What are we teaching the teachers?
“During my time in the master’s program at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, we were taught to teach children,” writes my colleague Kate Bierly, “But first, we were taught to dismantle ‘harmful’ stereotypes and to teach our students to see the world through the lens of the ‘oppressed.’”
“Every course, every lesson plan, every assignment was filtered through [social emotional learning]. While SEL spoke the language of kindness and empathy, it quickly became a framework built to expose ‘white privilege’ and cultivate ‘social justice.’”
“Colleges of education seem to be the breeding ground for a lot of this stuff,” says Ken Pope, CEO of the Coalition for Empowered Education, on a recent podcast. “The bulk of the problem comes in what they’re using as their foundational pieces that guide the instruction and pedagogy of these teachers, which is Paulo Freirir’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and the politics of education.”
“The whole goal there is to use education as a political tool to achieve their socialist or Marxist goals,” says Pope. “Howard Zinn’s The People’s History of America is another key piece that’s in those colleges of education. So when that is your foundation, then it’s not surprising that we’re getting the results we’re seeing with our teachers coming out. They believe this stuff because that’s what they’ve been fed for their four years of their educational process.”
This year Texas passed historic school choice reform that gives every parent the opportunity to choose the best education for their child. But if every teacher must go through the same program that indoctrinates them with a far-left, radical ideology they are expected to use in the classroom, then parents may not be left with real choices that match their own values.
Texas may have addressed the demand side of education, but a lot of work still has to be done on the supply side.
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