Seattle Public Schools thinks math is racist and oppressive

When I first heard about Seattle Public Schools’ proposed “K-12 Math Ethnic Studies Framework” this afternoon, I was curious if the actual document lived up to the freak-out among conservative observers. Seattle, after all, is where many STEM-based corporations are headquartered. (For now, anyway – several tech companies already have their foot out the door, and not simply over taxes.) How did a city where math is responsible for substantially all of governments’ tax receipts end up with school districts that want to destroy math education? It makes no sense whatsoever. But then again, New York City is talking about scrapping gifted and talented education because it is racist, so it’s not like Seattle is the first blue municipality to consider cranking out ignorant children a political priority. (Heck, New York City put it into law that schools cannot reject a student for a diploma on the basis of having never attended class. No kidding. You no longer need to attend school to get a diploma from a public high school in NYC. The schools literally have no academic standards.)

From what I can tell, most observers have only read the article in Reason magazine, which simply paraphrases an article in Education Week. Both of these articles understate the extreme positions in Seattle’s proposal. I think most people – regardless of political persuasion – would lose their minds if they saw the proposal documents for how Seattle Public Schools might transform math education.

Here they are.

The proposal divides math instruction into four categories that math instructors need to address in the classroom: (1) origins, identity, and agency; (2) power and oppression; (3) history of resistance and liberation; and (4) reflection and action. Yes, this is their framework for teaching math.

Under the “origins, identity, and agency” category, the authors suggest that instructors address “the ways in which we view ourselves as mathematicians” and emphasize that mathematical theory is “rooted in the ancient histories of people and empires of color.”

The authors urge math teachers to “create counter narratives about the origins of mathematical knowledge” and to “see the value in making mistakes both as individuals and as a community.” Got that? It’s no longer enough that schools pass students who cannot demonstrate a proficiency in subject-matter through the system. The schools need to praise students for failing.

The document elaborates: “How important is it to be Right? What is Right? Says Who?”

I don’t know about you, but when I was in school, I was not taught to talk about my feelings about math or to see the answers according to some political rubric of authority. I was taught *gasp* proofs. Ditto for symbolic logic.

Under the “power and oppression” category, the authors … well… I’ll just let them speak for themselves:

Power and oppression, as defined by ethnic studies, are the ways in which individuals and groups define mathematical knowledge so as to see “Western” mathematics as the only legitimate expression of mathematical identity and intelligence. This definition of legitimacy is then used to disenfranchise people and communities of color. This erases the historical contributions of people and communities of color.

Thus, math instructors need to work into their curriculum a discussion of “the ways in which ancient mathematical knowledge has been appropriated by Western culture” and “identify how math has been and continues to be used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color.” As an auxiliary, they recommend teaching about how technology and standardized testing are connected to mathematics as a tool of oppression.

But they don’t stop there. They also recommend that math teachers “explain how math has been used to exploit natural resources” (as if forests have been wronged by algebra) and “explain how math dictates economic oppression.” (For example, the fact that you do not understand how your mortgage works because you attended Seattle Public Schools puts you at an unfair intellectual disadvantage to the people at the bank who attended real schools.)

The authors then ask (I’m not even halfway through the document, hang in there) “who holds power in a mathematical classroom? Is there a place for power and authority in the math classroom? Who gets to say if an answer is right? What is the process for verifying the truth? Who is Smart? Who is not Smart?”

They recommend math teachers ask their students to name oppressive mathematical practices in their experience, “how data-driven processes prevent liberation,” and “how math can help us understand the impact of economic conditions and systems that contribute to poverty and slave labor.”

Students should be asked what is legitimate as math and what fears they have about math. Then they should ponder who in society has worked to make them fearful of math and what ulterior motives someone might have in doing so.

Next up is the “history of resistance and liberation” category, which suggests teachers cover “individuals and organizations that have reclaimed mathematical identity and agency” and how we can “change mathematics from individualistic to collectivist thinking.”

