CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2020, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“ETHNIC STUDIES SHAPES UP AS BIG
FIGHT IN EARLY 2021”
As the
key committee behind the extremely flawed ethnic studies curriculum planned for
California public schools gets set to ratify its pet project in a mid-November
meeting, it’s become clear this plan will become a major quarrel between
so-called progressives and every other stripe of Californians early in the new
year.
That’s
because under current law the state Board of Education has only until late
March to ratify some sort of curriculum for ethnic studies, and myriad ethnic
groups and organizations complain that the current version of the plan is so
flawed it would promote grudges rather than real education.
Odds
are the state Department of Education’s Instructional Quality Commission (IQC)
will do little more than ratify the plan it released to fanfare late last
summer, as there has been no publicized revision since that release. The
current plan is little more than a cursory rewrite of a 2019 proposal that was
so bad the state board sent it back for an overhaul rather than approve it last
year.
The
same thing ought to happen again this time, but may not unless state
legislators extend the deadline for approval of some kind of plan allowing
students to learn about the achievements, problems and prospects of
California’s more than 80 ethnic groups.
So bad
is the current version, which essentially reflects the priorities of the
academic Critical Ethnic Studies Assn. (CESA), that Gov. Gavin Newsom in
September vetoed a bill that would have made ethnic studies a high school
graduation requirement throughout the state.
The
CESA dominated creation of the plan because its members volunteered to help
write it, while few others stepped up. Websites associated with that group
stress “colonialism and conquest, racial chattel slavery and white supremacist
(doctrines).”
Adopting
the current draft would likely see schoolchildren learn that Spain conquered
most of Latin America by infecting Aztecs, Incas, Mayans and others with
smallpox, allowing a very small force of conquistadors to take over huge territories
and subdue previously large and powerful empires. Chances are kids would not
hear that the conquistadors also ended human sacrifice and some forms of
cannibalism. It would probably ignore how English settlers brought ideas like
freedom of religion here after being persecuted in Britain.
In
short, this would be education toward resentment, not toward understanding of
motives, ideals and achievements that came alongside the conquests that have
always been part of human history.
The
CESA also divides Californians into four basic groups: whites, Asians/Pacific
Islanders, African Americans and Hispanic Americans. Groups that don’t fit
easily into those categories, like Native Americans, Jews, Armenians and
Arab-Americans, could easily be ignored if the current plan reaches classrooms.
Newsom
was completely unsatisfied with the first version of this proposal last year,
spurring the order for a rewrite. He’s equally unhappy now, as his veto message
made clear. “Last year, I expressed that the initial draft of the model
curriculum was insufficiently balanced and inclusive and needed to be…amended,”
he wrote. “In my opinion, the latest draft…still needs revision.”
One
area obviously in need of change is the plan’s proposed treatment of
capitalism. “They treat capitalism not as a system of private property and…risk
and investment, but they frankly say in the original 2019 (ethnic studies)
draft that capitalism is a system of exploitation of labor where surplus value
from workers is confiscated,” complained Williamson Evers, an assistant U.S.
Secretary of Education under ex-President George W. Bush and now Director of the Center on Educational
Excellence at Oakland’s Independent Institute.
Added
Evers, “You might be a white person and think ‘I’m not racist,’” he said.
“Critical race theorists are going to say ‘You are racist…you have white skin
privilege.’”
Which
is another way of saying the proposed curriculum could cause California public
school students to believe that all whites persecute all minorities, even if
those whites come from ethnicities that have experienced bigotry and immense
persecution of their own.
So
unless the IQC recants very quickly much of what it has proposed, it will be up
to legislators to extend the ratification deadline so that a fair and reasoned
program can at last be created.
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Email Thomas Elias at
tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising
Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now
available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net