racism, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act—blacks became voraciously hungry. They were hungry for power—black power. They were hungry also for revenge. They were also filled with anger and rage. Gratitude was not an emotion they felt, as beneficiaries of the rights accorded them via the civil rights movements. They were eager to assume the perpetual mantle of victims and the conferral of moral, iconic sainthood that came with it for the first time in their collective history.