In the Francis Howell School District about 35 miles west of St. Louis, Missouri, teachers met in September 2020 to determine the curriculum the students would follow for the coming year. Advising them was equity consultant LaGarrett J. King, an associate professor of social studies education at the University of Missouri.
In addition to discussing the curriculum, King tried to impress on the teachers the importance of teaching history the “right way.”
“This is not a safe space,” but rather a ‘racialized space,’” King said. “In many ways, a safe space is a space where white people tell us how not racist they are. And this is not that space.”
A video of the curriculum planning session surfaced on Rumble and was submitted by “wokeatfhsd,” who offered this description of the video.
NRO’s Ryan Mills offered some insights into King’s thinking. It’s not pretty.
King said “the first thing we have to understand is that our social studies and our history curriculum is political and racist,” and “there is no such thing as neutral history.” He then asked the team members to question whether they are developing black history curriculums through the historical lens of the oppressor. “We have made those who have oppressed people, the oppressor, we have humanized them,” he said.
The nation’s founding “means nothing to black people,” he said, calling history “psychologically violent” but one-sided. He also seemed to justify violence in the name of racial justice.
“All of our wars was about freedom, violence,” King said. “But yet, when black people say, ‘Hey … we need to take over, man. We need to burn this place down, we need to do this, we need to do that.’ ‘Oh no, you should do non-violence to achieve freedom.’ It’s silly. It’s prejudice.”
Would you want this man developing curricula for your kids?
One white teacher on the call said she had been teaching about white privilege for a decade.
“Kids are way more open,” she said, “but then they go home and they tell their parents, and then their parents get upset. I don’t advertise to my students when I’m teaching U.S. history that sometimes I would consider myself the anti-U.S. history teacher.”
Well…if the shoe fits…
Another white teacher said, “Sometimes I think we have deferred to letting that stop progress. We let noise keep progress from moving forward.”
All that “noise” from nosey parents. They should just sit down, shut up, and let us brainwash their kids in peace!
While the district’s teachers have privately discussed their efforts teach students through a decidedly progressive social justice lens, school leaders have publicly denied this is occurring. At a recent school board meeting, superintendent Nathan Hoven said the district has not adopted critical race theory into the framework of its curriculum. “We are not and have no interest in advancing any political agenda,” he said.
“While we support the work and many of Dr. King’s contributions, we vehemently disagree with any suggestions that teachers or staff hide the work we’re doing from parents and taxpayers,” the district told National Review in a statement provided by spokeswoman Jennifer Jolls. “We always strive to make decisions that we believe are in the best interests of students, and do so in a way that is transparent and accessible to all stakeholders.”
This is happening all over the country. It’s by no means a “conspiracy” in the traditional sense of the word. It’s Orwell’s “groupthink.” The symptoms of groupthink, identified by psychologist Irving Janis, match the madness in the desire to teach CRT.
Type I: Overestimations of the group — its power and morality
- Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk taking.
- Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions.
Type II: Closed-mindedness
- Rationalizing warnings that might challenge the group’s assumptions.
- Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil, biased, spiteful, impotent, or stupid.
Type III: Pressures toward uniformity
- Self-censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus.
- Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.
- Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group, couched in terms of “disloyalty”
- Mindguards— self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information.
See anyone we know?
It’s apparent that, because the movement to teach this ideology is nationwide, only parents can stop it. Informed and concerned parents are the only ones who can save their children from being indoctrinated with these rancid ideas.
Source: PJ Media
