California politicians plan to impose yet another mandatory propaganda program on its students.
The California State Legislature is moving forward with a bill, AB 331, that will require all high school students to take a one-semester ethnic studies course as a condition of graduation. The bill would apply to charter schools in addition to public schools. Just how would the curriculum be generated? AB 331 states, “The model curriculum shall be developed with participation from faculty of ethnic studies programs at universities and colleges with ethnic studies programs and a group of representatives of local educational agencies.”
Here’s a sample from the first page of the Introduction:
At its core, the field of Ethnic Studies is the interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity with an emphasis on experiences of people of color in the United States. Further, it is the xdisciplinary, loving, and critical praxis of holistic humanity – as educational and racial justice. It is from communities of color and our intergenerational worldviews, memories, experiences, identities, narratives, and voices. It is the study of intersectional and ancestral roots, coloniality, hegemony, and a dignified world where many worlds fit, for present and future generations.
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 the social, emotional, cultural, economic, and political experiences of Native People/s and people of color.
Ethnic Studies is xdisciplinary, in that it variously takes the forms of being interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, undisciplinary, and intradisciplinary. As such, it can grow its original language to serve these needs with purposeful respellings of terms, including history as herstory and women as womxn, connecting with a gender and sexuality lens, along with a socioeconomic class lens at three of its intersections.
California’s educational system has gone from the nation’s best in the 1950s to either the very worst to 10th worst, depending on how these things are measured. Regardless, that decades-long decline can be easily duplicated and accelerated in today’s political climate, and I expect it will be.
