A public charter school in Garden City pushed activism on second-grade children by telling them to create “protest signs promoting social justice.”
The picketing signs featuring Black Lives Matter fist symbols are hung across the walls of Future Public School. The signs, written by seven-year-olds under the instruction of adults, have messages like, “From now on I can change gun laws, by protest at the capitol to make people safe,” and, “right now in our city I will speak up for Black Lives.”
A teacher at the school leaked that students were also shown a cartoon video promoting Black Lives Matter, an organization with self-described Marxist leaders and political goals. Set to a cheerful tune, the video features BLM fists and logos, cartoon images of a white child being mean to a black child, and encourages children to be hyper aware of race.
A letter from an eight-year-old to President Joe Biden advocating for stricter gun laws is posted on the school’s Facebook page. It is unclear whether or not the images shared on the Facebook page were the result of a school assignment. Another sign held by a child reads, “I can help to change gun laws in the community by protesting at the capital in the future!” and features a drawing of a gun with an “X” marked across it. A third image reads, “I made a poster like this at my school.”
Acclimating young children to organizing and participating in activism for progressive social justice causes is the goal of these classroom activities, not education.
The school’s Facebook page encourages parents and families to use an EmbraceRace.org resource that argues racism begins in the cradle. Babies show signs of racism at three months old, the resource says, and by five, “white children…are biased in favor of whiteness.”
Another recommended reading for children is “Antiracist Baby” by Critical Race Theorist Ibram X. Kendi. The picture book packages CRT so that it's easily digestible for little kids and teaches children to hate white people.
Parents are encouraged to read the adult version of Kendi’s book, “How to Be an Anti-Racist,” which advocates for a massive and indefinite expansion of discrimination against white people.
“The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” explains Kendi.
Future Charter School’s mission is clear: It is committed to anti-racism and the tenets of social justice ideology including diversity, equity, and inclusion. Anti-racism, a term coined by Kendi, is the idea that racism is a white problem. According to Future Charter School, equity is defined as “acknowledging the reality and roots of structural inequity.” The school achieves equity in the classroom by using “Teaching Tolerance’s Social Justice Domains of Identity, Diversity, Justice, and Action,” which “are not separate or additional to…core curricula, they are the foundation.” This curriculum focuses on anti-bias education which places social significance in racial categories and teaches children to affirm a group identity based on their race or sex.
The curriculum is based on Louise Derman-Sparks work on anti-bias education, who coauthored the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s well-known book “Anti Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves.” Derman-Sparks’ work is based on her idea that “all whites benefit to some extent from their racial privilege” and “by the preschool years, white children begin to learn the power codes of racism and to develop internalized racial superiority… from adults in their lives.”
Woke educators, in part, see their job as leveling cultural differences, grouping students into categories based on their immutable characteristics, and equalizing those students' outcomes.
However, the greatest disparity in educational outcomes is closely associated with social class. Stanford professor Sean Reardon has shown that the class gap in academic achievement is twice the size of the race gap, which is the reverse of what it was 50 years ago.
Administrators could pursue strategies that help students of all races by discovering and fostering the cultural traits and practices that lead to academic success across all groups.
Instead, administrators are focusing on creating division among students by suggesting their inborn traits are determinant of their status in society and wasting time that could be spent on reading, writing, or arithmetic rather than creating picketing signs about social justice and other progressive causes.
Parents who send their children to Future Public School likely expect their children to develop engineering skills and become critical thinkers. Instead, woke educators lead children into the cult of antiracism and sex and gender victimology otherwise known as social justice.
Idaho's education lobby organizations can claim all they want that indoctrination is not happening in our state's public schools. But the proof is everywhere, and parents should not assume their local schools are immune to the trend of progressive dogma politicizing their child’s education just because certain special interest groups refuse to admit it is happening.
