Public Education Going Mad

In 2009, the University of Minnesota announced a “Teacher Education Redesign Initiative” to alter admissions standards for its school of education. The proposal, designed, by the “Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group,” declared that teacher candidates “will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity,  heteronormativity, and internalized oppression.”¹

The Task Group suggested that future teachers should:

• Fight for social justice even if it’s just in their classroom.²
• Understand resistance theory.
• Explain how institutional racism works in schools.

CREATE (Culturally Responsive Education for All: Training and Enhancement) Wisconsin is a state-sponsored initiative that ostensibly exists to help white teachers learn how to more effectively instruct minority students.³ The program costs taxpayers roughly $1 million per year.

Source: Conform. Exposing the Truth about Common Core and Public Education (2014) by Glenn Beck with Kyle Olson.

¹ Where does the Left come up with these terms? Hegemonic masculinity? (I looked it up. Hint: It’s anti-male and a subset of Marxist theory.)  Heteronormativity? What?! How did I ever get through school without knowing that term? I feel so cheated.

² I guess good old arithmetic, spelling, and grammar is passé. Come on, who does that anymore.

³ Here’s an idea: What about effectively instructing all students regardless of what group they are in. You know, treat them as individuals.

As for a closing to this madness here’s an interesting quote about education from Albert Einstein:

Knowledge is dead; the school, however, serves the living. It should develop in the young individuals those qualities and capabilities which are of value for the welfare of the commonwealth. But that does not mean that individuality should be destroyed and the individual become a mere tool of the community, like a bee or an ant. For a community of standardized individuals without personal originality and personal aims would be a poor community without possibilities for development. On the contrary, the aim must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals, who, however, see in the service of the community their highest life problem.