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In The Wall Street Journal, Williamson M. Evers explains the frightening new proposal for an “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum” in California. He writes (abridged):
California’s Education Department has issued an “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum”.
The legislatively mandated guide is a resource for teachers who want to instruct their students in the field of “ethnic studies,” and was written by an advisory board of teachers, academics and bureaucrats.
It’s as bad as you imagine.
Ethnic studies is described in the document as “the interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity with an emphasis on experiences of people of color in the United States.”
Begin with economics. Capitalism is described as a “form of power and oppression,” alongside “patriarchy,” “racism,” “white supremacy” and “ableism.” Capitalism and capitalists appear as villains several times in the document.
On politics, the model curriculum is similarly left-wing. One proposed course promises to explore the African-American experience “from the precolonial ancestral roots in Africa to the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Teachers are encouraged to cite the biographies of “potentially significant figures” such as Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon and Bobby Seale. Convicted cop-killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur are also on the list.
This curriculum explicitly aims at encouraging students to become “agents of change, social justice organizers and advocates.”
Teaching objective history clearly isn’t the goal. Rather, it’s training students to become ideological activists and proponents of identity politics.
Read more here.
