I honestly thought this story was a parody when I first read about it. Horrifyingly, Woke Kindergarten is real: a genuine dead canary in the mine of U.S. culture. On the company’s website, it boasts, “Woke kindergarten is a global, abolitionist early childhood ecosystem & visionary creative portal supporting children, families, educators and organizations in their commitment to abolitionist early education and pro-Black and queer and trans liberation.” The babber on that page shouts, “Power to the little people!”, a direct call-out to Marx, and what that really means is “Power to radical anti-American ideology through the programming of its children.”
Claiming that the schools are more dedicated to indoctrinating children than in educating them is another one of those conservative conspiracy theories people catch from Fox News like the flu, I keep reading. The next time someone tells you that, send them the Woke Kindergarten link right after you respond, “Bite me, you useful idiot.”
Wandering through the site is like visiting Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, early education version. “Woke Words of the day” include “Ceasefire,” “Protest,” Strike,” “Abolish” and “Anti-Racist.” The kids are introduced to the wonders of censorship. How are children introduced to poetry, its meter, its rhyme schemes, its beauty? Here’s one of Woke Kindergarten’s “teachable poems”:
Sure, it doesn’t doesn’t scan and is incomprehensible, but there’s a leftist message in there somewhere. On most of the site, the communist aspirations are hardly hidden. “Lil’ Comrade Convos” is one section. Under “Woke Wonderings”, described as “unconventional questions rooted in liberatory thought” that teachers and parents are supposed to pose to 4 and 5-year olds, who, as we all know, are well equipped with the experience and critical thinking skills to evaluate them, we have these loaded queries…
Enough: you get the picture. But, you may ask, what school would pay to poison a kindergartner’s mind with such overt Marxist poison? Might you guess a Bay area school, mayhap? If so, you would be right, although who knows what other communities have let Woke Kindergarten run amuck? I’d check Madison, Wisconsin, anywhere in Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, surely Oregon and Washington, and D.C. as a start.
But we know about Glassbrook Elementary in Oakland. It paid $250,000 to the Woke Kindergarten folks in a three-year contract, but now some are questioning the decision because test scores have fallen. This has apparently prompted “some teachers to question whether the money was well-spent given the needs of the students, who are predominantly low-income.”
If the teachers took two years to figure out that prioritizing political indoctrination in kindergarten wouldn’t help test scores, the real problems in that school begin with the fact that its teachers and administrators are, to be precise, morons.
The San Francisco Chronicle informs us that,
English and math scores hit new lows last spring, with less than 4% of students proficient in math and just under 12% at grade level in English — a decline of about 4 percentage points in each category…District officials defended the program this past week, saying that Woke Kindergarten did what it was hired to do…
The decision to bring in Woke Kindergarten, rather than a more traditional literacy or math improvement program, aligns with the belief by some parents and educators that the current education system isn’t working for many disadvantaged children.The solution, these advocates say, is for educators to confront legacies of racism and bias in schools, and to talk about historic white supremacy, so that students feel safe and supported. As such anti-racism programs have spread, several more conservative state legislatures have moved to restrict or ban them.
There go those crazy, democracy-hating conservatives again! What are they so afraid of?
Ethics Alarms 
Jonathan Turley wrote about this yesterday. Turley quoted an Iowa school board member Rachel Wall, who said:
Rachel Wall, and those that think like her, are showing us in simple words that many in the public education system have the mindset of communists. This is pure communist indoctrination of our youth and parents are forced to pay for it with mandatory taxation whether they agree with the indoctrination or not.
Here are a few relevant quotes from Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt from her 1999 book “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America”:
Iserbyt was publicly tarred as a lunatic conspiracy theorist.
Don’t you think all these useful “woke” idiots have earned themselves a nice participation trophy…
I hadn’t checked Prof. Turley recently. Glad that he’s on the case.
Here is a link to Turley’s post on the topic.
A thought or two on Rachel Wall’s quote:
The controversy over Ms. Wall’s statements is, I believe, from a year ago, though it’s clearly appropriate to the current discussion of Woke Kindergarten.
Hers is the Linn-Mar school district on the NW side of Cedar Rapids. I lived in CR for 6+ years in the mid-90s and at the time, Linn-Mar was pretty highly respected. It might still be, but clearly the infection of leftist-marxist dogma is spreading.
After receiving quite a bit of blowback (and numerous calls to resign), Ms. Wall apparently responded with this (taken from a corresponding Fox News piece, also from a year ago):
Ms. Wall wanted to clarify…but she clarified nothing. Her initial statement indeed read that parents didn’t matter. Communities are comprised of parents and what they want?…well, that’s what the community wants.
So what SHE did say (using Orwellian double-speak) is that she doesn’t want to teach what the community of Marion, IA, its parents, or the larger Cedar Rapids community wants. Rather, she wants to teach what the largely Marxist-controlled and Marxist-driven educational communities want to teach children.
And her second “fall-back” statement was just more lies and double-speak. She thought her initial “sentiment was clear”. Oh, it’s clear alright. We know exactly what you said.
Ms. Wall ignored calls to resign (which is completely within her rights) and I believe still sits on the Linn-Mar school board.
