A national effort to elevate racial, sexual, and financial diversity in how colleges educate future teachers has taken root, leading to concerns that teachers are taking their “indoctrination” into classrooms of children as young as 5, according a search of university websites and a groundbreaking new study.
A review of websites for schools of education at the top teaching colleges found bold requirements for diversity training dominating the past focus on the “three R’s” — reading, writing, and arithmetic — that most parents want.
At the University of California, Los Angeles, for example, the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies lists a “diversity requirement” on its homepage, and the University of Michigan School of Education has added “justice” to its diversity demands.
“We recognize the history in the United States of racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination and the intergenerational effects of poverty, and we commit to working assiduously to promote and extend opportunities and outcomes for members of those groups that have been historically marginalized by these profound inequalities,” said the college.
In a new report, Wisconsin legal advocacy group the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty took a deeper dive into what future teachers are taught in the state university system and found dozens of examples of far-left required material just to get a degree.
The readings, videos, and internet postings propose teaching children as young as 3 to consider being gay, attacking whites, ripping rich people, promoting Black Lives Matter, and combating climate change.
“We find it unlikely that many parents — perhaps any parents — drop their kids off at school each day in the hopes that teachers will impose a political agenda on their children,” said the report, provided exclusively to Secrets.
The institute sought the teaching documents from the state school system after reports started popping up in Wisconsin and around the nation about parents being upset with what they saw their children being taught during the COVID-19 classroom lockout that put classes online for them to see.
The promotion of critical race theory, which made headlines in Virginia’s Loudoun County two years ago, spread across the nation, landing in the heartland, said the institute. “For the first time, many parents were exposed to what was being taught to their children, and they didn’t like what they found,” wrote the authors of the new report, “From The Top.”
Research Director Will Flanders and policy intern Dylan Palmer said, “The controversial material spilling into schools today is the result of an indoctrination process that begins when teachers are enrolled in universities around the state. We use the word ‘indoctrination,’ here, and throughout this brief, not solely because future teachers are presented with politically charged materials during their college educations, but because these materials are presented from only one political perspective, and in a manner that preempts and forecloses healthy debate and conversation about these contested political issues.”
While not too surprising that liberal colleges require far-left required readings, videos, and podcasts, the 143 cited in the report show the extremes of what’s taught, said the report.
For example, some of the system’s education programs promote racism by teaching material that encourages minorities to focus first on their race. Others require material that is anti-white. One school requires reading of gender material that promotes an LGBTQ agenda to daycare children as young as 3.
“There is evident intent, from the assignments and learning objectives listed by these courses, that students seeking to become teachers are taught to implement these identity-based theories and ideas in their K-12 classrooms. This means discussing racial politics, gender politics, sexual identity, transgenderism, ahistorical anti-American history, and culturally revolutionary ideas with children as young as five or six years old, up to seniors in high school preparing for college,” said the report.
Flanders told Secrets, “What our report found is certainly not unique to the University of Wisconsin System. All across the country, educators are required to attend courses that serve to indoctrinate them in left-wing ideas before they take jobs in America’s public schools. In addition to returning more control to parents and school boards, we need to understand what our teachers are learning and provide resources for alternatives.”
