I don’t know why my head didn’t explode over this one. I suppose it’s because The Great Stupid has lowered my expectations. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Odelis Anderson, a middle school choir teacher in Minnesota, recently taught a sixth-grade class about various “types of oppression” by separating students into “privileged” and “targeted” categories. This occurred with full knowledge of the school, Sunrise Park Middle School near St. Paul, Minnesota, which dubbed it a “social-emotional lesson.”
In an introduction to the exercise, Anderson told students, “Last week, we talked about how hard it is to talk about race, and the level of difficulty is different for different people. For people who are privileged, it’s much easier to talk about race and other issues. For people who are not privileged, it’s much harder. Today, we will look at different types of oppression, and whether each of us is in the privileged group or the targeted group.”
Boy. choir class sure has changed since I was a kid…
Then, according to the lesson plan, students reviewed a chart describing different types of oppression, “privileged groups” and “targeted groups.” Then the students were required to label themselves. The five types of oppression were racism, sexism, religious oppression, heterosexism, and xenophobia. The “privileged groups” —I bet you can guess–were white, male, Christian, heterosexual, and those born in United States (that is, not illegal immigrants). The “targeted groups” were non-whites, female, non-Christians, those who identify as LGBT, and those not born in the United States.
The school system’s superintendent responded to questions about the class with proud Authentic Frontier Gibberish. “It is our responsibility to ensure that each of our students’ needs are being met,” Wayne Kazmierczak sort of explained in a statement. “We know from listening to our students that our continued and sustained commitment to educational equity is a critical part of how we achieve our stated district mission and close gaps that currently exist in our student outcome measures.”
Observations:
- This is not education. This is ideological indoctrination.
- It is not based on science, legitimate research or intellectual rigor. This is political.
- Totalitarian systems educate children this way.
- To say the such poison does not belong in a choir class (the school has some kind of explanation for this, but it makes no sense to me) should be unnecessary.
- This occurred in a remote session. A parent who witnessed this was ethically obligated to at very least tune out of the session and complain. I would have broken into the session and told the teacher that the session was incompetent and not her place to present. I believe parents should have disrupted the session.
- I know Minnesotans are busy trying to defund the police and name snowplows, but parents there have no excuse for remaining unaware of how pubic education is grossly abusing ts mission. I have long believed that parents need to audit their children’s classes, and one of the very few good things about remote learning is that it makes doing this easy.
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Pointer and Facts: The Blaze
Ethics Alarms 
“Our schools”? Jack, they stopped being “our schools” a long, LONG time ago. They are THE STATE’S schools. But so many parents continue to use them because they are, hands down, Americans’ FAVORITE welfare program — D or R, Blue or Red. Dad AND mom BOTH have to work to afford all the goodies, and they’re “taxpayers, dammit!” No way they’re NOT going to avail themselves of 12 years of “free” babysitting. (That CA school board member simply said the quiet part out loud.)
People constantly bitch and moan about how “our schools don’t work.” Well, they’re NOT “our schools” … and they are working exactly according to plan.
Pull your kids out of the system, folks. Private school. Home school. There’s NUMEROUS different options.
When more and more Americans yank their kids from Caesar’s schools, they will collapse. Which would not be a bad thing.
I’m not sure most private schools are much better than the public schools when it comes to indoctrinating kids into critical race theory or leftist propaganda. Expecting parents to all yank their kids out of schools and home school them is unrealistic. There needs to be pushback on what the schools are doing. You cannot just cede ground to the totalitarians and let them indoctrinate all the kids who’s parents cannot afford private schools or homeschooling.
Unrealistic? What if the schools were beating the kids or torturing them or engaging in religious indoctrination? This is no batter. Are parents interested in protecting their children from harm, or aren’t they?
It is unrealistic. How are single working parents going to home school their kids? Quit their jobs and go on welfare? Ideally, children would be raised in two parent households where one parent stays home with the children and homeschooling would be a viable choice for most parents. We do not live in an ideal world. Two parent families are no longer the norm, stay at home parents are no longer the norm, and pretending otherwise is folly. Divorce rates are sky high, rates of children born out of wedlock are sky high, and even in two parent households there is seldom a stay at home parent. I’m not saying that is a good thing. It is not. It is just reality. Public schools are where most kids are going to attend school, whether we like it or not.
