Indoctrination versus education; or a disgraceful school district versus a wise teacher

For 250 years, education in America meant reading, writing, and arithmetic, along with peripheral subjects such as the Bible (in early America), history, civics, and science. During those years, with a mostly literate, numerate population, we were a stunningly successful nation. Now, in leftist-controlled school districts across America, reading, writing, and arithmetic have been supplanted entirely by leftist values, such as LGBTQ+ ideology, racism, and antisemitism. It’s Maoism, with ideology supplanting reason. Two items on the internet today highlight the difference.

On the Maoist front, the Daily Mail reports that an elementary school in Hayward, California, part of the San Francisco Bay Area, using federal taxpayer funds, has shifted its entire focus from education to indoctrination. The outcome for the children is tragic:

A Bay Area Elementary School has spent $250,000 on a ‘Woke Kindergarten’ program only to see its student’s literacy and numeracy rates plunge.

The ‘Woke Kindergarten’ program states its mission as an ‘abolitionist early learning ecosystem’ that trains teachers to uproot white supremacy, disrupt racism and oppression which are barriers to learning.

After spending the federal money on the program Glassbrook Elementary in Hayward saw numeracy among its 474 students fall to a new low of just 4 percent and literacy just 12 percent.

The scores, recorded last Spring two years into Woke Kindergarten’s three-year contract, represent a 4 percentage decline in each category.

The school also remains on the state’s lowest-performing level on the Comprehensive School Improvement list and has a lower rate of attendance than before the program was introduced.

If you go to the linked article, you’ll see that the program focused on such hard-left topics as defunding Israel to “rebuild Palestine,” abolishing the police, and supporting so-called transgenderism. In addition, a third-grade teacher has been encouraging kids to “disrupt whiteness” and to imagine America’s and Israel’s annihilation. The same system seemingly lacked the energy to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Image by AI.

There could be no more damning indictment of leftism in education than a system in which 88% of the students are illiterate, and 96% are innumerate.

But I misspeak. It’s a damning indictment if you think “education” is meant to produce people who can read, write, and do basic math, all of which are skills that are necessary for survival in a post-Stone Age world—not to mention the fact that the better you can do those skills, the more likely you are to rise up from poverty and achieve success in the world.

However, what if, for the “educators” in charge of the Hayward program, teaching functional skillsets isn’t the goal? What if the goal is exactly what it seems to be; namely, to produce mindless robots who will be foot soldiers for the new revolution? These are the human drones who will carry out orders, whether it’s to vote for a far-left politician, act as mules for faked ballots, riot in the streets, or kill police and politicians.

If the latter is what “education” means to you, what’s happening in Hayward is stunningly successful.

So, what should education look like? Well, an elegant example appeared on Twitter. In it, a thoughtful teacher, with true grace and courtesy, teaches an open-minded young man how to look at the claim that J.K. Rowling is “bigoted” and “transphobic”:

This is utterly brilliant. A student accuses @jk_rowling of being transphobic. This teacher skilfully dissects the claim and challenges it by asking questions.

He teaches not what to think, but how to think critically.

Watch until the end.
You see the epiphany in real-time. pic.twitter.com/x00gWdOugc

— Lee Harris (@addicted2newz) February 3, 2024

As I watched the video, I had at my side two people who live in the overlap between being the youngest millennials and the oldest Gen Zers. They were completely charmed by the video and by the young man’s epiphany at the end. Admittedly, they’re both someone conservative, but each felt that showing this to more leftist friends would be a helpful way to justify their continued support for J.K. Rowling. In other words, the teacher’s approach speaks to their demographic.

We live in strange times. The only consolation is that the world that leftists have created American schools cannot survive—as evidenced by the fact that the Hayward school’s attendance declined once it went so woke. Parents ultimately want what’s best for their children. They will not tolerate indefinitely schools that teach their children not how to read the Harry Potter books but, instead, to hate J.K. Rowling