The last category, “reflection and action,” suggests that teachers encourage their students to take the gospel of the math ethnic studies framework to their communities so they can understand how math is fundamentally racist and how it has been used to oppress them all along.

The sick thing about all of this is that people who push for this kind of content in classrooms are hurting minority children themselves. Every minute of every day that is spent on nonsense like this is instructional time and instructional resources that are not teaching the kids useful skills that they absolutely must have to compete in a modern economy. Not to mention the fact that the teachers are giving kids the impression that talking this way will do them any service in the real world. Crikey.

Elizabeth Warren’s struggles with autobiography

A lot of folks are debating the merits of Elizabeth Warren’s claim that she was fired from a teaching position because she was “visibly pregnant” and that was just the way things worked back then.

Warren has set a pattern when it comes to discussing autobiographical details – which she does an awful lot in an attempt to give some sort of folksy appeal to her pseudo-socialist policy ideas. She knows [insert trillions of dollars of federal spending] is necessary because she personally has suffered with [not being able to afford a college education, racism, etc.]. It’s like she knows that she can’t defend policies that in aggregate exceed the gross domestic product of the United States several times over, so she goes for some nutso emotional tale instead.

Every time Warren brings up her past, she (1) outright lies about what happened, and (2) has no problem inventing insanely damaging stuff about real people from her past, though she usually picks people who cannot defend themselves.

In discussing her fake Native American heritage, she claimed multiple times that her parents had to elope because her paternal grandparents were vicious racists who did not want their son marrying a Cherokee girl (who obviously wasn’t actually Cherokee).

This story sent the (legitimately) Cherokee genealogist Twila Barnes into an obsession with disproving that Warren had any Native American ancestry at all and that this wasn’t merely a matter of her family not being officially recorded on tribal rolls. She spent several long blog posts tracing Warren’s ancestry back to the 18th century with available public records to prove Warren was, in fact, whiter than Downton Abbey.

My take on this story is: Who the hell talks this way about their own grandparents? Not only to slander their grandparents for political points, but to suggest they were racists in the process?

Elizabeth Warren, that’s who.

Warren’s latest story about going off to college involves her mother – whom she previously said took a job for the sole purpose of helping Warren pay college tuition – punched her in the face “quick as lightning” when she dared to ask to attend college. It was her dear father who said she should be given a chance. (And of course, for the purpose of climbing her way through the academy, she was a Native American.)

So in the 2020 edition of her autobiography, a fictional abusive mother gets added to her fictional racist grandparents. All of them long gone and unable to defend themselves against these charges.

Now we have some poor school principal from the 1970s who hates teachers with buns in the oven, who continued the stream of fictional abuse Warren has “persisted” through.

She either knows so little about local government operations that she did not understand that there would be official records of the school board approving her contract for another term and accepting her resignation “with regret,” or she assumed that any official records from decades ago would have been destroyed. Or she’s such a pathological liar that she comes to believe the false narratives she tells about herself. Who knows. I’m not sure any of these is less in need of psychiatric help.

But it’s yet another example of Warren objectively lying about being discriminated against or otherwise injured that trashes some very real third party with a name and personal legacy. Someone who probably was around to help her out in reality only to get tossed under the bus because she needed a campaign speech and she had a pretty boring and, dare I say, white-privileged life. It’s really quite sick.

It’s a fun phenomenon that folks who need to appeal to a progressive party that fetishizes suffering ends up with a bunch of candidates inventing suffering. Poor Biden was valiantly standing up to the violent street gangs who terrorized community pools in Vermont. Warren’s very white parents had to elope because racism. Yadda yadda yadda. I mean, come on, give it up already. None of this has anything to do with the real business of government.

Moral nutrition

Lately, I have been reading The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity by Douglas Murray. The book is a brilliant critique of identity politics and the war on freedom of speech in western democracies by an established journalist who also happens to be openly gay. Murray believes that progressives’ identity politics ultimately undermines the human rights efforts they ostensibly exist to advance by building deep resentment and divisiveness within societies. It’s an easy argument to make for anyone who resides outside the identity politics dumpster fire intellectually, but it’s personal to Murray. I am glad he wrote this book.

