California Ethnic-Studies Curriculum: Left-Wing Learning Could Dominate Schools Nationwide

Tomorrow, 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.”

About the Author

Cameron Hilditch

Cameron Hilditch was a 2020-2021 William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism at National Review Institute.

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Tomorrow, 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.”