Chris Rufo: Instead of an ‘ethnic studies curriculum,’ let’s empower parents to choose their kids’ education

Decentralization. It’s a buzzword that’s making more and more sense to a lot more people every day, whether in the realms of politics, commerce, or the internet itself. It has long been a focus of conservatives and libertarians who want to reform our education system, and City Journal Contributing Editor Chris Rufo released a story last week that gives parents a very good reason to want to take more control of their children’s education.

The story highlighted a proposed California curriculum to be voted on this week called “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.” It’s an abomination that combined far-left “woke” educational principles with pagan god worship. You can’t make this stuff up, but apparently someone did. Now, the California Department of Education is bringing it up for a vote. According to his article:

Next week, the California Department of Education will vote on a new statewide ethnic studies curriculum that advocates for the “decolonization” of American society and elevates Aztec religious symbolism—all in the service of a left-wing political ideology.

The new program, called the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, seeks to extend the Left’s cultural dominance of California’s public university system, 50 years in the making, to the state’s entire primary and secondary education system, which consists of 10,000 public schools serving a total of 6 million students.

In theoretical terms, the new ethnic studies curriculum is based on the “pedagogy of the oppressed,” developed by Marxist theoretician Paolo Freire, who argued that students must be educated about their oppression in order to attain “critical consciousness” and, consequently, develop the capacity to overthrow their oppressors. Following this dialectic, the model curriculum instructs teachers to help students “challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial beliefs” and critique “white supremacy, racism and other forms of power and oppression.” This approach, in turn, enables teachers to inspire their pupils to participate in “social movements that struggle for social justice” and “build new possibilities for a post-racist, post-systemic racism society.”

R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, the original co-chair of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, developed much of the material regarding early American history. In his book Rethinking Ethnic Studies, which is cited throughout the curriculum, Cuauhtin argues that the United States was founded on a “Eurocentric, white supremacist (racist, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous), capitalist (classist), patriarchal (sexist and misogynistic), heteropatriarchal (homophobic), and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe.” The document claims that whites began “grabbing the land,” “hatching hierarchies,” and “developing for Europe/whiteness,” which created “excess wealth” that “became the basis for the capitalist economy.” Whites established a “hegemony” that continues to the present day, in which minorities are subjected to “socialization, domestication, and ‘zombification.’”

Rufo joined Fox News host Laura Ingraham to discuss this proposed curriculum. He then went a step further to offer a common-sense, decentralized solution for parents. Instead of wasting money on centralized curricula, that money should go to parents to help them make their children’s educational choices.

As I told @IngrahamAngle: We should radically decentralize the public school system and give parents the $15,000 a year per child to choose their own education. Families deserve an education that reflects their values—not the new woke orthodoxy of many public schools. pic.twitter.com/5Pcnms3GHd

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 15, 2021

Instead of teaching our kids to embrace Aztec gods or indoctrinate them into modern wokeness, we should enable and empower parents to have more control over their children’s education.