One observation I have come away from the book with is no matter how bad we think identity politics has become in the United States, it is far worse in the United Kingdom. Censorship is pervasive there. Interest groups micromanage everything that is shown on television. If your child makes a statement about how they disagree with homosexuality, for example, you might get a visit from real police, not just social media mobs. In the United States, identity politics is pretty easy to ignore if you aren’t active on social media and do not send your children to public schools. In the UK, there is a much higher effort to invade and police ordinary life.

But a much more interesting observation Murray makes is how much social justice warriors have come to resemble the Christian evangelicals they so passionately hate. That is to say, identity politics is as much a personal habit as a dogma. That’s part of the power it exerts over the people who are consumed by it.

I am from a Catholic background personally, but I know many evangelicals from attending a religious university and from living in the South most of my life. I do not agree with their positions on many things (particularly theology) but I also have no problem getting along with them. I personally respect their faith. So don’t take this as a criticism of their religious beliefs, which they are entitled to have.

Evangelicals believe that managing one’s personal habits is essential to living a good life, which they define as honoring God. They make the practice of religion a central habit. Every day, they set aside blocks of time to pray and read Scripture. They send their children to Christian youth organizations and schools. They read a lot of what I call Christian self-help books. They listen to specific radio shows and praise music from Christian artists. They fill their homes with signs and pillows with lines from Scripture. They brand themselves in public with what they wear and the stickers on their car. In short, they live in a sphere where their faith is ubiquitous and thus mostly impenetrable.

Murray describes this sort of behavior as “moral nutrition.” Your dogma is reinforced by your habits in the same way that your health is reinforced by eating five servings of vegetables a day. You get your five servings of Jesus a day and you are a healthy Christian soldier.

Social justice warriors behave the same way with their own (albeit increasingly nonsensical and contradictory) dogmas. They consume identity politics all day long, as if they might risk sobering up if they didn’t. If you read the New York Times or the Atlantic, for example, they find ways to bring identity politics into a discussion of pretty much any random thing: corporate governance, restaurant reviews, architecture and real estate, book and movie reviews. Like-minded folks dutifully circulate this content on social media and on cable news programs, so they can all get their five servings of dogmatic social and economic resentment a day. So they can feel like their political god is everywhere.

And like evangelical Christians, social justice warriors understand the necessity of converting children. Social justice warrior parents and educators also make sure their young charges get their five servings of identity politics a day.

This isn’t because they are trying to force their beliefs on you. It’s because they are trying to force them on themselves.

Why is anyone surprised that abortionists share the fetishes of serial killers?

Seems like a good guy to go to for counseling on when to start a family. What could go wrong?

This week, the family of Indiana’s most prolific abortionist, Ulrich Klopfer, discovered the medically preserved remains of 2,246 babies that he had aborted, which he was warehousing in his home. He was collecting the bodies of the babies he had been killing and living with them. Like they were Beanie Babies or Star Wars figurines.

Klopfer’s clinic had lost its license to perform abortions in 2015, after he had repeatedly performed abortions on girls younger than 13 years old. In his own testimony to the Indiana Medical Licensing Board, Klopfer explained that he performed an abortion on a 10-year-old girl who was raped by her uncle. While her parents supported the abortion and were present, they did not want the uncle to face any legal scrutiny. Klopfer rather dryly confessed that he went along and did not report the rape to authorities, effectively sending the girl back to be abused again. The members of the board cited his “professional incompetence” as reason for revoking his license.

He also kept no records that his clinic had been complying with the state law that women seeking an abortion receive counseling at least 18 hours beforehand. I’m not sure that avoiding being counseled on life decisions by such a man is much of a loss, however.

