Aren’t they the same thing? Speak out against the current ideology or perhaps being silent and not a vocal advocate for woke causes will get you cancelled.
I think people at least need to know what they’re up against and what mines not to step on. Every person’s journey will be different. Some may choose to speak out, others to pay lip service, and others to avoid vocally choosing a side, or maybe a combination of all three. Maybe some will even make woke choices that will lead to career success, or choose to avoid pursuing higher education and a career in the U.S. altogether.
I can remember, around age 6 or 7, my realisation (via racist behaviour on the part of adults) that I was ‘different’. Until that point I had just assumed I was English, albeit with a different skin colour.
It took me a few years to figure out that those racist adults were just common-or-garden idiots who weren’t worth my time, but my sister really took it all to heart and is very sensitive about such things to this day.
Maybe starting junior year…or at the very earliest 8th grade. I really don’t understand why it’s important to activate 9 year olds to become social justice warriors.
Don’t you though? The earlier you start, the better the indoctrination works.
These teachers are cowards. Little kids are easier to convince. If you’ve ever been in a classroom of 9 year-olds, they all pretty much want as much as possible to impress the teacher.
Wait till they’re older and some of them might not care.
For the reasons outlined in the original post.
You can read my post as they are hypocrites.
Actually, the 6-12 year old age range is considered to be developmentally the strongest phase of having a “strong sense of justice” in child development. Kids at that age are ALWAYS shouting about how things are “not fair” because they are very aware of what others have that they don’t.
If fostered correctly, they can recognize, without prompting, when they have something another does not and will seek to remedy the situation. Give them that foundation and they will go on to independently seek to solve the world’s problems as teens. Why else would Boy Scouts have the Eagle Scout or Girl Scouts have the Gold Award? I mean, bragging rights and resume stuffers are great, but you need to have a drive to solve the problems you see in the world.
But as adults, we do too much telling kids of that age to “shut up and stop complaining” or there’s overcompensation and kids become desensitized to all the world’s problems, especially in Catholic schools (or maybe just mine…). Then they grow up to be a-holes like everyone else on earth.
The problem is implanting within these kids perverted forms of justice based on things which are demonstrably untrue and teaching them to view the world through a racial or identitarian lens which looks to promote racist and dehumanizing ideologies. If we want to teach kids about justice (I do!), the focus should be on unalienable rights which all people deserve by merely being human and judging people based on what they do and what they believe rather than by immutable characteristics. TAS is actively working against these views.
Another take on it is: 6 - 12 year olds are old enough to absorb the dogma of their environment, and not developed enough to think critically, so it’s a perfect age to inculcate them with either good ideas (such as civic virtue) or terrible ideas (Those Guys Over There Are The Oppressors Task Force)
So, the new year has started at TAS, and for my kids’ very first social studies lesson they learned that the Mercator map was created by Europeans so that it would be easier to convince Europeans to engage in “imperialism on” third world countries (my kids’ words).
I wanted to make sure I understood what my kids were telling me, so I asked explicitly if they were talking about unintended effects of the projection or the reason it was made. One kid told me that the Mercator projection was purposely made to make the third world countries look smaller, and the other told me it was made to help convince people that the third world countries were less important.
Before this week, I don’t think my kids knew either the term “third world country” or “imperialism”, and I’m not too happy that they learned the terms in this way.
There’s a useful math lesson there about projecting a sphere onto a flat surface, which now they will have difficulty understanding. But, soon they’ll be problematizing at an advanced level, even though they’ll likely never be able to engineer anything more complicated than a safe space.
In fairness to TAS, they did say that there are issues projecting a 3D object onto a 2D medium, and they did talk about some advantages of both projections (Mercator and Gall-Peters).
My daughter’s class was asked to write about which one she thought was better, and she said it depends on what you’re using it for. The teacher wouldn’t allow that answer, so she chose the Mercator one because “it seemed that the teacher wanted me to choose Peters”. I love that girl!
It could have been imperialist penguins in Antarctica. Bastards!
Did your daughter back up her answer with what each map could be used for, or did she end it her answer with “it depends” and shrug her shoulders, only to be told “pick one” by the teacher? At whatever TAS currently charges for tuition, if critical thinking isn’t being taught, I’m not sure why anyone would bother sending kids there vs. a local public school. As a teacher myself, I would encourage a child to justify any answer, since this isn’t a set answer question. On the other hand, if I had a kid give me “mumblemumble it depends murmermermer.” and I knew they really didn’t want to be speaking up in class, I would tell them to just pick one in order to put them out of their misery of being forced to speak up in front of everyone.
It seems pointless to teach kids about maps and then not encourage them to do a pro-con list of each type. Or to do further research on their own. More accurately, it seems right in line with Taiwanese education approach of “memorize this information and don’t ask questions” and directly against my own American (public) school education experience. Seems like a waste at what? USD30,000/yr?
Also, I’m just going to spit on TAS for a moment longer: The term “third world country” was coined during the Cold War to refer to countries that weren’t aligned with NATO or the Warsaw Pact. So, first of all, they’re off by nearly half a millennium for when that concept even existed, but, more importantly, a good chunk of Africa and South America are, by definition, “third world countries”, but so are Ireland, Norway, and Sweden. (lol, Norway and Sweden are “third world”?! yes, because “worldness” has NOTHING to do with development). For the sake of imperialism, however, the US, Canada and Australia, and quite a few countries in southern Africa are all “first world”, by the proper definition of “first world”, so I’m not sure how they’re planning on engaging in imperialism on so many places that are, by the definition, “first world”. That’s an epic failure to use correct language at a school that you keep posting about obsessive correct language use. Why do you send your kids there again? Again, it’d be one thing if you put up with it because they were at a public school, but you (or your company, as I understand it) are/is paying way too much for such incompetent teachers.
According to her, she said that Mercator is better for planning on where to sail your ship and Peters is better for teaching how big countries are.
I send my kids to TAS because the tuition for this year was paid by the time I learned how the curriculum was transformed. 2 years ago I really, really like the school and how they taught. In fairness, they still do a lot right and I even like much of what they teach in social studies. But what they get wrong they really mess up royally.