I was walking home the other night and I see the group of kindergarteners all dressed up in white robes carrying a burning cross (they had cooking mitts on).
Oh, yeah...some first grader named the "Grand Dragon" was leading the procession to the front yard of an Black Trans American Indian family's home.
What are they not teaching these kids in school? I'm really getting sick of the legions of racist little sheets who pray on ...whomever.
Tim Walz Brings ‘Liberated’ Ethnic Studies to Minnesota
Beginning in kindergarten, the state’s schoolchildren will be indoctrinated in radical racial ideology.
By Katherine Kersten, WSJ
Aug. 21, 2024 12:53 pm ET
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz reads a book to kindergarten students at Adams Spanish Immersion Elementary in St. Paul, Minn., Jan. 17, 2023. Photo: Glen Stubbe/Associated Press
Minneapolis
Tim Walz was a schoolteacher before entering politics, so what is his approach to teaching? The Minnesota Department of Education will soon release the initial version of a document that lays out how new “liberated” ethnic-studies requirements will be implemented in the state’s roughly 500 public-school districts and charter schools.
Mr. Walz signed the law establishing this initiative in 2023. The department’s standards and benchmarks, approved in January, require first-graders to “identify examples of ethnicity, equality, liberation and systems of power” and “use those examples to construct meanings for those terms.”
Fourth-graders must “identify the processes and impacts of colonization and examine how discrimination and the oppression of various racial and ethnic groups have produced resistance movements.” High-school students are told to “develop an analysis of racial capitalism” and “anti-Blackness” and are taught to view themselves as members of “racialized hierarchies” based on “dominant European beauty standards.”
The Walz administration has relied on committed political activists to design and guide implementation of the state’s education agenda. One of them is Brian Lozenski, an associate professor of urban and multicultural education at Macalester College in St. Paul and a leader and a founding organizer of Education for Liberation Minnesota, or EdLib MN, a group that aims to “be a political force” in Minnesota and “contend with the status quo of colonial education that prioritizes Eurocentric curricula.” Starting in 2020, EdLib MN’s ideological allies, who dominated the state’s social-studies standards drafting committee, made liberated ethnic studies a top priority. Recently, the Education Department assigned Mr. Lozenski as one of the writers of the statewide K-12 Ethnic Studies implementation document that the department is about to release.
Mr. Lozenski’s ideological commitments were on display in a 2022 article about the George Floyd riots titled “The Black Radical Tradition Can Help Us Imagine a More Just World.” The riots, he wrote, were “mass uprisings against racialized state violence,” which portend “the inevitable death” of the American “social order that prioritizes vulgar economics.” Mr. Lozenski urged schools reopening after Covid to “join the social unrest and actively combat the greater public health crisis of systemic racism.”
As part of its campaign to build support for the liberated ethnic-studies mandate, EdLib MN retweeted a graphic calling for “the abolition of policing” and declaring that “defunding the police” means “abolishing the social order and building a new society.”
The standards are laced with ideological jargon like “decolonization,” “dispossession” and “settler colonialism,” consistent with Mr. Lozenski’s animus toward Israel. “Ethnic Studies explores the colonial roots of the dispossession of Palestinian land and the creation of Zionism,” he co-wrote in a 2022 article titled “Fight for Ethnic Studies Moves to K-12 Classrooms.” Given “the devastating impact of Israeli colonialism,” the article continued, “studying Israeli settler colonialism in comparison to US settler colonialism” is “at the heart of the discipline of Ethnic Studies.”
As with police abolition, EdLib MN moved aggressively to encourage student activism against Israel. On Oct. 17, less than two weeks after Hamas’s massacre in Israel, Mr. Lozenski’s organization retweeted a public call for a “Student Walkout for Gaza.” The Arab Resource and Organizing Center offered resources for the event, including media talking points and templates for protest signs and chants. One sign read “Decolonize Palestine!” and depicted a masked woman hurling a rock, with a police car in flames behind it.
Implementation of liberated ethnic-studies standards is in the early stages in Minnesota schools. But in 2021 the St. Paul public schools made “critical ethnic studies” a graduation requirement, with Mr. Lozenski serving as a consultant. A look at that course’s instructional materials may shed light on what’s ahead for public schools throughout the state.
The St. Paul course makes “resistance” to America’s fundamental institutions a central theme. It instructs 16-year-olds to “build” a race- and ethnicity-based “narrative of transformative resistance” and to “challenge and expose” “systems of inequality.” It tells them to “resist all systems of oppressive power rooted in racism through collective action and change.” Accompanying artwork, labeled “seeds of resistance,” features protest signs that read “No Bans/No Walls” and “Abolish Prison.”
Minnesota’s experience with this radical restructuring of its public education system may give Americans a picture of what the nation as a whole could soon face.
Ms. Kersten is a senior policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment.
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