New York School System Teaches Fourth Graders Antiracism, Puts Them in 'Restorative Justice Circles'

AP Photo/Craig Mitchelldyer

In upstate New York, they’re trying to fix the future.

One disturbing threat: potential racism.

Hence, school officials are ensuring kids don’t become problematic adults.

Advertisement

As reported by The Daily Wire, Monroe County’s Fairport Central School District has teamed with the PathStone Foundation.

Thanks to the partnership, kiddos will get schooled on how racism’s deeply embedded into their world.

From the Foundation’s “Untaught History: Structural Racism & Resistance Curriculum” webpage:

Our team is committed to empowering students, teachers, and educational leaders with instructional resources on the local history of structural racism and civil rights in Monroe County. We support students and educators in the co-creation, implementation, and evaluation of curriculum that will allow students to explore and interpret our local history through rich primary sources. We want students to be critical consumers of information, share their unique perspectives, and work with others collaboratively to make claims supported by evidence. Ultimately, we want students to be informed and engaged citizens in our community.

Its vision:

Every high school graduate in Monroe County will learn about our local history as well as the contemporary realities of structural racism AND have an opportunity to build a more just and equitable community through their education.

Per curriculum obtained by the Wire, students are told New York hosts the “most segregated schools in the country.”

Advertisement

Furthermore, they’re asked to recognize the governmental role in segregation.

Fourth graders will be made able to “understand, discuss, and identify examples of racism, segregation, and antiracism.”

For an example of antiracism, kids are shown a photo of children protesting with signs reading “Black Lives Matter” and “None of us are free until all of us are free.”

They’ll also be taught how to correct the adults.

From TDW:

As an “exit ticket” idea for teachers, fourth-graders were asked to watch a video to “reflect on how we as fourth graders can be antiracists” and what “problem(s) in our school or community that [they] want to change.” One example showed a picture of three young girls with the caption, “Bailey, Khaliat, and Simra meeting with their principal to address their concerns about hiring more black teachers.”

Additionally, ten-year-olds are purportedly put in “restorative justice circles” to discuss racism.

Healing seems an increasingly popular school endeavor.

As I covered in April, the University of California Berkeley was hiring for a position leading transgender backpacking and hosting climate healing circles.

From the job posting:

Centering under-served and historically marginalized populations on campus, this position will execute programming* (climate healing circles, wellness collaboration days with Berkeley Free Clinic and Tang, and planned meet-ups with Bay Area QT+ and BIPOC climate activists) that will support SERC BIPOC, Students of Color Environmental Collective (SCEC), and CNR Students of Color. … Outdoor education through camping and backpacking trips will be provided to these communities and will create space/opportunities for BIPOC and QT+ populations to reconnect with their communities through healing activities/reconnection with nature.

Advertisement

And following the Chauvin verdict, Louisiana’s Tulane University held “Racial Healing Spaces” Zoom events sponsored by the college’s Office of Equity Diversity, and Inclusion. White people were given their own space (“White People Examining Anti-Black Racism”), as were “Black/African American/African Descendants of Enslaved People” and also “Non-Black People of Color Examining Anti-Black Racism.”

Back to Fairport, in January of last year, the school board reportedly expressed disinterest in incorporating PathStone’s curriculum.

That led some in the community to create a Change.org petition calling to “Diversify the Curriculum of the Fairport Central School District.”

Here’s how it championed the cause:

We need change in this world. It is as simple as that. Now, how to achieve this change is a very difficult endeavor. To begin, we need to learn from our mistakes if we are to truly become better people. However, our schools do not teach our children about how people of color have been segregated and kept down in our society for hundreds of years. They do not teach our children about racial injustice and systematic racial abuses that our country continues to commit. If we don’t learn about our horrific “mistakes,” how can be possibly learn from them? We believe that the Fairport Central School District has an inherent responsibility to teach our children about all of history- not just a version of it that perpetuates insensitivity and has a “casting a blind eye” sentimentality to the abuses African Americans, Native Americans and other people of color have had to endure. We are deeply concerned that the education being provided by the Fairport Central School District is insufficient to prepare its students for understanding and acting upon social problems of our world.

We CAN do better. We HAVE to do better.

Advertisement

By July, the board had agreed.

Education has certainly changed. In just a few decades, not only has its content transformed, but the very notion of what education is — its place and purpose — appears to have been revolutionized.

So far as I can tell, it’s no longer a process by which young people develop their intellectual acuity and add to their skillset and knowledge base where academics are concerned.

It’s now a grooming of developing minds in order for them to become believers in what the state prefers.

What will be the result?

That’s uncertain.

But one thing appears sure: However you are, based on the upbringing and education you received…consider how different kids’ upbringing and education are now; the next generation of adults should be that much different than you.

-ALEX

 

See more pieces from me:

Eating Itself: Woke University Condemns Darwin for White Supremacy

Man Finds He Has No Weapon to Fight Police, Uses His Colostomy Bag

Pastor Imprisoned for Holding Indoor Services Blasts ‘Evil’ Politicians and Warns the World

Find all my RedState work here.

Thank you for reading! Please sound off in the Comments section below.

Recommended

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Trending on RedState Videos