Did you take social studies in school? They’re serving it up in Minnesota, and it might’ve have changed a bit since your were shootin’ spitballs from the back row.

According to the state’s Department of Education website, there’s a new draft of curriculum standards up for review.

Such scrutiny comes around every ten years.

Per the draft, The North Star State’s proposed program focuses on a “more inclusive approach to social studies education.”

The curriculum teaches young skulls full o’ mush to fight the power and question the system.

Was sex a part of social studies for you? It may soon be.

Kids will get schooled in matters related to gender and illegal immigration as well:

Social studies prepares students to live and interact in diverse communities through examining their identities, respectfully engaging with different perspectives, and addressing powerful social, cultural, and political inequities, as well as their connections to other axes of stratification, including gender, race, class, sexuality, and legal status.

The draft lays out a land acknowledgement:

Minnesota is the contemporary and ancestral home of the Anishinaabe and Dakota peoples, and social studies education on this land will acknowledge and honor their contemporary and historical voices.

In first grade, kids will learn about discrimination and — it seems — systemic racism:

Learn to recognize unfairness, stereotypes, and bias on the individual level (e.g., biased speech) and injustice at the institutional or systemic level (e.g. discrimination).

In addition to investigating “how groups (Example: women, religious groups, civil rights groups, indigenous peoples, LGBTQ) have advocated for access to greater rights,” fifth graders will “explain how colonial imperialism evoked varied responses by indigenous nations, and produced regional societies and economies that depended on the labor of abducted and enslaved Africans and distinct forms of local government.”

In sixth grade, children will “describe the goals of activists in their quest for their voice to be heard, especially anti-war, racial minorities, immigrants/refugees, women, LGBTQ, and indigenous people.”

They’ll also study genocide:

Define political, economic, spatial and historical perspectives and apply them to the boundary disputes and genocide that occurred in the past within the land that is Minnesota today.

For seventh grade:

Evaluate political, economic, spatial and historical perspectives used to justify the displacement/removal of indigenous peoples throughout the past in the United States.

Eight graders will get the 411 on power:

Analyze spatial decisions to recognize power and its impact on Indigenous peoples from local to global scales.

Ninth graders are set to learn, perhaps, the most about social justice.

“[Students will] analyze the founding documents of the United States, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as historical sources, asking who created them, whose voices were absent, and whose interests were articulated,” the standards read.

Moreover, 14-year-olds will be required to “explain how systemic inequity has been a barrier to accessing credit.”

And:

Explain the social construction of race and how it was used to oppress people of color and assess how social policies and economic forces offer privilege or systematic oppressions for racial/ethnic groups related to accessing social, political, economic and spatial opportunities. …

Evaluate the impact of spatial decisions on policies affecting historically marginalized communities of color and indigenous nations and take action to affect policy.

They’ll get the low-down on identity:

Develop a respectful awareness about how ideas and norms about gender have changed over time, and how members of the LGBTQ+ community have responded to persecution or marginalization by building coalitions in order to promote gender equality/equity.

Furthermore, freshman will get a load of whiteness.

And capitalism.

And Christianity:

Describe the tactics used by the United States government to claim indigenous and Mexican land, including but not limited to an analysis of the ideology of Manifest Destiny and its relationship to whiteness, Christianity, and capitalism; and analyze the strategies used by Native Americans and Mexicans to respond to US settler colonialism. (Example: Louisiana Purchase; multiple treaty negotiations with and wars against Indigenous nations and Native alliances; negotiated annexation of Texas; United States-Mexican War.)

Last but not least, they’ll “identify how Europeans and Euro-Americans developed new legal justifications for slavery and settler colonialism in the Americas by creating new racial categories (i.e. Whiteness), and new ideas about gender (i.e. partus sequitur ventrem).”

From Medium:

[Partus Sequitur Ventrem] was the legal doctrine that made any child of an American female slave a slave as well. It meant any white fathers had no financial responsibility for their progeny. They were free to rape their slaves at will as there were no laws against that either. With no concern for any children that might come from the forced union. … The Founders codified into law a means to further dehumanize those who they enslaved, walking away from all responsibility. Another lesson in American history.

It’s a new world with new things. And a new generation’s ready to learn about it.

-ALEX

See more pieces from me:

Minnesota Theater Cancels Musical Production of ‘Cinderella’ Because the Cast Was Too White

Monumental Metamorphosis: Poll Shows Majority Support for Gay Marriage Among the GOP

Gay Campground Gets Accused of Hateful Transphobia for Banning Female Genitals

Find all my RedState work here.

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