Today we’ll have a group of short posts as I have things to do beyond this website.
Remember the story of Woke Kindergarten, a teacher’s lesson plan that was implemented in the elementary-school grades of Hayward, California? (See the SF Chronicle story here. )
Below is apparently the sole person behind the project: Akiea “Ki” Gross. She got a quarter of a million dollars from the city so that they could use her lesson plan, which you can find here. On the site she’s identified this way “Akiea ‘Ki’ Gross (they/them) is an abolitionist early educator, cultural organizer and creator currently innovating ways to resist, heal, liberate and create with their pedagogy, Woke Kindergarten.”
And the site has plenty of anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian propaganda, for Gross apparently is on the side of Hamas, or at least Palestine, and the lesson plan for teachers is meant to inculcate kids with hatred for Israel. You can see some of her slides at the site, or in this morning’s Hili post.
Note the keffiyeh, and listen to her words saying that neither Israel nor the U.S. has a right to exist. She also utters the “from the river to the sea” trope. Yep, she’s an anti-Semite, but also someone, as Douglas Murrey has emphasized, that hates the entire West and its productions, for we’re settler-colonialists who have committed genocide against native people. The purpose of Woke Kindergarten is to propagandize children to hate the West.
Your tax money at work!
The founder of the “Woke Kindergarten” consultancy recently awarded a $250,000 grant: “I believe Israel has no right to exist. I believe the United States has no right to exist. I believe every settler colony who has committed genocide against native peoples has no right to… pic.twitter.com/bxIPIBZdd3
— Drew Pavlou 柏乐志 🇦🇺🇺🇦🇹🇼🇨🇾 (@DrewPavlou) February 4, 2024
I suppose I could add this as food for thought :
James Lindsay predicted “Critical Immigration Theory” a while ago. The relationship between BLM and Palestinian Youth Movement – according to Lindsay – suggests this dialectical synthesis.
See here and – Make Of It What You Will : https://x.com/conceptualjames/status/1754874470433431628?s=46
From the S.F Chronicle article:
“English and math scores hit new lows last spring, with less than 4% of students proficient in math and just under 12% at grade level in English — a decline of about 4 percentage points in each category.”
I think people are being overly critical and pessimistic about this initiative. I like to be optimistic and like to adopt a “glass half full” attitude, and I think that would be appropriate here. In fact, I would bet anyone that the math proficiency rates do not continue to decline by 4% per year for more than one more year. So I do see improvement (at a minimum — ending the decline in math proficiency rates) VERY likely in the near future!
Have you LOOKED at the Woke Kindergarten initiative? If so, do you want the kids to be brought up pro-Palestinian, hating Israel and capitalism, and so on? Look at the “Woke Wonderings”. Do you want the police abolished, money abolished, borders eradicated, and the entire U.S. system torn down. Really, do you want this woman running a school program?
That glass is COMPLETELY empty. Why is a “glass half full” attitude appropriate here. Yes, of course rates can’t decline forever; they just stop at zero. I’m appalled that you think that this Woke Kindergarten program makes you optimistic and hopeful that it will improve math and reading achievement.
Jerry, I think you missed the irony here in Robert’s take.
🙂
My apologies, then. It’s hard these days to distinguish irony from reality, and, in truth, your comment could be seen as serious, and I put it up to engender discussion. Sorry!
Yeah — I was just so tickled by the seeming difficulty of reducing an 8% proficiency level to something even lower — a challenge, though, that this program was able to meet — that I couldn’t resist the tongue-in-cheek way of noting that they were likely to hit zero very soon. What a grift this vile antisemite has going, eh. Whoever decided this would be a good way to spend a quarter mil should be summarily fired. BTW — could there really be anything quite as racist in this day and age in the U.S. as failing to teach minority children to read?
I missed it too. Sometimes these sort of things don’t come across online.
