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I'm having intense flashbacks to culture wars of years past, with the polarities reversed. I'm of course talking about "creation science".
It's all the same arguments. The "both sides" arguments, the "this belongs in a social studies class, not science" arguments, the "you can't have an authority figure like a teacher showing preference for these ideas in an education setting" arguments. And we more or less saw how that culture war shook out. I see no reason this one shouldn't follow through to the same conclusion. AP African American Studies is not education. It's dogma masquerading as such. It's no different in substance, rigor or evidence as "creation science".
I have zero reason to ever give the people teaching this curriculum the benefit of the doubt. Every interview with African American Studies scholars I've seen lambasting the decision is full of all the mealy mouthed buzzwords and turns of phrase I've learned to interpret as massive red flags.
The insistence that they don't "teach kids what to think, but how to think". Which I've learned is actually far more pernicious when you teach people how to think incorrectly. To turn a phrase, throw someone's fish in the river, they'll go hungry for a day. Teach them the wrong way to fish, and they'll go hungry the rest of their life.
There is always the old classic that they teach kids to study history "through a critical lens", which rather gives the game away. The "critical lens" only ever points one direction.
And of course in the interview I saw on The Hill, the scholar further emphasized that MLK Jr's legacy needs to be placed in the proper context of MLK Jr's "Democratic Socialism and radical" beliefs, if you believed any of the red flags I listed above had a more benign interpretation.
Furthermore, DeSantis was elected almost specifically to do this. If he actually has the authority to do so, I'm all for it. I'm over arguing principle. This is naked power politics, that I've been on the receiving end of. Turn about is fair play.
Because in my local school district that has tripled down on far left policies, they just lie. They lie when they are caught. They lie when those lies are exposed. When a grand jury is empaneled to investigate them, they lie more. When the grand jury report is released, they tell even more lies. It's lies the whole way down. The process has taken 3 years and counting, and in the meantime, nothing has changed and they still have our children as a captive audience. These are institutions that have learned to obscure, confuse and obfuscate through extreme bureaucratic defense in depth, and they've repeatedly proven themselves to be utterly untrustworthy.
Note that the syllabus never uses the term "critical lens". But it does use "lens" in that manner. It's like they were trying to avoid the trigger word while still getting the meaning across.
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