Many schools around the country are doing a poor job in early education. To address that issue, San Francisco educators hired a firm called "Woke Kindergarten" which may not be successful in improving literacy and math scores but is doing a bang-up job of fighting racism.
Woke Kindergarten claims on its website that it's "a global, abolitionist early childhood ecosystem and visionary creative portal supporting children, families, educators and organizations in their commitment to abolitionist early education and pro-black and queer and trans liberation."
Don't ask them what it means. One teacher, Tiger Craven, asked about the program's objective to "disrupt whiteness." "What does that mean," he asked. “I just want to know, what does that mean for a third-grade classroom?”
Good question. Unfortunately, it got him banned from future training sessions.
Woke Kindergarten has sessions on "woke wondering" that sound like the musings of a ten-year-old who asks, "Daddy, why is the sky blue"?
The Woke Kindergarten curriculum shared with schools includes “wonderings,” which pose questions for students, including, “If the United States defunded the Israeli military, how could this money be used to rebuild Palestine?”
In addition, the “woke word of the day,” including “strike,” “ceasefire” and “protest,” offers students a “language of the resistance … to introduce children to liberatory vocabulary in a way that they can easily digest, understand and most importantly, use in their critiques of the system.”
Other "wonderings" include, "If we abolished the police, what else could we do to keep the world safe?" and "If we eradicate borders, how might we build our communities to include and support neighbors from all over the world?"
A teacher at Glassbrook Elementary said, “It slowly became very apparent if you were a dissenting voice that it’s not what they wanted to hear."
These schools had some of the lowest reading and math scores in the state. But after two years of Woke Kindergarten, the scores got even worse.
Math and English scores actually hit new lows last spring "with less than 4% of students proficient in math and just under 12% at grade level in English — a decline of about 4 percentage points in each category," according to the Chronicle.
A professor of education policy at the USC Rossier School of Education, Julie Marsh, said that it might be “problematic when teaching strays too far into the political ideology realm. It’s just a big distraction from some of the bigger purposes of education and what we should be focusing on.”
Well, yeah.
Craven tried to complain when another teacher used the term, "so-called United States" and was ignored. He says that Woke Kindergarten "had a lot of good things. I think race should be addressed. Children should be aware if they are being discriminated against. But as a teacher of Hayward Unified, I shouldn’t have to get on the bandwagon of defunding police or insulting our country.”
This is not "teaching" in any sense of the word. It is "indoctrination" much like the Chinese Communists in the 1950s or the Hitler Youth of the 1930s. When kids are taught to view the world through a specific ideological lens, changing their thought processes to give them critical thinking skills is nearly impossible.
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