Thank you Robert for your sharp take: The Woke Kindergarten intervention stopped the decline in student achievement (sort of). So this was money well spent then. And we simpletons thought it was just a waste! We really need more woke consciousness raising, and less white logic and cisheteronormative empiricism.
Hey, if every student is at 0% proficiency, we’ve achieved equity! 😉
That’s the “No Child Gets Ahead” initiative.
😂
Good one!
“That” is WAYYYY toooo FUNNY.!
Once they reach 0% then every child will at or above average.
Sad that those poor kindergarteners are being taught Hamas ideology—here in the United States!
Grifters like the producer of the $250k Woke Kindergarten plan are by now as familiar as telephone scams, with the “Diversity Consultant” racket going back perhaps 20-30 years. The mystery is that school boards/school establishments keep buying. That behavior was summed up in the aphorism credited to P.T. Barnum, but really expressed by the owner of a Chicago saloon and gambling house in the 1860s.
Yeah, the word grifter is one of the first words that comes to mind when hearing this story. But we should not kid ourselves about the fact that on the buyers side of such programs (that is, the school bureaucracy) there are people who really believe in this stuff, at least in “progressive” cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, etc. And this itself can be traced back to US education schools. These tend to be places with low intellectual standards. Remember from today’s Hili dialogue where Jerry reported on a substack piece by Jesse Singal about this story Woke Kindergarten: its founder has a degree from Teacher’s College of Columbia University. That is the same school that for years, until 2022 or 2023, was the purveyor of a reading curriculum that sidelined phonics instruction. It has been long known (for at least 25 years) that phonics is essential for learning to read. This is also something that can be easily studied experimentally (which is preferable to relying on inferences from observational data), and has been studied that way. But you can be tenured professor at Teacher’s College of Columbia University and simply ignore this. That tells us a lot of what goes on in US ed schools.
Emily Hanford: School Is for Learning to Read. New York Times, Sept. 2022
https://archive.is/e6S8H
The Economist: Try it and see: In the social sciences, it is often supposed, there can be no such thing as a controlled experiment. Think again. Feb 28th, 2002
https://archive.ph/UPpIc
What They Don’t Teach You at the University of Washington’s Ed School
https://quillette.com/2019/04/05/what-they-dont-teach-you-at-the-university-of-washingtons-ed-school/
And on one of the books that is probably dear to the heart of the founder of Woke Kindergarten:
David Corey: Paulo Freire’s Oppressive Pedagogy. National Affairs, No.54, Winter 2023
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/paulo-freires-oppressive-pedagogy
+1
In case it isn’t clear : the intent of Freire’s “pedagogy” was Revolution – as in Marxist – each student to go through their own personal “Easter” (I have to book right here, but haven’t gotten the exact quote).
How about :
“we’re not just altering knowledge ; we’re altering consciousness and creating new kinds of subjectivities.”
-Henry Giroux
Giroux had a moment of epiphany after reading Freire. Again, a quote would be nice.
From a talk on YouTube titled Critical Pedagogy – Where Is The Outrage – at 46 min.
https://youtu.be/CAxj87RRtsc?si=VcWaDaMDh0YuKSOe
What is it, when consciousness is “altered”? Hmmm, what could that be?
Lastly : Alice A. Bailey’s Education in the New Age (1954, Lucifer Publishing – now Lucis Trust) – the likely dialectical starting material for the New Age religion of Social-Emotional Learning – a multi-million dollar product of The Fetzer Institute.
Yes, that “New Age”.
Here’s a the Freire excerpt – pardon the length but this might explain a few things – including my comments from earlier posts (italics preserved, bold added):
“This new apprenticeship will violently break down the elitist concept of existence they had absorbed while being ideologized. The sine qua non the apprenticeship demands is that, first of all, they really experience their own Easter, that they die as elitists so as to be resurrected on the side of the oppressed, that they be born again with the beings who were not allowed to be.