Interestingly, Pete Buttigieg – presidential candidate and mayor of South Bend, where Klopfer was practicing – intervened on Klopfer’s behalf when a Catholic organization wanted to set up a counseling center across the street from the Women’s Pavilion, where Klopfer worked. His administration refused to grant a permit for the counseling center after they had already purchased the land. Buttigieg is a pro-abortion activist and recently stirred up controversy when he suggested that we define “life” as when a baby takes its first independent breath – sacrilegiously suggesting that this was the “biblical” definition of life – which was obviously intended as defense of late-term abortion. (By Buttigieg’s logic, there are a lot of non-living babies in NICUs across the country.)

Anyway, keeping gruesome souvenirs is classic serial killer behavior, for whom killing becomes a highly ritualized activity. Serial killers like to feel connected to their victims.

Klopfer is hardly the first abortionist found to behave like a serial killer, either.

Kermit Gosnell was convicted in 2013 of killing at least three babies born alive at his abortion mill by severing their spinal cords with scissors. People who knew about or even directly witnessed the issues with his clinic had filed a litany of complaints with authorities, who did absolutely nothing to discipline him for fear of being attacked by abortion activists as trying to impair women’s reproductive rights. Organizations like Planned Parenthood bully lawmakers and other concerned observers into silence, even when there is very good reason to go after someone. It’s a significant component of their business model.

Gosnell preyed on poor women and immigrants, and several even died at his facility. But pro-choice wackos didn’t have a problem with that. As an outspoken advocate for late-term abortion, Gosnell was treated as a progressive hero. He even performed abortions on women who were far along in their pregnancies using experimental technology on television.

In addition to running an abortion mill, Gosnell was also a prosperous heroin dealer. He wrote tons of bogus prescriptions for OxyContin. How better to exploit impoverished urban women than to charge them thousands of dollars to kill their babies and get them addicted to drugs? Again, this guy was a progressive hero.

The OxyContin business was something authorities would pursue, so they raided his clinics. That’s when they discovered the complaints about his business actually understated the wicked reality. They found dead babies in garbage bags and recycled milk cartons everywhere he went. He collected baby feet in jars. Like Klopfer, Gosnell also enjoyed living with souvenirs of his handiwork.

And then there was the 2017 case of Detroit abortionist Michael Roth, who was also caught with 15 jars of parts from aborted babies in his car, out of which he had been performing abortions (perhaps in dark alleys, as the cliché goes). Along with a bunch of drugs. He was driving around with corpses. Totally normal human being, right?

So much of the abortion “debate” is about concealing the fact of what abortion is, which is willfully murdering another living human being. Pro-choice folks try to deny the humanity of aborted babies by describing them as a “clump of cells,” among other things. (I’ve even heard pro-choice individuals compare a baby to a cancerous tumor.) They employ strategies like Buttigieg’s bizarre notion that “life” begins when a baby takes its first independent breath. He’s a 30-second Google search from understanding how biologists define life, but that’s inconvenient to a politics of death.

It’s the height of fantasy to think your emotions have the power to confer real existence on another person, that a baby literally comes into being by the act of a mother desiring it. That’s like Marianne Williamson arguing that people could meditate Hurricane Dorian away – like the sheer act of not wanting a hurricane means you won’t have to deal with it. It’s nonsense. I’d call it childish, except most children are smarter than this.

But perhaps the biggest fantasy that pro-choice people entertain is the fantasy that psychologically well-adjusted people want to be in the business of performing abortions and that they are not sending children and young adults to sicko serial killers to get medical advice. That being an abortionist is a career, not a spree.

A psychologically normal person does not look at a baby bouncing around in its mother’s womb and think, hey, I’m cool suctioning that out with a vacuum cleaner, shooting it up with digoxin to send it into heart failure, sucking out its brain matter, tearing it limb from limb and then re-assembling the body parts in some twisted puzzle in the lab to make sure they didn’t leave any behind to give the mother an infection later. This is the sort of daily grind that only excites psychopaths. And an abortionist is just a psychopath with a 401k.

