A new type of back-to-school learning, known as Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), is leaning heavily into a focus on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and other divisive socio-political concepts by dividing classes along gender and racial lines.
The Daily Caller reports that the curriculum was created by a group called Facing History and Ourselves, which plans to partner with over 100,000 teachers in order to teach about “racism, antisemitism, and prejudice at pivotal moments in history.” The curriculum includes a five-day back-to-school lesson plan, based in SEL, that includes questionnaires and other lessons that will see the class divided up based on various group identities.
Included in the curriculum is a story that students must read called “Orientation Day,” which describes a 17-year-old Chinese-American girl struggling to fit in with her class due to her racial identity. After reading the story, students are asked to consider their own “individual identities” and describe how they feel their own views of themselves differ from other peoples’ views of them.
The lesson plans encourage teachers to create a “classroom contract” that will “empower” students to “wrestle” with “multiple perspectives,” and ultimately produce “logical consequences” for anyone who doesn’t contribute to a “classroom community.”
“The purpose of this exercise is none other than to program kids to internalize information through an ideological and racial lens rather than to understand the historical context of the facts,” said Dr. Elana Fishbein, president of No Left Turn In Education, a watchdog group dedicated to fighting political indoctrination in schools. “Instead, the teacher should guarantee objectivity, pledge to keep politics out of the classroom, and promise to let all perspectives be heard, without a threat of intimidation or retaliation.”
By the end of the five-day period, the curriculum – which is supposed to last for 230 minutes over the course of the five days – will lead to the students “establishing classroom norms and an inclusive environment.” These plans are to be utilized at the very beginning of the school year, when children are most psychologically vulnerable to indoctrination.
“The schools starting CRT and SEL indoctrination early set up the controls for the year,” said Wai Wai Chin, a fellow with the Manhattan Institute. “Parents need to develop networks to be aware of what is being taught, and to develop options when the local educational offerings are destructive.”
CRT is the far-left and widely-debunked theory that all White people are automatically racist, and that the United States is an inherently racist country. CRT largely serves to revise, or even outright erase, key events throughout the history of the United States, and has also been used to make White students feel guilty for their heritage and their skin color, and to accept a level of blame for past events in which they had no role.