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Woke History Is Making Big Inroads in Americas High Schools realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/…
Like growing numbers of public high school students across the country, many California kids are receiving classroom instruction in how race, class, gender, sexuality and citizenship status are tools of oppression, power and privilege.
They are taught about colonialism, state violence, racism, intergenerational trauma, heteropatriarchy and the common thread that links them: “whiteness.”
Students are then graded on how well they apply these concepts in writing assignments, performances and community organizing projects.
At Santa Monica High School, for example, students organize and carry out “a systematized campaign” for social justice that can take the form of a protest, a leaflet, a workshop, play or research project.
They demonstrate their mastery of the subject matter by teaching about social justice to middle school students.
Students at Environmental Charter High School in Lawndale are assigned to write a “breakup letter with a form of oppression,” such as toxic masculinity, heteronormativity, the Eurocentric curriculum or the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Students at schools in Anaheim, San Jose, Oakland, and San Francisco are taught how to write a manifesto to school administrators listing “demands” for reforms.
Some conduct a grand jury investigation to determine who was responsible for the genocide of the state’s Native Americans.
And one class holds a mock trial to determine which party is most responsible for the deaths of millions of native Tainos: Christopher Columbus, the soldiers, the king and queen of Spain, or the entire European system of colonialism.
These are just a few examples of the ethnic studies courses taught at 253 California schools, nearly 20% of the state’s high schools, according to 2017-18 data. California is now looking at expanding this approach in a proposed statewide curriculum.
The expansion could affect up to 1.7 million high school students if a second bill, making ethnic studies a high school graduation requirement, is approved.
The ethnic studies movement has been underway for years and is now poised to enter the mainstream, raising tough questions for educators and policymakers about how to present such material to teenagers.
Teachers around the country are already offering ethnic studies classes, units or lessons on their own initiative, citing a growing urgency to confront racism, sexism, homophobia and other entrenched social inequalities.
Two years ago, the Indiana legislature mandated that high schools offer an ethnic studies elective. As approved by the state’s education department, the class teaches...
....about the contributions of ethnic and racial groups, various cultural practices, as well as such concepts as privilege, systematic oppression and implicit bias.
Advocates believe they are within striking distance of making ethnic studies a graduation requirement in high schools across the country, making it a prerequisite for preparing students to navigate the world, much as learning about the Western tradition had once been.
They say the shift to ethnic studies appears inevitable because of the nation’s changing demographics, the growing awareness of white supremacy and other forms of systemic discrimination, and a newfound political clout for the ethnic studies movement.
“We don’t want students to have the option not to take ethnic studies,” said Melina Abdullah, professor Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, and a board member of the national Association for Ethnic Studies. “It is as important as taking a lab science”
"It comes dangerously close to turning the American exceptionalism on its head: Yes, we're exceptional – exceptionally evil,” said Will Swaim, of the California Policy Center. "It is remindful of re-education camps in Vietnam or China. It is indoctrination rather than education.”
“I oftentimes think of ethnic studies as radical social action,” said Julia Jordan-Zachery, a professor and chair of the Department of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and president of the Association for Ethnic Studies.
“It is education and knowledge that’s produced to influence social change,” she said, “which makes it different in part from other types of disciplines whose primary concerns are quote-unquote to simply produce knowledge.”
Jewish, Armenian, Assyrian, Hellenic and other ethnic groups left out of the proposal are demanding their narratives be included. And critics also wonder why many ethnic groups are left out, but the LGBTQ community is included even though it is technically not an ethnicity.
A number of advocates said that the conceptual starting point of ethnic studies is to “decenter” the dominant cultural perspective: whiteness. “It’s not ethnic studies if it doesn’t challenge whiteness,” said Monteiro, a board member of the Association for Ethnic Studies.
He described “whiteness” as a 500-year-old artificial social construct that functions as a God, is perceived as all-powerful and never directly named. Ethnic studies are all about smashing this man-made idol, he said, and that process can be painful.
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