There’s a reason why many abortionists don’t even have any serious medical training, apart from the fact that Planned Parenthood is adept at stifling regulation. (Only 7% of OB-GYNs who work in private settings will perform an abortion. And even those are reluctant to do most of the procedures performed at private clinics. In more conservative parts of the US, most doctors refuse to refer women to a clinic at all.) Keeping people alive and healthy is not what abortionists are about. It’s not what they do with their hands. They are killers. That is the activity that defines who they are. That is their identity. They aren’t going to go six figures into student debt like a cardiologist just to vacuum wombs like some deranged housewife. You don’t need specialized training to be a serial killer.

There’s a “celebrity” abortionist who was caught discussing the sale of fetal remains and is involved in the trial of David Daleiden in California. (He’s the guy who caught them on tape. Kamala Harris & Co. have charged him with felony eavesdropping. His defense is based on the fact that he taped people confessing to criminal activity, as the abortionists he spoke to described how they convince women to get certain kinds of procedures because they produce optimal cadavers to be sold. And the trade-offs of pushing women into decisions that also risk live births.) The abortionist wore a necklace with a silver coat hanger dangling from it into the courtroom to show her pride in her profession.

How bizarre is it that this sort of psychopathic projection has been normalized in some regions of our country? These people are telling you who they are and what they love to do.

It is beyond me why anyone would ever act surprised that abortionists have the same sick fetishes as serial killers. I think more sensible future generations of Americans will look back on this era of politicians encouraging girls to have as much sex as possible – and hey, who’s to “slut shame” you if you don’t even know his name – then kill any “unplanned” pregnancy that may result the same way we look back on the Holocaust. (It actually is a holocaust, the term we humans use to describe slaughter on a mass scale.)

I think future generations will see abortionist personalities as they really are: people with the same moral compass as the Manson family, who engage in the same sort of behavior.

And I think they will see pro-choice people the same way we see ordinary Germans of Hitler’s era – people so drugged on fantastical, narcissistic rhetoric or fearful of personal repercussions that they stood by and watched it happen. Some of them even voted to protect it. They “believed” in it. Because abortion involves talking about very real babies in theoretical terms, and the denial of empirical evidence.

It will probably be an object of interest to future generations how so many people lionized a guy that was living with over two thousand dead bodies in his house, as if his life was one big safari, but his trophies are human beings. And some of those trophies were removed from the uterus of girls who weren’t even teenagers yet.

And people called it progress.

A must-read account of how identity politics has destroyed public education in NYC

George Packer has a long essay in The Atlantic, When the Culture War Comes for the Kids, about education – public and private – in New York City. The arc of the piece is essentially a rich, white, ideologically progressive family becomes increasingly disillusioned with the education system in NYC as the same identity politics they obsess over in their private lives is actually applied in their kids’ classrooms with predictably insane, unfair, and demeaning consequences for the schoolchildren. They watch as their leftist ideals end up causing real economic and emotional harm to their kids’ minority friends as the education policy becomes ever more ridiculous. They also watch as their own children start to reject the political logic of their elders and all of the forces that are stripping away their childhood.

Parker’s piece starts off in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has ever listened to rich, white, ideologically progressive people in NYC bitch about the private school admission process. The tuition over $50,000 is bad, not because of the cost, but because the cost means someone who writes for The Atlantic and The New Yorker will have to send their kids to a school with the offspring of “financials” – as if the worst thing you could conceive of is your kid socializing with the son of a hedge fund manager instead of artists. And then there are the gripes about having to go through a rigorous interview process to get your two-year-old into a private school that won’t kill their chances as getting into Harvard before they can even read. And then there is the aching concern that maybe populations that are spending $1.5 million cumulatively on K-12 education might not be very diverse, and how could you justify that to your chic, liberal friends? (As if the author actually has diverse friends, lol.) Oh, the humanity. Someone alert the United Nations.

His kid gets routinely rejected and placed on waiting lists to get into these elite institutions, and the author worries that maybe it’s because the admissions officers do not like him very much.