But for a hypothetical, let’s say people were willing and able to yank their kids out of public schools, and could afford to send them to private school or homeschool them. The lefty parents are probably happy with the indoctrination. So even in ideal circumstances, where everyone not on the left yanks their kids out, you still have half the nation’s children being indoctrinated. That is untenable as well.
We cannot just cede the public school systems to the totalitarians. We need to push back on them.
If the schools were beating the kids or torturing them or engaging in religious indoctrination, there would be backlash. People would push back on the behavior, just like they should push back on the current behavior. People throwing their hands up and ceding territory to the left is how the situation got this bad in the first place. I don’t see how doubling down on the strategy makes things better.
Am I not being targeted when my attributes are identified on paper by the educational institution as the privileged group, implied as guilty of something?
A rhetorical question to be sure.
Forget it, Jake. It’s Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota. Church and state are now one in the place where all the children are above average. Social Justice has replaced Faith, Hope and Charity. Leftism is the new religion. Minnesota nice. Openly buck a trend? Oh, Jah, Sure.
That is quite true. I was educated in the Mpls school system, enrolled in what they called Open School. I am convinced that my quest for social justice began with indoctrination in those schools. That being said, at the time, I did receive a better education than a lot of folks I’ve encountered, because while I was in school, MN was a state with better education at the time.
My mom recently mentioned that I’d come home from school saying things like “don’t go straight, go forward” because you know, straight people are bad. Or “don’t say Oriental say Asian.” I got that from school, especially high school. But I also got to go to gifted and talented classes and AP classes, where the schooling was much more interesting and dynamic. My understanding is the system there now has eliminated some of those programs which is too bad. This “cultural responsibility” in schools with CRT is just a lot more of what was already going on.
Why not Blue eyes and Brown eyes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott
It’s… Interesting to me that teachers don’t want to return to classrooms. Never before in modern history have parents had such a convenient window into the classroom. Do we think this kind of content is new? Do we think that the kids graduating college weren’t exposed to content like this? No, but ever since the latchkey generation, parents have been tuning out of education, so they just didn’t know. The faculty running these programs know that the parents would object to this content, we’ve caught them saying as much… Which is… something…. when you consider that their inherent laziness has gone to war with their ideological self-preservation, and their laziness won out. All they’d need to get all this parental scrutiny off their shoulder is to act like actual frontline workers and go to work.
This whole thing’s becoming a joke.
We’ve catered too much to the woke.
Their hearts start to flutter
With all that we utter.
Let’s quit before it’s all broke.
Could communities do what they used to do? A bunch of families put money together, hire a teacher, put her in a room with the kids and teach them that way? It can’t possibly be any worse.
This year I decided to run for our local school board. I have been fed up with the direction education in the United States has been turning for quite sometime. This is just another perfect example of the rot that continues to infect a wonderful institution. While I have not seen items like the one happening in our local town (maybe 20,000 people), I have heard many complaints from my teacher friends about how they are being abused by students and the administrators and there is becoming little and little they could do about it. While this could be chalked up to typically job complaining, a quick check of the analytics shows that my town has an unusually high rate of teacher turn over strongly implying there is quite a bit of validity to the claim.
So I decided to do something about it. In December two positions became open. So I went up to the school board, submitted my name, filled out the state paper work, went through the online ethics training, planned out a platform, and created some campaign materials. As a way of “coming out” I posted to a few of the towns Facebook page announcing my candidacy with an overview of my platform. At this point it became clear that I was significantly further ahead than most people. My wife wanted me to do more, but for years this is the most amount anyone has done when running for school board. So the questions came pouring in. Most people wanted to know if I was going to push to raise taxes (property tax had been raised three times in the three years I’ve lived there to pay for school stuff). Others wanted to know what I was going to do about staff. One person was thankful because she couldn’t remember the last time a candidate had put something out like this where they could be questioned by the public.
I have often found that local elections are the most frustrating to vote in. In a town this small, most people don’t know anything about the candidates issues or platforms. So when it comes time to vote, they mostly just pick the top name (studies show the first name gets 10-15% more of the votes). I personally don’t vote for anyone if I don’t know where they stand. It seems like a wildly irresponsible way to do democracy, but people do it.
