By Michael Bielawski
The education rights watchdog Parents Defending Education has obtained from Orange Southwest School District via public records request details that one of their social-justice-themed classes seems to call on students to become publicly funded activists.
The class is called “Racial Justice: PBL Challenge” (PBL meaning Project-Based Learning) is currently taught as an elective course for high school students at Randolph Union Middle High School.
According to the course description, it’s to “study the history of social injustice in our country, including the creation of race, the function of class division, and the history of exclusion based on gender and sexuality.”
Publicly funded youth-activists?
The course explicitly calls to have the children engage in political activism, something typically considered improper for a publicly funded institution. It calls for students to organize “around social issues and advocating for change through education and civil resistance” and “establish and maintain a Racial Justice Student Alliance.”
It continues, “Students will work with area experts to establish and maintain a Racial Justice Student Alliance here at RU, with the goal of raising awareness around racial injustice to create a safer and more educated environment for all community members. …Students will be encouraged to question and reimagine the power dynamics that contribute to an inequitable society.”
The activist students now will be tasked to convince their friends to join in. It states that they must “work with their peers to educate our school community about current issues, and will work with teachers to develop inclusive curricula.” It goes on that they will be encouraged to recruit new members and hold regular meetings and events for the school.
Teachers must participate?
Teachers will also be pressured to participate in these activist programs.
The PDE report states, “Teachers attended several professional development conferences in connection to the course, including a conference called ‘Seeing the Racial Water: Combating Institutional Racism in School’ and a conference through the Education Justice Coalition which hosted workshops on youth activism and restorative justice.
“Another professional development conference was sponsored by Outright Vermont, which describes itself as a ‘vast community of queer, trans, and allied youth and adults’ offering GSA resources and teacher workshops to ‘create vibrant queer joy in schools.’”
Vermonters/BLM opponents deemed “racist”?
PDE report further details all of this and there is a movie and podcast list that the group will be promoting.
PDE writes, “One podcast, called ‘Sounds Like Hate,’ details another Vermont high school’s debate over flying the Black Lives Matter flag on campus. The podcast presents the view that opponents to flying the flag are ignorant or racist conservatives, with one community member saying: ‘Enough of the conservative folks are entrenched in their views… I think there’s just, literally, an oblivious self-righteousness.’”
Their report continues, “The podcast also presents the claim that Vermont is systemically racist and therefore that all white people are subconsciously racist, saying, “If you are raised as a white person in a white supremacist society or in a society where white supremacy is baked into one of the systems, you are going to enact racism in your speech and in your actions throughout your life.”
The Compelled Speech Doctrine
A lesser-known part of the 1st Amendment is the Compelled Speech Doctrine. According to the NYTimes, the 1st Amendment not only protects our right to speak freely without censorship but furthermore, it protects us from being compelled to believe or agree with something that someone else believes. Public schools therefore are generally prohibited from directly engaging in or supporting political activism.
Their report states, “Under what is known as the compelled speech doctrine, the First Amendment’s free speech protections extend beyond generally keeping the government from suppressing people from saying what they want: It also generally bars the government from compelling people to express things they do not want to say.”
The author is a writer for the Vermont Daily Chronicle
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Categories: Education, Race and Division
The GovEd schools in the V.S.R. need to be dismantled from the top down.
Amen, our children are not safe in Vermont schools
It’s not that political activism is a bad thing. It’s civics. It’s political science.
The problem is that what these programs are doing is not promoting political activism. They’re indoctrinating students to a specific point of view. If anything, these programs are the antithesis of Racial Justice and Project Based Learning.
This is the typical sophistry we’ve addressed before. There is nothing in the Affordable care Act that makes healthcare more ‘affordable’. There is nothing in the Inflation Reduction Act that ‘reduces’ inflation. There is nothing in Vermont’s Reproductive Liberty amendment that remotely protects the ‘liberty’ of an unborn fetus. There is nothing in Vermont’s Global Warming Solutions Act that can remotely be perceived to ‘solve’ global warming.
Again, what the public-school monopoly is doing is not supporting political activism. It’s trying to stifle it.
I wonder if the Orange Southwest School District would include this perspective in it’s professional development programs.
https://babyolivia.liveaction.org/
vermont is a banana eating monkey run by zoo masters///
Amen!!!
Please do Vermonters a service and provide and publish the list of names of the alternatives to vote these people out Nov 2024.
It’s probably your local school board.
I recall that, a few years ago, a school teacher lad his students to demonstrate on the street in Hardwick. The “cause” was to “Defund the Police”. I took photographs.