You can’t tell if it’s borne of necessity or political ideology, but the author decides to send his kids to public schools. He describes, with some perverse measure of pride, how bad the physical environments are at NYC public schools versus the private schools he had toured:

The public school was housed in the lower floors of an old brick building, five stories high and a block long, next to an expressway. A middle and high school occupied the upper floors. The building had the usual grim features of any public institution in New York—steel mesh over the lower windows, a police officer at the check-in desk, scuffed yellow walls, fluorescent lights with toxic PCBs, caged stairwells, ancient boilers and no air conditioners—as if to dampen the expectations of anyone who turned to government for a basic service. The bamboo flooring and state-of-the-art science labs of private schools pandered to the desire for a special refuge from the city. Our son’s new school felt utterly porous to it.

His kids are going to attend shitty schools with bad test scores, but at least they will learn to resent their privilege, and that’s all that matters. No, really, this is his argument. What a great dad.

When he was making this decision, it was before the 2016 election, and before identity politics went from being a status symbol for rich, white, ideologically progressive New Yorkers – which to him seemed harmless enough – and became a bona fide national obsession. He slowly watches as identity politics becomes substantially all of the content of education in NYC.

It started with his kids’ schools dispensing with standardized testing altogether because test scores are racist:

The excesses of “high-stakes testing” inevitably produced a backlash. In 2013, four families at our school, with the support of the administration, kept their kids from taking the tests. These parents had decided that the tests were so stressful for students and teachers alike, consumed so much of the school year with mindless preparation, and were so irrelevant to the purpose of education that they were actually harmful. But even after the city eased the consequences of the tests, the opt-out movement grew astronomically. In the spring of 2014, 250 children were kept from taking the tests ….
Our school became the citywide leader of the new movement; the principal was interviewed by the New York media. Opting out became a form of civil disobedience against a prime tool of meritocracy. It started as a spontaneous, grassroots protest against a wrongheaded state of affairs. Then, with breathtaking speed, it transcended the realm of politics and became a form of moral absolutism, with little tolerance for dissent.
We took the school at face value when it said that this decision was ours to make. My wife attended a meeting for parents, billed as an “education session.” But when she asked a question that showed we hadn’t made up our minds about the tests, another parent quickly tried to set her straight. The question was out of place—no one should want her child to take the tests. The purpose of the meeting wasn’t to provide neutral information.

Whereas the school, years ago, had adopted an admissions structure intended to integrate children across socioeconomic backgrounds, they started deliberately splintering the children into groups according to race and other factors. This is apparently very common in NYC now:

The school’s progressive pedagogy had fostered a wonderfully intimate sense of each child as a complex individual. But progressive politics meant thinking in groups. When our son was in third or fourth grade, students began to form groups that met to discuss issues based on identity—race, sexuality, disability. I understood the solidarity that could come from these meetings, but I also worried that they might entrench differences that the school, by its very nature, did so much to reduce. Other, less diverse schools in New York, including elite private ones, had taken to dividing their students by race into consciousness-raising “affinity groups.” I knew several mixed-race families that transferred their kids out of one such school because they were put off by the relentless focus on race.

And then there is the wall art, intended to put students in their place as they walk to their locker:

In one middle-school hallway a picture was posted of a card that said, “Uh-oh! Your privilege is showing. You’ve received this card because your privilege just allowed you to make a comment that others cannot agree or relate to. Check your privilege.” The card had boxes to be marked, like a scorecard, next to “White,” “Christian,” “Heterosexual,” “Able-bodied,” “Citizen.” …. This language is now not uncommon in the education world. A teacher in Saratoga Springs, New York, found a “privilege-reflection form” online with an elaborate method of scoring, and administered it to high-school students, unaware that the worksheet was evidently created by a right-wing internet troll—it awarded Jews 25 points of privilege and docked Muslims 50.