Then Tuesday happened. On Tuesday the candidates were asked to come in for a meet and greet and get an idea of what it was like to be on the school board. In attendance was the current board (including the incumbent), the board secretary, the superintendent, and the two assistances. After the introductions (at this point some of the board left for other things) the board president goes on to talk about what happens on the school board. Our job isn’t to manage the schools but to develop policy. Therefore, no one running for school board should have an agenda. Then she looks at me and proposes a hypnotical straight off my platform as an example of not having an agenda.
It was a rather blazen attack. I have to imagine that at some point where I posted my platform, the board and the president did not like what I stood for. Realizing nothing could be said in public where they themselves would get into ethical trouble, they choose that moment to shoot me down. So I fired back. I reminded her of her own agenda that she just stated in her introduction. She got into the school board because it was full of “old white men.” No one does anything without a purpose (and if they do, they have no business in being in charge of anything). I reminded her that her constitutes had an obligation to know what it is she stood for, because she was representing them. While I agree school boards were non-political entities, the things we stand for become political because of the sides they are typically associated with.
That seemed to break the ice in the room. When asked what we would like to see done in the future if we didn’t win, someone wanted to know what the board was doing about the debauchery going on in the high school and middle school. He describes incidents he reported as a substitute. The superintendent fired back that he had not heard of these things. I shard some of the things my teacher friends have shard, and he also said he did not hear of these things. I asked the question, “Why doesn’t the superintendent know what is common knowledge to the public and what is the board going to do about it? The superintendent said he would look into it. The board president looked like a deer caught in the headlights.
I’m pretty sure I scare them because I do not represent what they themselves do. If that means being elected and being outvoted on issues by the other members, so be it. However you can make sure I fight them ever inch of the way, because they are allowing our education system to go into the toilet and I’m going to do what I can to stop it from happening.
Hoorah! Can I get an absentee ballot?
I commented that I was disgusted by the behavior of the public schoolteachers and I didn’t think they were educating the children to my insurance agent (he asked me why I was sending my child to a private school). He became furious that I would disparage such caring heroes. I had to change insurance agents.
Public schoolteachers are secular saints, they cannot be criticized. They are all selfless, wonderful, caring people who do the best job possible. This is reinforced with continual media messages.
Science, Michael!
“Science is the belief in the incompetence of experts.” -Richard Feynman
Therefore ignoring evidence of the incompetence of experts is anti-science.
My better half has always had an open door policy in his classrooms – any parent or administrator can pop in at anytime – without notice – to hear what and how he teaches history. He also gives every parent his phone number so they can call if they have any questions or concerns.
He was recently fired from a more than 23 year position because of two parents complaining to the heads of the school about things he said….BUT neither of those parents had ever set foot in his classroom, called him, or even mentioned any concerns when passing in the hallway. It basically boiled down to hearsay and concerns that he was not woke enough – not accepting their prescribed definition of various words.
Usually those who squawk the loudest do the least research and listening. Fortunately, three other outlets where he teaches prefer to have rational discussions with their staff and thus have built trust and understanding between all parties.
You know, this is as good a time as any for me to reveal my open letter to the people behind this indoctrination and those who go along with it.
Hello out there,
You might not know me, but I’m your neighbor. I’m the one neighbor who doesn’t get talked about as someone you should accept and be decent to. I’m not your black neighbor, your Jewish neighbor, your gay neighbor, or your Asian neighbor, though I could also be any of those things, and I’m definitely not your neighbor who is here illegally. I’m your neighbor you think is a decent person, but know little about, or who keeps to himself, or who you really don’t think much about at all. I’m your neighbor who might have given you a hand when you were hauling that huge piece of furniture up an awkward stair, or helped you shovel out after the last blizzard, or who kept an eye on the place while you and your family took that long-awaited trip to Disney. I’m your neighbor who stood across the street and clapped when the Memorial Day parade went by, or took from the same urn of lemonade at the town picnic, or stood twenty feet away from you as most of the town sang Christmas carols at the tree lighting. To all appearances I’m just an ordinary person, who goes to work, comes home, gets the kids off to school, and does all the things ordinary people do.
