May 31, 2021 Loretta Hunnicutt | American Daily Independent News Network
Malcom X told us years ago that “only a fool would let his enemy teach his children.” Yet, for decades that is exactly what American parents have blindly done.
We completely embraced the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., while ignoring the equaling compelling lessons from Malcolm X. Americans chose to follow the former because King’s teachings were based on a Judeo-Christian optimism and the fundamental love that flows from it.
That is who we are. Hopeful, striving and relentless in our pursuit of a better world. The drive to be the better angels is the foundation of our nation.
From the time we entered grade school, to today, countless Americans have recited every year the words given to us by King and made them our own. We hoped that someday all “little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
We were getting there; or so we thought. How could we not get there? Our parents, ourselves, our brothers and sisters, our friends, and neighbors worked so hard toward that goal.
How did we fail? Were we unrealistic? That is what we are now being told by the very people Malcolm X warned us about. Our kids: black, brown, and white are being taught by people who hate them. Hate us. Hate all that we have built, and all that we believe.
They believe our black and brown children are incapable of doing math. They believe our black and brown children are incapable of learning the most basic skills and cannot comport themselves accordingly in our schools. They believe our white kids have at the core of their character, a slave-owning demon intent on asserting their superiority.
That is what they believe, and that is who we are handing our kids over to five days a week for 7 hours a day.
There are still many great teachers. Hopefully your child has one or two. However they are few and far between and silent. Too silent. We need them to speak up, but if they do, they will surely not survive in the system. They are complicit, but we can’t condemn them because some of them are only avenues of insight we have into the schools, and too often they offer the only safe harbor for kids in our turbulent schools.
Hard Thinking
One of my mentors, a local civil rights icon, who continues to serve as a representative for the black plaintiffs in the Tucson Unified School District summed up simply what we are witnessing in our schools. She posits that we can easily, readily even, identify those people in our schools who engage in racist behavior and bring their bigotry to bear in the treatment of our children and subject matter. However, disciplining, and going so far as to remove them from K-12 classrooms the individuals would require that “hard thinking” that Dr. King implored us to do. It would require educators – lead teachers or administrators – to counsel or terminate the employment of a colleague rather than a “system.”
In the past, strong teachers’ unions had an interest in taking steps to ensure their membership was comprised of professionals, but as union memberships declined, it became a numbers game – one that required unions to defend the indefensible while providing cover to controversy-adverse administrators.
So, rather than rid our classrooms of codependents and bigots, while funneling money toward professional development geared toward classroom management and requiring teachers to master the very skills they hope to impart to their students, educators are selling us and our kids a wholesale condemnation of the “system.”
That system just so happens to be one founded on personal freedom and personal responsibility. It is also a capitalist system, and that is the root of the problem.
What we are watching with the advance of Critical Race Studies is all about advancing an economic system not an educational one. Under no circumstances, is it about advancing the individual student. Your kid.
As a person, who formerly identified as a progressive Democrat, there is inside me still a desire to live one day in a utopian universe in which the needs of all are met by a benevolent government. Unfortunately, for that system to work, we would all have to be the best angels, and that can never happen. It has taken me years to accept that, and part of me still holds out a glimmer of hope.
Unfortunately, it is almost purely economics that got us here. We have spent so much on the educational industrialized complex and so little in the classroom. As a result, we have attracted too many of the least capable people to the field. People incapable of doing that “hard thinking.” Talk to the average school administrator and you will find someone with a doctorate in edubabble. Vapid, arrogant, and proof of the inherent flaw in the Peter Principle, our school leaders are those who couldn’t do something of higher value, pulled from a pool of those who couldn’t do something of higher value.
It is those people, who armed with the delusion that they are capable of complex thought, along with a select few members of their school board and perhaps a procurement officer, travel to exotic or otherwise exciting locales to purchase the latest curricula scheme.
In the alternative, they are spoon fed Critical Race Theory-based concepts by the likes of the Arizona School Board Association rather than receive training in the civil rights law so many of us fought so hard for.
The school board members lap the pablum up and violently spit back out at the very parents they hold responsible for the low wages their administrators have decided to pay their teaching staff.
Rarely does a board member question why there are such inequities in their own district’s pay scales. They are trained to rubber stamp the “professional” they hired to run the district, and the vast majority are happy to serve the public without actually serving in any meaningful way.
Too often we see board members who defer to administrators without question. Happy to be important, they sit at the dais and nod like puppies when the administrator speaks and scowl at parents who dare to speak.
The superintendent works for them, and they work for the people who elected them, but you would never know it.
It is difficult to watch parents go before school boards. It almost seems as if the administrators and school board members take pleasure in showing their contempt for pleading parents. Sometimes it feels like you are watching Milgram’s electric shock experiment. The more parents plead for mercy, the more the board members are eager to exert their control. Little people exercising diffused responsibility by obediently following the directives of their superintendent.
They can’t see it, but anyone with any level of intellectual honesty can’t miss it.
How Can This Continue
Every force in our system is working against parents and kids. From the media to elected officials, no one is willing to take a hard look at the toll Critical Race Theory-based curriculum could take on students. At this moment, we cannot know what the long term damage will be. We can speculate based on our own limited understanding of the human psyche. A professor of mine, who was a fan of Alfred Adler once quipped, “if you tell a man he is horse long enough, he will buy himself a saddle.” We see the truth in that statement all the time.
Because we don’t know what happens to children is told often enough that they are a racists, that they are key players in a racist system, how can we allow this experiment to go on in our classrooms? We know how, because we are refusing to engage in that hard thinking. That’s how.