This is not going to get any better, by the way.
It’s amazing we’re allowed to report on it and even comment.
Kind of like them telling us that it’s being done right in our faces, eh?
…and we taxpayers are footing the bill for it…
Right out of Brazilian neo-Marxist Paulo Freire’s Social Justice Theory indoctrination. Check out James Lindsay’s “The Marxification of Education”. Why are Vermonters allowing the children to be indoctrinated in this way?
Government schools train your children to be government agents………
It is not about learning, but making little marxists……
you will own nothing and be happy…..get back to work children!
They are raising a nation of vipers. The only thing that gov-ed doesn’t give them is the little Hitler Youth uniform with the little swastika armband.
The BLM flags at schools apparently started in Vermont before anywhere else. Imagine being forced to go to school supporting a political statement in favor of a group that wants to abolish police. The administrators and liberal girls who pushed all this need to answer.
Watching March Madness right now. The racial injustice is quite evident.
Over the years, I’ve come to learn that modern education is all about instilling deception and lies. Remember this: In case of an incoming nuclear missile, take shelter under your desk for safety. A college education guarantees a good paying job! All you learn is to be an ignorant, obedient, compliant serf for the corporation.
Many people can attest and witness the education system is a Grimm’s Fairy Tale turned into reality. The results speak for themselves. We are in the bottom dwelling basement compared to other nations. A least China teaches third graders how to disassemble and reassemable a firearm – real life practicle skills!
A Vermont group that you can participate in Parents Defending Education can be found here https://www.vthope.net/sos-posts.html
Thank you for this citation, Libby.
It’s interesting to note that, while not complete in any way, there is information referring to Vermont’s Norwich public schools. And it’s telling. Consider this citation.
“The definitions provided here are not intended to label students but rather are intended to assist in understanding this policy and the legal obligations of District staff. Students might or might not use these terms to describe themselves. ‘Gender identity’ is a person’s deeply held sense or psychological knowledge of their own gender, regardless of the gender they were assigned at birth. Everyone has a gender identity.”
I assume that this Norwich Policy conforms with VT Agency of Ed. guidance. In other words, if this policy is in Norwich, it is likely the same in all VT public-school districts. One size fits all, after all.
My question to our legislators, the administrators in the VT AOE, the Norwich public schools, and all VT public schools for that matter, is as follows. Is there any question in your mind that the policy referenced above is dysfunctional? If the ‘definitions’ aren’t intended to label students, how can there be any ‘legal obligations’?
Never mind that the ‘definitions’ (i.e., ‘labels’) are arbitrary and vague. For example, how ‘deep’ must a ‘sense or psychological knowledge of [one’s] own gender’ be before it qualifies as an enforceable aspect under this policy? Who makes the decision? The school counselor? The principle? The parents?
In other words – it should be clear that these policies are not only dystopian, they are dysfunctional. So, the question I have for all of you out there warning us that our children are in danger, is how can parents get their kids out of the public-school malaise?
I disagree with any recommendation that petitions or political actions like running for your local school board provide efficacy. Been there. Done that. For 30 years. It doesn’t work. It only frustrates and saps the energy from those being exploited.
I know there are active organizations out there in Vermont promoting homeschool. I also know they have their limitations. But based on more than 30 years of participating in the effort to change the public school system, I can honestly say that homeschooling is a parent’s only saving grace. Get your kids out of the public school system. And I implore those of you who are providing homeschool guidance to step up your efforts. The ‘Save Our Children’ and ‘Parents Defending Education’ web sites do an excellent job of exposing the public-school tyranny. We get it. But these web sites fall short in providing direction to parents to take that tangible next step.
I look forward to seeing some articles on VDC promoting homeschool guidance and services. And, of course, I’m willing to help in any way I can as you see fit.
“”According to the course description, it’s to “study the history of social injustice in our country, including the creation of race, the function of class division, and the history of exclusion based on gender and sexuality.””
“creation of race” how ironic that a previously used form of indoctrination (the teaching of evolution, a specific form of religion not based in sound science) is now having to be undone to make way for DEI. The concept of or creation of “the races” was heavily popularized by Charles Darwin in the Descent of Man. So what was attempting to pass as science was in fact religion or ideology, we see the same thing today; climate change being just one example, also the mental gymnastics of rewriting history and twisting facts to fit the narrative of the day: DEI.
We keep paying for this garbage through our taxes. I applaud those who are willing to sharply reduce school spending. Parents who remain in this need to look to move out and take their kids somewhere else. By remaining here, you are buying into this bologney.
This is a great article. Thank you Michael.