However, I have a confession. There is a terrible secret behind that white-painted door. A truth too terrible to mention lurks in the dimly lit hall. Something horrible awaits at the bottom of those steep wooden stairs that lead down to the laundry room and the basement closet that hasn’t been opened in who knows how long. What is it? Am in the Federal Witness Protection Program because I saw something I shouldn’t have? Do I belong to a second “family,” the kind that makes offers no one can refuse, in addition to my own? Do I secretly hold a 00 license, and any day might I get the phone call that sends me on an incredibly dangerous mission vital to the security of the West? Am I something supernatural, like a vampire? No, it’s something even worse than any of those things: I voted for Donald Trump for president, and I think both attempts to impeach him were wrong.
How could that be, right? I don’t seem like an evil person. I never said anything openly hateful. I never really said much about politics at all. This doesn’t make any sense. Do you feel shock, that a to all appearances decent person could commit this cardinal sin of cardinal sins? Do you feel betrayed, that a person like me could go about his life under your very nose and never say a word about it? Do you feel disgusted, that maybe you exchanged a few words or a handshake with me under what would otherwise be normal circumstances, and now you’re somehow polluted? Do you feel angry, like you want to run out your door and either attack me or scream at me to set me straight on a few things? Do you feel like you want to vandalize my house or car or harass my family, like you want to drive me out of the neighborhood, anywhere but here? Do you see me in a different light now? Am I a racist, a xenophobe, or just a plain Nazi? Are you asking yourself where I went wrong, or where my parents went wrong, or what did I experience that messed me up so badly?
If you’re thinking any of this, I have a few questions of my own. When did a difference of opinion, or the decision as to who to vote for become a capital offense? When did choosing a different candidate than you become grounds to treat someone like a cross between a leper and an untouchable? What makes you think that the kind of thug tactics that any number of organizations used to bully those they disagreed with are perfectly all right when directed against another American who you disagree with?
Let me shine a light on two facts that seem to have gotten lost in all of this: hatred is hatred, and bullying is bullying, no matter the target or the justification. Don’t give me that crap about punching a Nazi is inherently virtuous or that hatred of hatred isn’t hatred. The minute I pledge allegiance to some mythical forever Aryan regime, or start beating people up I disagree with, or I attempt the mass murder of those different from me, feel free to race to their defense. Having different heroes than you isn’t the same as pledging allegiance to some mythical regime that wasn’t and can never be. Disagreeing regarding policy issues that aren’t as cut and dried as you think they are isn’t the same as beating up those I disagree with. Saying that I don’t buy the ideology you swear absolute fealty to isn’t anywhere near taking even one life, leave alone the attempted genocide and violent destruction of any race.
What’s funny here is that you never once look into the mirror at what you yourself are doing, or set up the mirror to look at what you are doing vis-a-vis what you accuse me of doing. You’re the same folks who said it was perfectly ok to refuse to display allegiance to the flag, in fact that it was praiseworthy to seek attention by a public display of disloyalty. However, you also demanded that everyone utter the phrase “black lives matter,” and if they refused, or if they said “all lives matter,” or some other phrase, you accused them of racism or white supremacy. You’re the same people who cheered on “mostly peaceful” protests that reduced downtown Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, NYC, and a bunch of other places to ashes and got over 40 people killed, then quoted the meaningless statistic that only 7% of protests got violent. Tell me, if you struck your partner and injured him/her only 7 days out of every 100, would that mean your relationship was a “mostly peaceful” one? You’re the same people who called an outright secession enforced by armed thugs the “summer of love” and “democracy in action,” and cheered on attempts to burn down a Federal courthouse. You’re the same people who cheered damage to DC unseen since the British burned the place in the War of 1812 and sneered when the president was moved to a secure place when it looked like the security of the White House might be compromised. Yet when one protest out of how many by those you disagree with got out of hand, did a lot less damage, and didn’t rack up anything like the death toll, you called it treason, insurrection, and a million of the worst possible political sins, and called for blood. You acted like you were horrified that members of Congress performing a “sacred duty” had to flee, and even now, Washington D.C. looks like an armed camp, with plans for it to stay one until at least the fall, no reasons given. You’re the same people who tried for four years to undo the 2016 election, by claiming Russian involvement, claiming the president was insane or unfit, claiming this or that. You even ran ridiculous ads calling for the electors to break with the results of the 2016 election and throw it to the loser. Yet, when Trump said he didn’t buy the results of an election that involved huge amounts of unsecure mail-in ballots, in which Big Tech ran interference for his opponent, in which the media put its thumb (actually its whole fist, but that’s just keeping score) on the scales against him, in which there was an overnight blackout just as it looked like he was about to win the swing states, after which they all flipped, you said he was a dictator and an authoritarian. We’ll never really know, because case after case was thrown out on procedural grounds, before the record could really be developed, but you know they were “laughed out of court,” so they must have had no merit, right? You’re the same people who said to lay off Bill Clinton when he committed adultery and perjury, because he had important work to do, but impeached Trump twice, once over a conversation, once with no investigation, and are still grumbling that the other side twice failed to “get on the right side of history” and convict.
