This is but a foretaste of the kind of ‘learning’ that could dominate schools nationwide if conservatives don’t organize against it immediately.
This is but a foretaste of the kind of ‘learning’ that could dominate schools nationwide if conservatives don’t organize against it immediately.
T omorrow, California’s Department of Education will vote on a proposed Ethnic-Studies Model Curriculum. If members vote in the affirmative, it could become mandatory in all of California’s K–12 public schools. I wrote about the curriculum’s early drafts last week, but we now know that the latest 894-page version is the final one. It was hoped that the process of revision would temper the radicalism of the first few iterations, but those hopes have been dashed.
Perhaps the most astounding part of the proposed curriculum is the section that deals with religion. Students are to be taught that white Christian settlers committed “theocide” against indigenous tribes when they arrived in the New World by murdering Native American gods and replacing them with the Christian God. According to the curriculum, this replacement ushered in a regime defined by “coloniality, dehumanization, and genocide,” and the “explicit erasure and replacement of holistic Indigeneity and humanity.” But all is not lost, we are told. For students will learn that they have the power and the responsibility to build a social order defined by “countergenocide,” which will eventually supplant the last vestiges of colonial Christianity and pave the way for the “regeneration of indigenous epistemic and cultural futurity.”
The architects of the curriculum have to be praised for their commitment to their cause, if for nothing else, because they haven’t allowed their veneration of pagan religion to rest at the level of theory. They insist on putting it into practice, and on roping the children of California into their pattern of worship. In fact, the curriculum includes an official “ethnic studies community chant,” in the performance of which teachers are instructed to lead their students. Christopher F. Rufo describes the rite (what else can it be called?) as follows:
Students first clap and chant to the god Tezkatlipoka—whom the Aztecs traditionally worshipped with human sacrifice and cannibalism—asking him for the power to be “warriors” for “social justice.” Next, the students chant to the gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totek, seeking “healing epistemologies” and “a revolutionary spirit.” Huitzilopochtli, in particular, is the Aztec deity of war and inspired hundreds of thousands of human sacrifices during Aztec rule. Finally, the chant comes to a climax with a request for “liberation, transformation, [and] decolonization,” after which students shout “Panche beh! Panche beh!” in pursuit of ultimate “critical consciousness.”
The first question all this raises is one of pity and compassion: Will no one think of the poor writers at the Babylon Bee, whose Herculean task it is to satirize this dizzying pinnacle of woke insanity? If present trends continue, we will soon have to pass antitrust legislation aimed at reality itself on account of its unfair and anticompetitive monopoly on satirical content.
On a more serious note, however, the fact that such a document as this could be on the brink of becoming law in the richest and most populous state in America is troubling in the extreme. The religious component of this curriculum might void the entire bill in the end, running afoul of the First Amendment as it so obviously does. But the fact that it could be signed into law in the first place is evidence of just how completely conservatives and liberals alike have abandoned the field of education to radical progressives over the last century. There are few, if any, institutions in American life that can meet radical educational theorists and mandarins on their own territory and win long-term legislative battles. What is needed is a kind of Federalist Society for education, to which right-thinking parents, teachers, administrators, and academics can belong, and through which they can organize for change.
Opponents of the progressive education agenda have limited the effectiveness of their advocacy in the past by conceiving of the fight in terms of the familiar opposition between free markets and state control. It’s necessary to have this fight, but it’s no longer sufficient. The sooner that conservatives and classical liberals wake up to this fact, the better it will be for America’s children.
Many of us still act as if government control of the means of production is the top priority of the post-1989 Left, just as it was during the Cold War. But this simply isn’t true. The economic categories that were normative for classical Marxism have been replaced by cultural, racial, and sexual categories for the most part on today’s left. There are still intellectuals (such as Thomas Piketty) and politicians (such as Bernie Sanders) who hew to the older economic paradigm, and they must be engaged on every front. But the political energy and enthusiasm today is with an ascendant cultural Left that has few qualms with capital as long as capital is woke. This is why school choice won’t be a panacea to the kind of craziness on display in this curriculum. Expensive private schools are increasingly anxious to genuflect toward precisely the same ideological agenda as the one being pushed in California.
Today, the far Left is not, in fact, overly interested in nationalizing coal production or the post office. It is interested in nationalizing childhood. The Democratic machine in California is using the power of the state to accomplish this end, but principals in rich private schools across the country are increasingly happy to do so voluntarily and for a six-figure salary. If Americans of sound mind and sane conscience want to arrest the spread of what’s going on in California, they can’t limit themselves to campaigning for school choice alone. They have to be willing to have arguments about the content that children learn in the classroom. Nor can this be merely a defensive, rearguard action against bad curricula. Good curricula will have to be formulated, proposed, campaigned for, and implemented as an alternative to the productions of the social engineers. If conservatives in particular were to organize in as active, disciplined, and committed a way around the issue of education during the next 40 years as they organized around the law and the courts over the last 40 years, programs like this ethnic-studies curriculum might one day be remembered as strange historical artifacts of a brief and bygone moral panic. But recent events don’t warrant such an optimistic forecast.