It’s years and generations of torture, neglect and murder by the left and the Social Justice Warriors…
Multiculturalism, Diversity, anti-White Race teachings Undermines Our Children’s Ability to Read, Write and Reason
church. Children being taught to read are simultaneously, silently and in secret injected with the propaganda of the American Left. These beginning readers are purposely, meanly and maliciously deprived of the great lessons of our past of the past featured excerpts from classic stories such as “Arabian Nights” and “Robinson Crusoe,” with a complex vocabulary and sentence structure able to challenge the imagination and build reading skills, today’s beginning readers are presented with politically and ethnically “correct” stories whose language is virtually foreign and unable to engage students. Drawing words from Swahili, Spanglish and other trendy dialects to teach students with a shrinking English vocabulary is a symptom of this intellectual and cultural disorder. It’s rotted the American culture. Sandra Stotsky reminds us that how successfully we teach reading is no mere academic matter. Literacy–cultural and verbal–gives all students, but particularly those from poor or minority backgrounds, personal independence and achievement and the ability to participate fully in our civic life. Obsessing on the sacred cow of diversity, school-age children are regularly force-fed a bland non-chronological compilation of stories designed to emphasize the victim status of various groups. The book repeatedly demonstrates that this misplaced harping on cultural identity usually assumes that “culture” equals “victim status,” a weird equation that very few parents proud of their heritage would want their children to adopt.
Among the tragic side effects of multicultural agitprop is the omission of genuine heroes whose lives could truly inspire children but who satisfy nobody’s agenda. In addition to the putative aversion to white males, Ms. Stotsky shows how Helen Keller fails to pass politically correct muster. On the rare occasions when she is included, her story is subjected to perverse distortions; one author described her as “proud” to be deaf. Ms. Stotsky wisely laments, “Is Helen Keller’s story disappearing because it cannot be used to indict the world in which she grew up?” Shouldn’t such a charge be all the more reason to include her uplifting narrative?
Ms. Stotsky wisely stresses the complete lack of any research to support the truculent claims of multicultural proponents.
In a brave, politically incorrect display of realism she writes, “those who stand the most to lose the most intellectually from their (diversity proponents) subconscious racism will be the children in whose names the changes in reading instruction are taking place.”
Several other thoughtful dissertations have accented these separatist aspects of multiculturalists, but “Losing our Language” goes a step further and shows how the diversity craze is hostile to the English language. Much of the juvenilia offered in modern day public schools substitutes politically correct gibberish for works that could stimulate a child’s vocabulary. Linguistically hybrid stories are frighteningly commonplace based on the many flaccid passages Ms. Stotsky cites. Included are stories for 4th through 6th graders that feature alarmingly high volumes of Spanish, Japanese, or Swahili words. A familiarity with even the most basic Swahili is not a terribly high requirement for most productive United States citizens, nor is this exceedingly rare dialect the first language of many children in America (or anywhere else in the world) in the twenty first century. Even when the stories avoid bilingualism, a push to use foreign proper names is utilized in these readers. She sites characters or place names like Maizon, Eliscue, Emeke, and Quito Sueno as hard to pronounce examples that children will probably never encounter outside of an agenda-heavy classroom. The very active War Against Whites can be seen on the nametags of non-whites at WalMart. Some people go through an identity crisis their entire life.
Sandra Stotsky’s small book on Losing Our Language, (302 pages) is a huge caveat that we should not let the intricate English language be supplanted by the sectoring cant of Multiculturalism, Diversity .
Stotsky reports that contemporary English “language arts” readers misrepresent American history by refusing to tell children about great American leaders, inventors, and scientists because they tended to be white males. Thus children are given to believe that Amelia Earhart invented the airplane, and the only “George Washington” they hear of is George Washington Carver. When presented at all, white males are portrayed as despicable racists. The focus, instead, is on American Indians, blacks, and Hispanics, all of whom are presented as victims.
In 1991, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a former advisor to the Kennedy and other US administrations and Pulitzer Prize winner, published a book critical of multiculturalism with the title The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society.
In his 1991 work, Illiberal Education,[82] Dinesh D’Souza argues that the entrenchment of multiculturalism in American universities undermined the universalist values that liberal education once attempted to foster. In particular, he was disturbed by the growth of ethnic studies programs (e.g., black studies).
The late Samuel P. Huntington, political scientist and author, known for his Clash of Civilizations theory, described multiculturalism as “basically an anti-Western ideology.” According to Huntington, multiculturalism had “attacked the identification of the United States with Western civilization, denied the existence of a common American culture, and promoted racial, ethnic, and other subnational cultural identities and groupings.”[83] Huntington outlined the risks he associated with multiculturalism in his 2004 book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity.
Impoverished vocabularies are part of a war on English, Whites, Europeans, America and Americans, which the educationists and state education officials who direct and control the textbook-adoption process wrongly insist oppresses black and Hispanic children. Instead of improving the teaching of English for these children, the “solution” is to destroy the English language: “Self-righteous educators have chosen to take out their professed anger at this country’s social problems on the English language itself. Unwilling to engage in the hard work of helping all children learn how to read and write, they have spitefully made the English language the object of their seeming frustration because it is so vulnerable, especially in its written form. What is not clear is how these educators can be blamed then held accountable for the damage their pedagogical notions are inflicting on a fundamental biological process in human development.”
Stotsky correctly observes repeatedly that no scholarship supports the multiculturalists’ pedagogical claims.
Influential education researchers such as Carl Grant of the University of Wisconsin and James Banks of the University of Washington constantly refer to other “research” that supposedly backs up their outlandish claims. But no such research exists. Stotsky notes that in contrast to early twentieth-century progressive pedagogues, multiculturalists consider the mere request for factual support proof of racism.
Concluding that dodges by multicultural education professors and teachers are the result of their laziness, unconscious racism, and desire to enhance their own self-esteem at children’s expense, Stotsky gives parents advice on how to regain control of their children’s education.
This is an exhaustively researched, rigorously argued work. However, in her insistence on maintaining a civil tone, Stotsky has avoided telling the occasionally brutal social history from which this pedagogy derived. The Black Power and New Left movements grew into the apartheid movement of Multiculturalism and Diversity, which mixes notions from communism, national socialism, and caste thinking. Through affirmative action and violent “community control,” multiculturalists took over both university schools of education and slum-district schools. They installed incompetent professsors and often functionally illiterate school teachers based on the color of their skin and their degree of hatred, while running off competent educators of all colors. Only then did the pedagogy and teacher guides come along to rationalize the apartheid.
The truth can be a nasty business.
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