12/30/09

from Big Government

Minnesota University Wants K-12 Teachers to Hate America

by Kyle Olson

We’re accustomed to strange political phenomena rising out of Minnesota.


We can accept the occasional Jesse Ventura or Al Franken winning statewide office, because the state’s voters obviously like to be different.

But we doubt even the most offbeat citizens of that state would approve of the new K-12 teacher education program that’s been proposed for the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus.

While the rest of the nation is trying to force teachers to help our children reach their potential, the university’s College of Education and Human Development wants to make sure future teachers are more anti-American, so they can share that philosophy with their future students.

We couldn’t even begin to make something like this up.


According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, College of Education officials recently established the “Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group.” It’s charged with helping to devise a new system for training prospective K-12 teachers, because current teachers lack “cultural competence,” a factor officials believe contributes to the poor performance of minority students.

The task force has issued its final report, which the group Foundation for Individual Rights in Education brought to light, and officials from the College of Education are expected to review its recommendations in January.

What’s the task force’s main recommendation? That new teachers be immersed in a liberal political agenda that’s highly critical of American social norms, particularly the notion that all people can positively influence their own destiny through hard work and determination.

The task force “recommended that aspiring teachers must repudiate the notion of the ‘American Dream’ and instead “must embrace – and be prepared to teach our state’s kids – the task force’s own vision of America as an oppressive hellhole: racist, sexist and homophobic,” according to writer Katherine Kersten of the Star Tribune.

“The report advocates making race, class and gender politics the ‘overarching framework’ for all teaching courses at the university,” Kersten wrote. “It calls for evaluating future teachers in both coursework and practice teaching, based on their willingness to fall into intellectual lockstep.”

The task force recommends that prospective teachers begin by confessing their own bigotry. They would have to prepare a report “describing their own prejudices and stereotypes, questioning their ‘cultural motives’ for wishing to become teachers, and take a ‘cultural intelligence’ assessment designed to ferret out their latent racism, classism and other ‘isms,’” according to the newspaper.

More than anything, “future teachers must. . . recognize and denounce the fundamental injustices at the heart of American society,” the article said.

What about those prospective teachers who refuse to fall into “intellectual lockstep?” After all, there’s bound to be a stubborn conservative or two who think America’s a pretty decent place to live, work and raise a family.

For them, the university “must develop clear steps and procedures. . . including a remediation plan,” the report said.

We wonder if the university’s “remediation” program will prescribe years of hard labor, so the unenlightened will have plenty of time to ponder their foolishness.

Silly us. The whole time we thought the problem was that our kids were falling behind in key subjects like science and math.

We never understood that the key to quality education is to teach all youngsters to hate their country, and teach minority kids that society’s cards are impossibly stacked against them, so they might as well go sell crack.

And silly us, we were under the impression that free thought was still allowed in this country, even in the intellectual gulags otherwise known as university campuses.

But back to reality. We think the proposed program at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities is an unbelievable pile of dung, a complete waste of tax dollars, and an insult to university students and the K-12 students they will be teaching.

God help us if this is the prevailing attitude in schools of education across the land.

Now that the good citizens of Minnesota are aware of this nonsense happening right under their noses, we trust they will kill it out before it’s put into practice.

"Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted."
-Vladimir Lenin