The worldview implications from this curriculum proposal are astounding. This proposal asserts an ideological agenda from the far-left fringes of liberals, now peddled as mainstream educational policy. Here is official state policy perpetrating and advancing a massive moral and sexual revolution—and children are their target.

As millions of American students prepare to return to the classroom for a new school year, it is important to reflect on the centrality of education. Every society understands that education shapes the hearts and minds of its youth—which is why education is always political and often controversial. If you control the schools, you eventually control the direction of the culture.

The state of California is now establishing an “ethnic studies” curriculum for public schools, particularly for high schools in the state. The developing story can catch you by surprise, and some might assume that this is only of interest to Californians.

But what happens in California schools doesn’t stay in California. The state has for decades enjoyed outsized influence on such things as curriculum and textbooks because if a textbook is adopted in California—the nation’s most populous state—that book will produce enormous sums of revenue and will likely be adopted around the nation.

The story demanding our attention is a new state-mandated ethnic studies curriculum for high schools. Authorities in California have released what they call a “model” curriculum. But this is actually a model of what happens when people seize the public schools and turn them into engines of social and moral transformation.

The Wall Street Journal drew attention to this curriculum in an article by Williamson M. Evers. The headline reads, “California Wants to Teach Your Kids that Capitalism is Racist.” Evers writes, “California’s Education Department has issued an ethnic studies model curriculum and is soliciting public comments on it until August 15. The legislatively mandated guide is a resource for teachers who want to instruct their students in the field of ethnic studies and was written by an advisory board of teachers, academics, and bureaucrats.”

Then, Evers declares, “It’s as bad you imagine.” I’m going to go further and conclude that it’s probably worse than you can imagine.

Evers explains, “Ethnic studies is described in the document as the interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity with an emphasis upon experiences of people of color in the United States. It is the study of intersectional and ancestral roots, coloniality, hegemony, and a dignified world where many worlds fit for present and future generations. It is the xdisciplinary [sic], loving, and critical praxis of holistic humanity.” And, yes, that is how they spell the words. That is actually part of the problem.

In short, this proposal marks an agenda for absolute social transformation in the United States. Evers argues, “The document is filled with fashionable academic jargon like ‘positionalities,’ ‘hybridites,’ ‘neplantlas,’ and ‘misogynoir.’ It includes faddish social lingo like ‘cisheteropatriarchy’ that may make sense to radical university professors and activists but doesn’t mean much to the regular folks who send their children to California public schools. It is difficult to comprehend the depth and breadth of the ideological bias and misrepresentations without reading the whole curriculum, something few will want to do.”

While I did not want to read the proposal, I did—what I found was exactly what I expected, namely, an absolute agenda for a radical reorientation of the United States. It is an educational agenda aimed at a total societal transformation of American culture. The opening lines of the proposed curriculum read, “As early as the 1970s, some California public high schools began offering ethnic studies, positing that courses in the field would provide an opportunity to engage the hxrstory [sic], cultures, contributions, perspectives, and experiences of groups that have been overlooked, historically marginalized, and often subjected to invisibility within mainstream courses.”

“Hxrstory,” is not an accidental misspelling of the word “history.” There is a footnote in the curriculum that explains the word’s meaning. The curriculum states, “Throughout this model, curriculum language is used that deliberately offers an alternative to traditional wording that could have a particular context within the dominant culture. More information about these terms can be found in the glossary.”

On page two of the curriculum, the document states, “The field critically grapples with the various power structures and forms of oppression, including but not limited to white supremacy, race and racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia that continue to impact social, emotional, cultural, economic, and political experiences of native peoples and people of color.”

The proposed curriculum quickly reveals its main intent, namely, to turn all the academic disciplines upside-down and inside-out. This curriculum seeks to rewrite history, and subsequently, reality. It states, “As such, it can grow its original language to serve these needs with purposeful re-spelling of terms.” This misspelling includes history as herstory spelled as hxrstory and women as womxn. The impetus behind the spelling change is to connect “a gender and sexuality lens along with the socioeconomic class lens at three of its intersections. Terms utilized about this document which may be unfamiliar to new practitioners of the field are defined in the glossary.”

If you have to provide a massive glossary just to define the terms you are using as a model curriculum, then you have larger issues at stake. But of course, the worldview behind this assumes that even the English language itself is thoroughly corrupted by the patriarchy and represents a vestige of oppression and colonialism. Such language must be transformed.

The curriculum dates the emergence of ethnic studies back to 1960s, where movements like Third World Liberation Front emerged—citing approvingly in the curriculum. Also, in the 1960s and 1970s, liberal educational theorists descended on American public education—while influential in the periphery of schools then, they are now cited as central authorities in this new model curriculum.

Parents only emerge in the document once you get to page 15 of 26. Where they do show up, they show up as a problem. The document states, “Beyond content, it is important that ethnic studies educators are knowledgeable of the context in which the course is being taught. Here are some dynamics an ethnic studies educator might consider: Is the course being taught in a district where parents or community members are hostile to the field?”

The audacity of that sentence cannot be passed over—it amounts to an outright assault upon the sacred relationship between a parent and a child. Here, the curriculum calls educators to be weary and prepared for parents exuding a divergent worldview from that of the elitist curriculum. These kinds of parents are mired in the patriarchy and sold out to the oppressive structures that this new curriculum sets out to correct.

Read More