Agitprop, Thoughtcrime, Re-education and a few other proposals for public education in Minnesota

A post at the National Association of Scholars web site pointed me to an article about a new report/proposal from the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative at the University of Minnesota.

The report advocates making race, class and gender politics the "overarching framework" for all teaching courses at the U. It calls for evaluating future teachers in both coursework and practice teaching based on their willingness to fall into ideological lockstep.

The first step toward "cultural competence," says the task group, is for future teachers to recognize -- and confess -- their own bigotry. Anyone familiar with the reeducation camps of China's Cultural Revolution will recognize the modus operandi.

The task group recommends, for example, that prospective teachers be required to prepare an "autoethnography" report. They must describe their own prejudices and stereotypes, question their "cultural" motives for wishing to become teachers, and take a "cultural intelligence" assessment designed to ferret out their latent racism, classism and other "isms." They "earn points" for "demonstrating the ability to be self-critical."

The task group opens its report with a model for officially approved confessional statements: "As an Anglo teacher, I struggle to quiet voices from my own farm family, echoing as always from some unstated standard. ... How can we untangle our own deeply entrenched assumptions?"

The goal of these exercises, in the task group's words, is to ensure that "future teachers will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression."

I encourage you to read the whole article and see the postmodern-leftist-GLBT thought police at work. The goal is to ensure that all licensed educators are indoctrinated in their "Newspeak" and will be "ideologically and politically reliable" when they walk into a class room to "educate" our children.

That's our tax dollars at work in our higher education system to train the teachers of our education system...

They seem to understand public education's power. Do we?