Abusing Schoolchildren

In one sense it’s too soon to estimate the damage done to children’s minds by the current mania about race and gender based indoctrination. In another sense, this new front in the Great American Cultural Revolution-- which I identified in a book a quarter century ago-- has been on the march for decades now. 

In the past it had been limited to colleges and universities. Now it has made its way into kindergartens and elementary schools. As we have reported, kindergarten children are now taught the dogmas of transgenderism. If you think that this is going to end well, you must have gone off your meds.

Erika Sanzi brings us up to speed on some of the horrors currently being visited on America’s schoolchildren. She writes for the City Journal (via Maggie’s Farm):

The contemporary obsession with identity has made its way into elementary school policy, curricula, and standards approved by state boards. While we continue to see poor reading and math scores, schools spend money and time confusing and shaming other people’s children. Many educators and elected leaders have good intentions; they believe deeply that they are part of a necessary and long-overdue movement to teach racial literacy, social justice, equity, and antiracism. But as virtuous as these terms may sound on their face, they mean something else in far too many classrooms. American schools are teaching young children race essentialism: reducing them to identity groups, putting them in boxes labeled “oppressor” and “oppressed,” and often inflicting emotional and psychological harm.

The important point is that America’s schoolchildren cannot read, write or count. Precious few can do algebra. Nearly none can do calculus. And yet, we are filling their minds with radical leftist ideology, because then they will not even be motivated to learn how to read, write or do math. And they will never be able to compete against their peers in the world economy.

At a time when America is up in arms about any and all forms of child abuse, it is countenancing this pedagogical version of child abuse. Parents have called it out, but it continues apace. Someone or other, too few people have understood that you can abuse and damage children without molesting them.

Sanzi offers the example of an elementary school in Bellevue, Washington:

Consider Bellevue, Washington, home to Cherry Crest Elementary School. The school website indicates that students “will have explicit conversations about race, equity, and access” and “will identify culture and begin to recognize and identify white culture through storytelling, sharing, and conversation.” The school promises to hold monthly assemblies that focus on culture, identity, and race, and has created a group called SOAR (Students Organized Against Racism) for fourth- and fifth-graders. These children, who range from ages nine to 11, are tasked with “implementing learning and stratimplementation of school-wide learning and strategies for being anti-racist.” Left unclear is whether these students have been made aware that modern antiracism requires discrimination on the basis of race.

Of course, it’s an obscenity. It is destroying America’s most precious resource. And, in the current political climate, very few people seem to care:

But public institutions funded with public dollars do not exist to groom activists for particular causes, shame children for their immutable traits, or deny them their agency or their childhood. We are talking about eight- and nine-year-old kids who believe in Santa Claus, hide their lost teeth under their pillow for the tooth fairy, and curl up in their parents’ laps for comfort and love. It is immoral—at least—to reduce them to confected racial and gender categories and to teach them to do the same to others. Parents around the country need to understand what is happening in a growing number of elementary classrooms.