Biden On Education

Joe Biden’s choice to head up the Education Department is the Connecticut Commissioner of Education and played a key role in developing a statewide minority-studies course that, according to the Washington Free Beacon, “analyzes how race, power, and privilege influence group access to citizenship, civil rights, and economic power.”

Miguel Cardona based the curriculum on “critical race theory” which claims America is systemically racist. The choice has pleased left-wing education advocacy groups and teachers’ unions.

Hearing Youth Voices, a left-wing activist group that works to integrate “political education and theory” into public schools, helped develop the curriculum with Cardona. Hearing Youth Voices hosts a slew of diversity training sessions, including one that claims “capitalism is at the root of white supremacy, patriarchy, police brutality, the school-to-prison pipeline and so much more.” Other training courses call for police abolition and refer to Israel as a police state.

What possible educational value is there for a student to receive “political education”?  If it was an education about politics, that would be fine. But we all know whose politics are going to be taught and which are “good” and whose will be portrayed as “bad.”

Over two million people have seen this controversial video about what will happen next to stocks this year.  That’s not “education.” It’s brainwashing.

The Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning Collective was also involved in finalizing the curriculum’s instructional materials. Following a review of the course’s syllabus, the group said the curriculum helps students engage in “anti-racist leadership.”

Cardona has long been a proponent of integrating identity politics into public education. In a press release for Connecticut governor Ned Lamont (D.), Cardona said that “identities matter” in the context of a child’s education success, “especially when 27 percent of our students identify as Hispanic or Latino and 13 percent identify as Black or African-American…. More inclusive, culturally relevant content in classrooms leads to greater student engagement and better outcomes for all.”

The curriculum includes readings about Black Lives Matter and “resistance” movements of other minorities. Where do they come up with this stuff?

An “expert review panel,” which was filled with educators who support critical race theory being taught in the classroom, had input on the curriculum. One reviewer, Glenn Singleton, founded an organization that teaches students that individualism, competition, politeness, the scientific method, planning for the future, and the nuclear family are “aspects and assumptions of white culture.” Stefanie Wager, another member of the review panel and president of the National Council for the Social Studies, said social studies should be used to combat racism.

The future world portrayed in Idiocracy is going to look like geniuses compared to how kids are being educated today.  The “scientific method” is racist? There goes our technological future, at least in the U.S. No foreign country in their right mind would teach that the scientific method was a means of oppression. Our great-grandchildren will be sweeping the floors of factories owned by the Chinese and Indians.

If these were all elective courses for older high school kids, that could be OK.  Young people should be exposed to all kinds of thinking and viewpoints in order to get a wider, more complete education. But forcing children to sit through propaganda and mandating it goes beyond what could possibly be considered “education” and is indoctrination.

 Adrian Vance