Well, this is where the road forks. I’ve been content to just go my way and leave you to go yours, despite the fact that for a while I’ve known every time you look at me you’re calling me all sorts of hateful, ignorant, profane names in your head, and awarding yourself points for thinking them up, and bonus points for a particularly cruel one. I even tried to reach out and be fundamentally decent. What changed my mind was that article about how someone like me did something nice for someone like you without being asked to do it, and not only did the recipient of the favor not reciprocate, which is ok, because the Boy Scouts (you know, that group you and your allies trashed and made continued existence impossible for because it was pitched only at boys?) taught not to do a good turn in the hope of receiving a tip or other service in return, but squirmed at owing an obligation even of simple gratitude to someone they didn’t agree with, and ended with the idea that giving a quick thank you and a wave was more than the person he disagreed with deserved, because that person was just that bad, and, until that person reformed and came over to where he was, he was persona non grata. You’re the kind of jerk who back in college would nod with a stony face as greeting, pass the salt when asked, and murmur a noncommittal “hmmmm” before turning away from someone like me, like civility to those you disagree with was a sin.
We’re not pedophiles, we’re not convicted felons, we’re not terrorists, we’re not traitors, we’re not seditionists, and we’re not lepers. We’re done accepting you treating us worse than you’d treat almost any of those people and applauding yourselves for doing it. You stay on your side of the fence, and we’ll stay on ours. Henceforth, don’t talk to us, don’t come near us, don’t even look at us. Expect no favors from us, unasked for or asked for. If you need someone to babysit your kids while you attend some necessary event, or give you a ride somewhere because your car is in the shop, or give you a hand installing that huge flatscreen TV, or to hold the ladder while you trim the hedges, don’t ask, because the answer will be no. Don’t be surprised when we walk right past you and say not one word. Also don’t be surprised if one day we up and leave, because honestly, although you may think you’re such a good person that anyone should be honored to be in your presence, it’s really no fun at all to be constantly in the presence of someone who hates you, looks down his nose at you, and thinks you are a cross between Alfred E. Neumann and the Emperor Palpatine. I’d much rather live among like-minded or at least neutral people, or out in the country where you don’t really see your neighbors, and when you do, you mind your own business.
I’d say have a nice life, but I really don’t care two clods of dirt whether, when, where, or how you live or die.
This might be COTD, but not because I agree with it. It seems like the inevitable state of our current reality.
What happens when one of the “Targeted” groups is the oppressor? Go ask a Muslim baker to make you a gay wedding cake.
When a Muslim husband and wife targeted their Christian coworker and massacred him and over 10 others in San Bernardino, as revenge for him patiently debating religion with them and questioning their hatred of Jews…that wasn’t religious persecution. According to this handy chart, it was just two oppressed people fighting back.
Steve-O-inNJ…
I read your open letter and cried my eyes out. It’s how I’ve felt for the last few years, and left social media because I was too afraid to verbalize it. I’m horrified at the state of our country, the hatred and vitriol spewed, the assumptions made, but most of all I mourn the loss of common basic human decency. I’m a gentle soul, but I’m also a patriot. Thank you for expressing so eloquently the angst that many of us feel, how awful it is to be alienated from people we’ve thought were loving friends and caring neighbors, and how dangerous it is to simply “be”…as we’re constantly told that not being an active SJW (too often for causes we disagree with or take issue with or God forbid, question) translates to being a racist, bigoted, misogynistic, xenophobic, homophobic, insert woke term, person…when those terms couldn’t be further from the truth.
And Jack, thank you for always being brave enough to speak your mind, and talk about the issues so many of us can’t talk about.
I never thought Orwell’s 1984 would come true, but I feel we are slipping into it more and more each day.