We Are Indoctrinating The Children!

No, not the LGBTQ+ community but rather the right-wing Republicans!

Teachers, advocacy groups angered by Virginia’s proposed changes to history education
The Virginian-Pilot
By Nour Habib
November 17, 2022


Teachers, school officials, historians and advocacy groups are expressing anger this week after a new draft of the Virginia social studies standards appears to have largely thrown out a version of the draft that experts spent months developing.

“I don’t see this as a re-draft, I see this as a new draft,” said Norfolk State University’s Cassandra Newby-Alexander, a history professor and co-chair of the Virginia Commission on African American History Education. Newby-Alexander was involved in the development of the original 2022 standards which were released this summer.

“There are a lot of things that I find very problematic and concerning in this new iteration,” Newby-Alexander said. “First and foremost, because it is not a redraft, it is a new draft, it should go through the same process as the other one that was presented to the board.

The governor packed the State Board of Education with five new members who tossed out two years of work by the committee appointed to review the policies and in the span of months they came out with an entirely a new, 53-page draft of the standards was released throwing out the 400 page standard.

Fedderman said the draft appears to have been largely taken from the Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum, which has been criticized by historians for inaccuracies and biases as it was adopted in other states.

“The standards are full of overt political bias, outdated language to describe enslaved people and American Indians, highly subjective framing of American moralism and conservative ideals (and) coded racist overtures throughout …” Fedderman said.

And of course the new policy muzzled the teachers!

He also expressed concern that the standards placed a restriction on “teacher-created curriculum,” which are permitted in other subject areas.

While the original board was open and transparent the new board was secretive.

“In Virginia, we are accustomed to a transparent process of policymaking and governance, and to engagement with the public and with the professional educators of the commonwealth,” Spence said. “And this state superintendent seems intent on making sure that that doesn’t happen.”

[…]

Among Spence’s concerns about content are that Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Juneteenth and Veterans Day were eliminated from the curriculum for the early grades. He also does not understand the “historical framing” of Native Americans as the nation’s “first immigrants.”

Some of the concerns about the new standards are,

• A more thorough treatment of slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights Movement across all grade levels
• A more thorough introduction to the Constitution and the branches of government in the early grades
• The presentation of content in unbiased and dispassionate language
• The revision of “vague skills-based standards subject to multiple interpretations by teachers”
• The creation of a “staircase” of standards that build students’ understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship

They talk about us indoctrinating and grooming children but that is what they are doing, they are grooming White children to be little uninformed white supremacists while they deny minorities of their heritage.