Public Schools Should Stick to their Educational Mission

What does it mean to be informed? At bottom, it means to respectfully listen to a diversity of opinions. To have viewpoint diversity.  In my view, viewpoint diversity is by far the most important type of diversity.  I make it a habit to reach out to people with whom I disagree.  That is my personal mission and that is the mission of Heterodox Academy. 

Many public schools are straying from their core educational mission and this has ramifications for families back home. This core mission of education is to teach traditional subjects.  It means taking each child as he or she is and teaching those subjects. This mission does not include diagnosing, evaluating or attempting to change a child's "gender," much less cheering on a child to change his or her "gender."  The core mission of schools never allows a school to hide important information about a child from the child's parents.

I think it is important to consider much more than the driving narratives of the left-leaning legacy media on these issues, where you will never read anything like the following. I am writing these words as someone who is left-leaning on many issues.  I don't agree with every position taken by PEC, but it's important that we listen to people who are hurting as well as people who are exuberantly riding the modern wave of transgenderism.  Truth is a mosaic.

The following excerpts are from Partners or Ethical Care, an first-hand account by a mother titled "As Mother's Day 2021 Approaches."

Here’s how I am this week, as Mother’s Day approaches again.

I’m exhausted, and frustrated, and scared.

I pulled all of my kids from public school after one announced a transgender identity, and all the teachers, administrators, and counselors began lying to me, using my child’s made-up name and fake pronouns behind my back, and undermining my husband and me to our child with words like “unsupportive” and “inappropriate.”

That child desisted and came back to reality after we cut off all the trans juice flowing from the school and the GSA club and social media and woke neighbors. So I know pulling my kids from public school and homeschooling them was the right decision.

. . .

I’m angry. I want someone to answer for what they’ve put our family through.

I want this to end.

But I’m the mom, and I love my kids, and this is what I have to do, for as long as it takes. I cry more than I should have to. I’ve given up my own life to save my children’s.

But the culture says I’m abusive and hateful and bigoted.

This is how Mother’s Day finds me this year.

Maybe next year will be better.

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The Fifth Column Features Math Teacher Paul Rossi and Discussion of the Modern Racial Retrogression

"The Fifth Column" is one of my new favorite podcasts. It features interviews and commentary by hosts Matt Welch, Kmele Foster and Michael Moynihan.

The current episode (#200) does a deep dive into the Woke culture that drove math teacher Paul Rossi from his long-time job at a $57,000/year private school in Manhattan. I recently commented on Rossi's rejection of the school's curriculum because it was harming children.

Highly recommended. Here is a list of all prior episodes.

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Critical Race Theory Successfully Implemented

Gosh, what harm could it possibly do to a reasonably well-functioning society to divide people into colors and to treat them differently based on their looks? Tap on this image and behold. This woman is well educated and drives a very nice car. Presumably, she is a person of significant means, both educationally and materially. Listen to how she addresses this polite police officer in this traffic stop. This appears to be the end game of a society permeated with Critical Race Theory:

Perhaps some people will argue that this woman is an outlier, someone who misunderstood CRT, perhaps as it is taught in the school where she is a "teacher." To that, I would suggest that the doubter should consider what is being taught, coast to coast, as part of Critical Race Theory: Categorize all people into racial silos and obsess about these "identities." See here and here. Also, all police officers are racist and all of them are hunting down "black" people as a matter of doing their job on an every day basis. This motorist exemplifies these CRT teachings perfectly.

For more on the end game of CRT/Wokeness, consider the takeover of Evergreen State College.

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George Carlin is Desperately Needed to Poke at the Woke

We need George Carlin like never before, but he is no longer with us.  He was willing to ignore propriety and power centers and to pull the scabs off social absurdities with polished eloquence. He was able to do this because he no longer "had a stake in the outcome" of the "freak show." We need someone like Carlin to expose and ridicule the absurdities of modern wokeness, especially on college campuses. Unfortunately, some prominent comedians, including Chris Rock, have given up on performing for college students because they have become so Woke.  I believe I heard Ricky Gervais express this same reluctance in a discussion with Sam Harris (in these notes, he discusses the minefield encountered by modern comedians). The following short video illustrates what comedians are up against on campus.

Check out 3:40 of this video, the speaker is talking about what "they" want and the interviewer challenged her: "They don't speak with one voice, do they?" She then claims that 18-21 year olds are "diverse." This is a deep issue, perhaps the defining issue of today: For many people today, "diversity" does not include intellectual diversity. Her comment revealed the intense tribal energy in our coddled young people, as well as their desperate felt need to be protected ideas they consider offensive.

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The Poisonous Online Environment of Gen Z

Abigail Shrier discussed Gen Z with Harold Bursztajn, M.D., a psychiatrist. Bursztajn is concerned about Gen Z and he identifies smart phones and social media as two of the major culprits. How bad is this environment?

This generation seems helpless and hopeless. Why — I asked him — did this generation possess the highest recorded rates of anxiety, depression and suicide—and the lowest rates of sex or physical intimacy? These young Americans may be as radical as Flower Children, but they seem incapable of organizing a Woodstock or hosting a “Love In.” Where was their Kumbaya? What put the damper on their “Good Vibrations”?

Based on his thousands of hours administering psychotherapy to university students, Bursztajn believes it is the online life they lead which renders them anxious, unhappy, and emotionally malnourished. Social media trains them to divide humanity into allies and enemies. It offers them little basis for hope. Their online world is not a new-age vista of possibility, but rigid series of high-stakes social contests, in which players rack up “likes” and form alliances, but never actual friendships. “To the extent that you’re dealing with a culture of algorithms, not all things are possible—only the things in the algorithms,” he explained.

Bursztajn's conclusions thus mesh well with those of Jonathan Haidt and Tristan Harris, both of whom blame social media for siloed thinking and high rates of anxiety.

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