The California Department of Education will vote next week on the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, a proposed new program for all public elementary, middle, and high school students. The curriculum, focused on “African American, Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x, Native American, and Asian American and Pacific Islander studies,” aims to “guide” California schools and is marinated in progressive ideological language, requiring that the curriculum “validate students’ lived experience” and “creat[e] space for all students regardless of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, or citizenship…” It seeks to “decolonize” California education, and promotes the Marxist-based “ideology of the oppressed” that denigrates Western Civilization. The curriculum discusses how ethnic studies can “address the causes of racism and other forms of bigotry including, but not limited to, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, xenophobia, antisemitism, and Islamophobia within our culture and governmental policies.” The curriculum is another nail in America’s coffin, casting white European Christians in the villainous role of “colonizer” and further dividing our society by race.
Fortunately, the public school teachers of Los Angeles have bravely stood up for our children and refused to return to the classroom until all their Wuhan flu “safety” demands are met, heroically dooming the nation’s second-largest school district’s children to online – and, praise be to God, ineffectual – online “learning.” The teachers last week voted 91% in favor of condemning the children to classes held via tiny camera and small electronic screen, so that the children may more easily be distracted and never learn the curriculum the state promotes. The teachers’ representatives even wisely advised teachers to keep their spring break vacation photos off social media, lest people get the wrong idea. Bravo to the noble and courageous public school teachers!
Although UTLA, the teacher’s union, announced just days ago an agreement to return to the classroom in April, opposition among the “grass roots” is reportedly growing, with the far left calling the plan “homicidal.” The UTLA members will vote next week on whether to accept the agreement. We can only hope they maintain their courage and protect our children from the dangers of a California education.
As for the proposed Ethnic Studies Curriculum, what the California Department of Education fails to understand is, often – of course, not always – and in many and perhaps the most important ways, colonization and empire are good.
It is an inescapable rule of nature that the strong survive. Empires are made by strong societies. If they were not strong, they would not be empires. The Roman Empire brought many benefits to its citizens and to those they ruled, including, among other things, aqueducts, roads, and hygiene — not small things. Of course, those they enslaved may feel differently, but then, the enslaved came from weaker societies, didn’t they?
The British Empire spread concepts of human rights that have blossomed across the globe. As but one example, in the 1840s, When Hindu priests in the British colony of India complained to the British commanding general that burning widows alive on their husband’s funeral pyre was their custom, General Charles Napier famously responded, “My nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.” Widows are no longer burned alive in India.
Before the Spanish Empire conquered them, the Aztecs ripped the still-beating hearts from the chests of their slaves, all from weaker tribes whom they themselves conquered. That custom, too, is no more, thanks to colonialism.
The concept of empire and colonialization includes enough shades of grey to make an athleisure fashion designer drool. But there’s little denying that overall, the people living under the rule of the Roman Empire were better off than those under the rule of some petty local tyrant. What’s even better than empire, of course, is a loose central government allowing for local control of the provinces. Maybe one day we’ll get there.
California’s Ethnic Studies Curriculum, finding this concept difficult, instead includes having the children chant to the Aztec god of cannibalism and human sacrifice.
Fortunately, in L.A. at least, our children are still safe at home, and our society remains strong enough. For now.
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