Educate me...please
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I am sure that most of you have seen the YouTube video of that Mom from Carmel, NY attacking the school board of Carmel about the attempt by some of the teachers in her district teaching her kids some form of Critical Race Theory. While some of her speech is bluster and anger commingled with some several important points, I think this is actually a good sign for education in this country. Parents, it seems, are now looking through the curriculum of their kids and seeing that a new bias is creeping into education. That’s not to say that Liberal voices (and Conservative ones as well) have not been part of higher education for years, they have. It’s more about teaching children at an earlier and earlier age one bias or the other. I am not sure it is an indoctrination just yet but without parental pushback, it very well could become that.
Young minds are sponges and absorb way more than they are taught in school so a lot of true education is done at home. Morals, principles, knowing right from wrong, doing the right thing, being the best you can be. It all starts at home. Churches used to have a major impact as well but that impact has lessened over the years. As young adults who rebelled against church teachings now grow up to raise families, their connecting to some religious belief has become weakened and this is where the lessons from home should become more important.
Unfortunately, racist parents raise racist children and that cycle continues but what these children are finding is that those racist beliefs are not held by everyone and as they go through their school years, they see that their friends don’t hold the same beliefs. This is how cycles are broken. It is a slow process but you can see it is working. I have known several older people who I would consider borderline racists, yet, their children, my peers, are much less so. Looking at my friends children, their isn’t a racist among them. They do believe in equality and have empathy for those in society who are less fortunate. That’s the generation that changed the course of racism. They were educated, I believe, fairly and made their own decisions about what is right and what is wrong. With Parents that may have held strong Conservative opinions ( but not racist) they taught what needed to be taught at home. They did not rely on some school district to teach them some bent version of history. Making children feel inferior because their forbearers are responsible for what is going on in this country now is just plain wrong.
Children learn valuable lessons at home and we expect that children will get valuable lessons in school as well. The lessons in school should be based on sound facts and the opinions of administrators and teachers should be left out of the equation.
I do realize this is a very slippery slope and arguments can be made for changing curriculum to encompass present day models but those models should be fair and unbiased.
My overall point is that, once again, there are racists in this country but this country is most certainly not racist. The cycle is slowly being broken and each succeeding generation will put racism in the rear window. Swinging the education pendulum too far to the left will not change the course of racism in this country, all it will do is open the door for a form of society that looks nothing like it is today. That will not be a good thing.