[…]
This Easter, which results in the changing of consciousness, must be existentially experienced. The real Easter is not commemorative rhetoric. It is praxis; it is historical involvement. The old Easter of rhetoric is dead — with no hope of resurrection. It is only in the authenticity of historical praxis that Easter becomes the death that makes life possible.
[…]
I can only experience rebirth at the side of the oppressed by being born again, with them, in the process of liberation. I cannot turn such a rebirth into a means of owning the world, since it is essentially a means of transforming the world.”
P.122-123
The Politics of Education
1985
Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc.
Paulo Freire
Jon, are YOU a teacher? I mean a REAL teacher? With an education degree? With training in critical pedagogy? Do YOU have a PhD in Educational Leadership? Do you not know the pleasures of groupthink, that state of harmony one fosters, that excitement that surrounds you when you know that all your fellow experts agree? Perhaps you should keep your opinions to your own field of expertise and let us continue to buy ours.
I know you are being sarcastic here; but teachers don’t buy curricula.
School boards and school councils do.
Yes Jim, but almost always upon the recommendation of the education professional staff through the superintendent of schools (in U.S.). Board members, who are either elected or appointed by a political entities board of supervisors, must educate themselves and engage fellow board members in discussions to fight off this crap, or, if it continues, replace the superintendent. The buck certainly stops with the board, but they have an obligation to hire a superintendent whose educational philosophy reinforces that of the board majority.
Yes, thanks for adding that.
Jim Blilie, I was being sarcastic, in part, but I was also intentionally ambiguous in that last sentence about what was being bought. I worry about our cult of expertise and our systems of credentialization at a time when seemingly everything is political, when people in prestigious places invoke “my truth,” when opinions are mass manufactured and cloaked in claims of expertise, and when beliefs deeply felt substitute for facts and reason. Perhaps little of this is unusual in society, but that the rot now seems deepest in the institutions meant to advance, preserve, and share knowledge dismays me. That it has now spread throughout many credentialed professions and government organizations concerns me greatly.
Yes sir doug. Very, very sad.
Watching videos like that are really bad for my blood pressure.
But she’s okay with gays being pushed off rooftops and women being murdered for not covering their hair?
I know, I know, we’ve covered all that. The ability if the human mind to rationalize incongruent beliefs never ceases to amaze me.
I’m also very perturbed by the other message she’s giving out:
Forget for a minute the shocking situation of teaching young schoolchildren that everyone in the United States who disagrees with her should be eliminated. That’s specific.
The general message which will filter down is that each child should divide the people in the world — and that means the people in their own lives, be it family, friends, neighbors, and everyone else — into categories of good or evil. They should think this way. They should judge, condemn, and renounce others in order to be moral. Be prepared. Find the witches — and burn them.
How dare anyone try to poison young minds like this.
+1 a large number.
(But, but, but, in the end, if you do that, then the good people will come out on top! /sarcasm )
The “Demons” play the role of the demiurge of Hermeticism, the somewhat evil artisan which built the prison of the material world.
Gnostic insight – here, with critical consciousness – shows what needs to be transformed in the material world. It’s a bit fuzzy – see my Freire “rebirth” quote – but a death and rebirth with critical consciousness is what is meant (partly) – by, pretty much, brainwashing (hse nao) for transformation – or also decolonizing the mind (Freire).
It’s Gnostic-Hermetic alchemy – a cult. It follows from Freire’s pedagogy, and so on.
The Japanese against the Ainu?
The Bantu against the Bushmen?
I presume those better-educated than I am can extend this list considerably.
I don’t think I’m better educated than you, Mark, but I do know about this subject. The Han subjugated many different peoples in the long history of China. They’re about to add to the list of ethnic minorities when they reabsorb Taiwan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_minorities_in_China
Thank you. I was thinking about adding the Han Chinese to the list, but I wasn’t 100% sure, and have learned the hard way not to opine too vociferously about anything I don’t know like the proverbial back of my hand.