And then there was the case of the second-grader who came out as transgender, prompting school officials to make all bathrooms gender neutral. Yep, if you were a fifth grade boy, the girls in your class got to watch you use the urinal in the name of progress:

The bathroom crisis hit our school the same year our son took the standardized tests. A girl in second grade had switched to using male pronouns, adopted the initial Q as a first name, and begun dressing in boys’ clothes. Q also used the boys’ bathroom, which led to problems with other boys. Q’s mother spoke to the principal, who, with her staff, looked for an answer. They could have met the very real needs of students like Q by creating a single-stall bathroom—the one in the second-floor clinic would have served the purpose. Instead, the school decided to get rid of boys’ and girls’ bathrooms altogether. If, as the city’s Department of Education now instructed, schools had to allow students to use the bathroom of their self-identified gender, then getting rid of the labels would clear away all the confusion around the bathroom question. A practical problem was solved in conformity with a new idea about identity.
Within two years, almost every bathroom in the school, from kindergarten through fifth grade, had become gender-neutral. Where signs had once said boys and girls, they now said students. Kids would be conditioned to the new norm at such a young age that they would become the first cohort in history for whom gender had nothing to do with whether they sat or stood to pee. All that biology entailed—curiosity, fear, shame, aggression, pubescence, the thing between the legs—was erased or wished away.
The school didn’t inform parents of this sudden end to an age-old custom, as if there were nothing to discuss. Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals. Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms. This return to the familiar was what politicians call a “commonsense solution.” It was also kind of heartbreaking. As children, they didn’t think to challenge the new adult rules, the new adult ideas of justice. Instead, they found a way around this difficulty that the grown-ups had introduced into their lives. It was a quiet plea to be left alone.

The author notes that, by age 10, his son had learned all about other civilizations around the world, but had no idea how the American republic was founded and why. Instead, his study of history was about more politically correct forms of activism than the Founding Fathers:

Every year, instead of taking tests, students at the school presented a “museum” of their subject of study, a combination of writing and craftwork on a particular topic. Parents came in, wandered through the classrooms, read, admired, and asked questions of students, who stood beside their projects. These days, called “shares,” were my very best experiences at the school. Some of the work was astoundingly good, all of it showed thought and effort, and the coming-together of parents and kids felt like the realization of everything the school aspired to be.
The fifth-grade share, our son’s last, was different. That year’s curriculum included the Holocaust, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. The focus was on “upstanders”—individuals who had refused to be bystanders to evil and had raised their voices. It was an education in activism, and with no grounding in civics, activism just meant speaking out. At the year-end share, the fifth graders presented dioramas on all the hard issues of the moment—sexual harassment, LGBTQ rights, gun violence. Our son made a plastic-bag factory whose smokestack spouted endangered animals. Compared with previous years, the writing was minimal and the students, when questioned, had little to say. They hadn’t been encouraged to research their topics, make intellectual discoveries, answer potential counterarguments. The dioramas consisted of cardboard, clay, and slogans.

Over time, the kids all begin rebelling against the moral authoritarianism of the adults in their life, which is evolving into ever more bizarre standards of what is and is not acceptable behavior:

In middle school our son immediately made friends with the same kind of kids who had been his friends in elementary school—outsiders—including Latino boys from the district’s poorest neighborhood. One day he told us about the “N-word passes” that were being exchanged among other boys he knew—a system in which a black kid, bartering for some item, would allow a white kid to use the word. We couldn’t believe such a thing existed, but it did. When one white boy kept using his pass all day long, our son grabbed the imaginary piece of paper and ripped it to shreds. He and his friends heard the official language of moral instruction so often that it became a source of irony and teasing: “Hey, dude, you really need to check your privilege.” When his teacher assigned students to write about how they felt about their identity, letting the class know that whiteness was a source of guilt for her, our son told her that he couldn’t do it. The assignment was too personal, and it didn’t leave enough space for him to describe all that made him who he was.

Isn’t school for learning math and science and reading,” he asked us one day, “not for teachers to tell us what to think about society?

Imagine being a seventh-grader who is himself the only functional adult in his world.

The piece ends with the author caving and sending his younger child to a STEM-focused private school because she was bored out of her mind in the politically correct public school starting in kindergarten. Because she actually wanted to learn something, and the school was teaching nothing except how to sit still and listen to your teacher spew their hateful politics.

If you want to know why millions of American parents are homeschooling now, this is why. Americans are sick to death of this garbage. Children are sick to death of this garbage.