Good thing is we have a pretty conservative Governor, and an equally conservative, pro-parent legislature, that signed legislation allowing parents to use education dollars to send their children to whatever school they choose. This is an incredibly powerful tool, especially here in the Des Moines metro, where marxist ideology has spread in at least a couple of schools to the point that they are on life support.
Well, that was a depressing website. More depressing still is that the school was paid $250k to fail its students.
jvb
All those woke Kindergarten snippets remind me of the lyrics in John Lennon’s song “Imagine”. Bunch of communist cultist minded fools.
As you might guess, I nearly introduced the post with John’s annoying song.
If they abolish the police, who will enforce the stricter gun control laws that they want?
Armed brown shirt vigilante squads.
If they abolish the police, who will enforce the stricter gun control laws that they want?
Or beat back the burgeoning White Supremacist phalanx…?
PWS
Why enforce him control laws when free commerce in weapons is required for survival under the conditions of questions 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6?
They want to abolish the local police. The gun control will be enforced by the ATF/FBI/DEA/Homeland Security/IRS/EPA/OSHA, etc. Remember, the Treasury Department has required all the credit card companies to turn over all records they have of anyone who purchased a firearm or firearm accessory because it indicates the person is a domestic terrorist. This wasn’t the FBI or the ATF, this was Janet Yellen.
“If they abolish the police, who will enforce the stricter gun control laws that they want?”
The illegal immigrants they organize into a federal gun control agency, probably some branch of the BATFE (and sometimes Y).
I wonder what kind of parent would send a child to that preschool. When my wife and I were looking into schools for our son, we agreed on Catholic school and our parish school was/is excellent so our choice was easy. Had we wanted public school, though, we certainly would not have sent our son to something like this. My wife looked into a ‘Mommy and me” program at a local Methodist church and bailed on the first day because she thought the teachers were nuts.
In this case/post, I am not sure if this is a local San Francisco Bay Area school or part of a larger network of preschools throughout the country. The website has an “about us” feature and it links to the director (maybe the “us” refers to her choice of “they/them” pronouns but . . .) A quick review of the site does not show a link to other schools. There was a the article showing the school received $250k in federal funding but, again, who would fund a for-grif . . . erm profit program that ignores fundamental teaching structures.
The website offers a poster available (oddly, in US Dollars) called “A-B – but no C” and the alphabet deletes Cs, Ds, Es, and Fs. How are they going to teach spelling if letters are omitted? Cat would become kat? Dog would be, what, “thog”? How about fan? ”Phan”? Again, what parent would abdicate responsibility to a group of hard leftists? I get this is a preschool so the damage they inflict can be remedied, but why do that?
jvb
I am currently taking a break from my self-inflicted punishment of combing the internet for tools to use to improve my fourth grader’s vocabulary so that she can properly comprehend books like “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” and “Misty of Chincoteague” for the final quarter of this school year. I am feeling pressure to figure out how I’m going to handle all of my second grader’s newly diagnosed special needs with dyslexia, ADHD, fine motor skills, and a few more on top of that, along with her medical conditions. I am worried about planning out next school year (finding curricula, planning classes and times for activities, working on a class schedule that incorporates everyone’s strengths and weaknesses, etc) when I’ll add a kindergartner to the mix, along with trying to currently school and care for those three, plus a two year old and all of the stresses that come along with that.
With that as my backdrop, every so often I question whether or not I have made the best choice, homeschooling my children. Surely public school couldn’t be THAT bad? Then, I come here, and low and behold, every single time, you have a post strengthening my spine within the top five posts. This one may just take the damn cake. I’m so happy to homeschool! I wish other parents could/would do the same.
We went through the same doubts, Sarah, and they linger. I found public school a generally valuable and enjoyable experience, but that was a long, long time ago. I know my son missed a lot by not getting THAT experience, but as you say, the more I followed the decline of public schools across the country, the more I am secure in believing they aren’t worth the risk.
I wonder what changed.
The only way to stop this is to get rid of the central control. The only way to get rid of the central control is to end the taxation. The federal, state, and local governments spent about $9.8 trillion last year. That works out to $79,000 for each of the 123 million households in the US. The median household only makes $74,000. There is no way to fix anything unless the size of government is reduced. There is no way to do anything else because the government is almost everything now.
Here’s a tip for communists: The workers can’t control the means of production if they don’t know how to produce anything.
Students will feel “safe and supported” when they can intentionally accomplish things that either are inherently constructive or that others find useful and meaningful. The possibilities are fairly broad if you know what to look for.
Some of these questions are not bad, but kindergarten is not the age to make kids start thinking about them. Kids need a foundational education which will equip them with skills that they can use to build good answers to these questions when they grow up. Some of the answers will be “there’s a reason we do it this way; we just need to hold people accountable for abiding by ethical standards.”
For example, the question about abolishing money would be better asked in high school as an exercise in demonstrating why money is important for large-scale economies, and why the use of money in and of itself isn’t the source of problems. Money is just a quantification of promises. It’s a tool that acts as a medium of exchange, a store of value, an imperfect way to distribute limited resources, and an imperfect measure of what someone contributes to society.
The danger in money-based economies shows up when we don’t account for those imperfections, when we rely on money to inform all decisions instead of responsibly addressing the ethical choices that money can’t automatically make for us.
Afterward, students can learn about economies across Earth’s history, many of which developed forms of currency completely independently of one another.