Inuit against Dorset culture (probably).
Indeed this means that almost no current society has “the right to exist”, as pretty much by definition we are all mostly descended from the “winners” and not the “losers”.
Maybe some Pacific island cultures would have “the right to exist”, but not many others.
I’ve had a woke interlocutor state that only European white people have colonized or created empires.
When I pointed out many other examples, including these, he just bloviated. Big surprise.
Yes, not tremendously surprising. After all how else could they reply?
TJR’s comment, right above yours, is particularly cogent.
In case your interlocutor is interested (though, given that he’s woke, he probably isn’t), he might want to peruse the Wikipedia article on the Songhai Empire in Africa.
I prefer to take the opposite tack, which leads to the same place. Being a successful settler colony gives you every right to exist. That’s how people have moved around for many millennia. Everyone has to eat. When food is short where you are, you move to where there is more food. If there are no people there, great. If there are, you either drive them to the fringes, or they drive you back. Centuries later, some moderns living after 1943 will call your success genocide. Yawn. If you find each other fetching, you fuck the differences out of each other and all live happily ever after….until some demagogue comes along later and starts comparing skull shapes or genetic polymorphisms to create division.
The right of any state to exist depends on its ability to resist conquest from without and insurrectionist self-determination from within, which are also rights. And so it goes.
Leslie, your strong, absolutely correct Anglo-Saxon verbiage applies to our present day and age as well. We have had much movement of populations around the world in the last several decades with the natural result of more and more “interracial” marriages. (I hate the world “interracial” but am using it here as shorthand.) The “multiracial” (another word I hate) progeny of these marriages are really outside of the racial divisions that have been held up as so important by the identity politics of both the Left and the Right. (This does not obviate the need to know one’s ancestry for medical reasons.)
Anglo-Saxon is another name for Old English (Beowulf etc). So I used a translator, as you referenced Anglo-Saxon verbiage!
“{The} dafenlic of welhwilc pro cynewîse oð bêo {depends} onufan and sîn strengu cuman ætstandan {conquest} âdôn bûtan meltan {insurrectionist} {self-determination} hêan intô with, ðætte m¯æðegian êac ðegnlagu. {And} adverbial phrases hîe {goes}.”
+1
To be consistent, you must extend the victims to include members of other species, so there will be equity in hating all humanity.
Han Chinese vs ethnic minority Tibetans and Uighurs. But I suppose this wanna-be Red Guard gets all gushy at stories of The Cultural Revolution.
Continuing the irony and sarcasm on this topic, I offer Jeff Maurer’s snark for your amusement. https://open.substack.com/pub/imightbewrong/p/the-woke-kindergarten-final-exam
That test is hilarious! Thanks for posting the link.
That is hilarious and so on the mark.
Perfect! Humorous way to point out the incoherence of many of the concepts.
“They” seems mentally ill.
Anything but. I guess one could call it “ideologically ill”, i.e. fanaticism, I suppose.
And in this case, this person is yet-another Marxist horny for a race-war. Hitler-with-a-tan, basically.
Hayward, CA school district is 18,000 students, 3.4% white and 40% economically disadvantaged. They seem to have at least a partially dysfunctional board as indicated by a recent open letter from the Board Chair to the community at https://www.husd.us/post-details/~board/all-news/post/board-statement-regarding-trustee-remarks
I took a look at her LinkedIn profile
MA from Columbia University developmental psychology
Touro University Master of Science Childhood education
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, child development
Full time kindergarten teacher in NY State
Speculation: childhood education is not a well paying field. Ironically, she went full capitalist and started a consultancy/coaching profession in 2019, just when cash was being thrown hand over fist at the decolonizer grift.
Why didn’t they spend the money on balls, crayons, musical instuments and healthy food for the children?
They would certainly benefit more, even if the academic performance remained dismal.
The last thing I would want to tell a kindergartener about is mass death.