When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis rejected the statewide African American history Advanced Placement curriculum, it was like blood in the water for the leftist sharks. His reason was that its prejudiced slant on American history violates Florida’s STOP W.O.K.E. Act.
This not only sparked a lawsuit threat from Ben Crump, who represented the George Floyd family as well as the talcum powder class action lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson. It also ticked off Harvard professors Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and Henry Louis Gates Jr., he of the famous confrontation with Cambridge police in which President Obama said they “acted stupidly” in arresting him. These were the history experts who vetted the course for the College Board.
If modern education had a creed, it would be that the normal is abnormal. Under various guises, mis-educators prance about employing every aspect of the curriculum to undermine the normal. Their modus operandi is to call into question what the normal person knows to be true and what common sense points to be obvious. That boys are not girls is only the most obvious of the obvious observations “modern” educators delight in questioning and challenging students to “rethink,” but it is not the only one.
Higginbotham, in an interview with Time, claims, “We’re not pushing theory. Those things come up. Theory is replete in academia. Critical race theory is built off of critical legal theory. Critical legal theory isn’t Black. Theory is everywhere.”
In response to criticism, the course has been slightly revised. “Intersectionality,” that merger of race and gender grievance, has now been made optional, and essays on reparations and Black Lives Matter are also optional. But it hardly conceals the bias in the program.
In classic chip-on-the-shoulder style, Higginbotham attacks DeSantis’s remark that the focus in history is often on “great figures.” “That’s a very old-fashioned way of thinking about history,” she said. “American history is not the American history of the great white male anymore. America wasn’t made by just simply the people who left their autobiographies, libraries, and manuscript papers in the Library of Congress.”
We are not teaching a theory, they claim. We are not indoctrinating and corrupting youth, they claim. We are just asking questions. No, what modern academia is really doing is calling into question all theories and all doctrines that point students towards the normal, the everyday, the prosaic life of an ordinary family in an ordinary world. Insane asylums are full of people who simply have theories and question the reality of reality. Making this the focus of academic excellence is madness, and getting college credit for it is absurd.
This Leftist attack is not on one front, but on all fronts and all disciplines. All the great questions that make up the liberal arts tradition–from the philosophers of ancient Greece, to the creation of the university in the Middle Ages, to the thinkers who inspired the creation of that unique democratic republic called the United States–need to be put under suspicion and cross-examined in the docket. Not questioned through the lens of ideas, but through the funhouse mirror distortion of race, gender, and sexual orientation. It is immutable characteristics, not ideas, that are to be the alchemy that turns the normal into the abnormal. This is the pathway to their dystopian utopia.
Deep down, it is a call to reject yourself as you really are, a bizarre form of self-doubt, if not outright self-loathing. Deeper down it is a call to reject the Christian tradition and the insights that helped it build European and, by extension, American culture. Two thousand years ago, St. Paul in his letter to the Galatians laid down one of the founding principles of Western civilization: “There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. “
Contrast this broad foundation of human equality as children of God on which Western civilization was built with the latest attempts to tear it down. One such lighting rod was the Black History Curriculum’s 19th lesson, section 4.19, on Black Queer Studies. According to Wikipedia, “Queer theory is a field of post-structuralism that emerged in the early 1990s out of queer studies (often, formerly, gay and lesbian studies) and women’s studies.[1] The term can have various meanings depending upon its usage, but has broadly been associated with the study and theorization of gender and sexual practices that exist outside of heterosexuality, and which challenge the notion that heterosexual desire is ‘normal’.[2] ”
Which world do you want your children to live in? Which world do you want to live in? Which world do you want your taxpayer dollars to fund? America cannot remain a normal country if its educational system remains obsessed with race, gender, and sexual orientation while rejecting the timeless ideas incorporated into Western civilization. It cannot long stand if it is obsessed with what divides rather than what unites, with the abnormal over the normal.
Related: College Board Surrenders to DeSantis on AP African American Studies
For Western civilization is not an idea, but an absorption and purification of ideas from many cultures. Without its classical moorings, and its cultural inheritance from Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem, it will become a soulless, dysfunctional society with no ideals worth living for or dying for. An “intersectional” failure.
Only the uneducated and families inoculated against academia’s attempt to tear down Western civilization will then retain the common sense needed to go about the normal business of working, marrying, and having reasonably happy family lives. Only they will have the capacity to build a civilization of love. It is time to stop the nightmare world Leftist educators are trying to create. Challenging this program is a good first step.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member