A news article in today’s New York Times [Gift link!] begins thusly:

“Late last fall at the Hugo Newman School in Harlem, two social studies teachers handed out pages of hip-hop lyrics to their seventh graders, and then flicked off the lights. The students appeared surprised. They had been studying ancient matriarchal societies, including Iroquois communities that had women as leaders. Now, their teachers were about to play the song ‘Ladies First’ by Queen Latifah and Monie Love. The teachers instructed their students to highlight any lyrics that reminded them of the Iroquois women, who were known as the Haudenosaunee Clan Mothers. Although they did not know it, the middle schoolers were in the midst of their first lesson of ‘Black Studies as the Study of the World,’ a curriculum that rolled out in September and is now available to every New York City public school.”

“In New York, we are trying our best to be Trump-proof,” the Times quoted Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the New York City Council, as saying in a recent interview. “We are doing everything we can to protect the curriculum.”

The obvious question is “Why?” Protect the curriculum from straightforward standards that ensure that the average student leaves high school with the core skills necessary for success in work and life? By its very nature, bombarding middle school students with lessons on “matriarchal societies”—an elective college course if there ever was one—is political in both nature and intent.

The article goes on: “Ms. Adams, who helped allocate $27 million to develop the Black studies lessons, has called New York’s curriculum a “model of fearlessness.” The curriculum offers students an “African-centered perspective that predates slavery” and is optional for schools.”

That’s nice. How does educator “fearlessness” benefit students? It seems beyond dispute that the curricula being imposed on students were developed with specific ideological goals in mind that have nothing to do with basic education. Why is any American public school teaching “an African-centered perspective”? Need it be pointed out that America isn’t Africa? Again, this is pure ideological indoctrination.

Yet, we are told, 200 New York schools have adopted it. New York’s educational leadership embraces this approach, mouthing familiar woke cant, Melissa Aviles-Ramos, the city’s schools chancellor, says the African entered perspective is essential “in a diverse school district. “When students connect with the material, they are more engaged, develop critical thinking skills and build a deeper sense of belonging,” she said in a statement. “I am proud to lead a school system that values inclusion and the powerful truth that our diversity is our strength.”

Students “connect” with material to the extent that they are human beings and American citizens, and any further classifications or distinctions are first, not the school’s place to emphasize and second, distractions. “The powerful truth that our diversity is our strength” isn’t fact, or truth; it’s propaganda. What this report demonstrates is how thoroughly the U.S. has allowed its education sector to be radicalized, politicized, dominated by a radical cultural mission, and to make education a process that subordinates the development of children’s practical skills and knowledge to the implanting of Marxist ideology.

There is much more at the link, but the message is clear: A destructive, quiet, but lately not so quiet, revolution took place because of parental and community apathy, inattention and laziness. Dedicated ideologues filled the vacuum. I have no idea how reversing its ruinous consequences can occur, because it seems horribly clear that the culture of education has been corrupted and that the corrupters are still in control.

Now what?