K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Genghis Khan was a nice guy. Israel is evil. SF parents push back on ‘ethnic studies’ mandate.
San Francisco parents aren’t happy about the district’s year-long “ethnic studies” class, which is now a graduation requirement, report Ezra Wallach and Anya Kaiser on The Standard. All ninth graders — and 10th-graders who opted out last year — will have to take the course, which focuses on the evils of structural racism, colonialism, capitalism and heteronormative thinking.
Looking at the curriculum on the district website, parent Viviane Safrin found only “four lessons out of 55 highlight contributions by ethnic groups, she wrote in a memo last year. The word “hegemony” appeared 81 times.
“They are taught how to organize — what it means to resist,” Safrin told The Standard. “They’re taught about dominant and counter narratives. It’s an upper-level college course for one way to examine history, but it is not teaching any actual history.”
Some lessons were removed in response to her comments, write Wallach and Kaiser, but “one exercise still in use places the Red Guards, a student-led paramilitary organization from Mao’s Chinese Cultural Revolution, alongside the U.S. civil rights and feminist movements as emphasizing ‘the resistance that oppressed groups have shown in history’.”
Another calls for students to read a 2012 article called “Straight white male: The lowest difficulty setting there is” and asks, “What would white males need to give up (or relinquish) in order to make a more equitable society?”
Communism, straight up.
