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