The culture wage will rage in America's classrooms. Max Eden writes:
School will be a very different place next year. Classes will be less full. Desks will be rigorously sterilized. And, if the education establishment has its way, teachers will be aggressively “woke.”
“We are living at a time of obscene inequities and merely trying to compensate is not enough,” the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) recently announced. “Equity is more than making things more accessible and AASA’s work on equity must go further and become actively anti-racist. … Leading a system-wide effort requires that we ensure that cultural responsiveness permeates all levels of the district.”
For many parents, this might sound like an unobjectionable appeal to moral progress in the wake of a tragic injustice. But they could be surprised when they realize what antiracist, culturally responsive classrooms will look like. Antiracism sounds simple: treat everyone the same, like a version of the Golden Rule. But the Chicago Public School district headlined its recently released “toolkit to help foster productive conversations about race and civil disobedience” with an epigraph by Angela Davis, the former Communist and criminal fugitive who supplied the guns used in the Marin Courthouse massacre in 1970. “In a racist society, it is not enough to not be non-racist,” said Davis. “We must be anti-racist.” The toolkit provides links to materials written by the Southern Poverty Law Center and directs teachers toward Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist.
[Max Eden, “There Is No Apolitical Classroom,” City Journal, June 19]
