US executive order - Schools

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Here we go, a new EO regarding schools.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-radical-indoctrination-in-k-12-schooling/

"Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling
EXECUTIVE ORDER
January 29, 2025"

"Section 1. Purpose and Policy. Parents trust America’s schools to provide their children with a rigorous education and to instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation and the values for which we stand.
In recent years, however, parents have witnessed schools indoctrinate their children in radical, anti-American ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight. Such an environment operates as an echo chamber, in which students are forced to accept these ideologies without question or critical examination. In many cases, innocent children are compelled to adopt identities as either victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color and other immutable characteristics. In other instances, young men and women are made to question whether they were born in the wrong body and whether to view their parents and their reality as enemies to be blamed. These practices not only erode critical thinking but also sow division, confusion, and distrust, which undermine the very foundations of personal identity and family unity."

I am going to ignore the ridiculous first part. As if I give a damn about trans-activist who women and girls and am also not a woman with - do you want to trade stories? - my fair share of male inflicted trauma.

With regards to the latter sentence: And guess what women can care about more than one thing. Shocking I know.

That's why I am disappointed.

^^

Lots of Americans who are members of minorities hate this stuff for their kids too.

The people most likely to be in favour of it are middle class white university grads.

I find it increasingly difficult not to ask pointy questions about why that is.

This. Sorry I missed your comment somehow

Apples(of many colours)

"Feminist theory just sows division. It’s hard for a male kid from a really disadvantaged background to see how their life is so much easier than Obama’s (female) kids."

You take my words out of context, then change the characteristic from race to sex. To put my words back into context - using sex if you would like.

I still think it is wrong to teach children that the girls are always the victims and the boys are always the oppressors. IMO, that damages children’s relationships with each other, and can give them a self-image (either way) which they find difficult to live with. Teaching this stuff too early inevitably leads to it being simplified into pointlessness

Of course as children grow into young adults, it can be useful to teach them about the nature of oppression, and how historically some groups have been treated (way) worse than others. But inevitably this needs to be a nuanced debate which recognises the issues eg which cheez has raised above - some of which are rather more complicated with race than with sex.

At school, children just need to learn that everyone should be treated with respect, and that racism and sexism is unacceptable

It's not that they learn or notice differences, it's how they are taught to understand them.

Or the move to remove math requirements in schools because black kids don't perform as well, and therefore math is racist.

Another good place to look is at what happened at Evergreen College, Benjamin Boyce has a good documentary on Youtube.

CRT, or anti-racism, aren't what most people think when they hear the terms.

My personal opinion is that no child should be encouraged to take on a personal identity of oppressor or oppressed based off any immutable characteristic, sex included. It is tragic enough that some children will inevitably adopt these identities based on their direct experiences in society, but they should not be reinforced at school. That way leads to incel-ism, vulnerability to radicalisation, social anxiety, internalised self-hatred, us and them mentality, loss of ambition and a reduced ability to have healthy relationships with people in different demographics. I know someone who identified as transgender in school for a while because his teacher made him feel so ashamed of being male - he's now a devoted father, thankfully.

(Teachers should, as a duty of care, be ensuring all children are fairly treated and not victimised or victimising others. This goes without saying)

Children and young people are often not as nuanced as adults, and this is especially important to consider in countries with a highly individualistic culture - we are primed to think about how things apply to us as individuals, not groups in society. Schools must be careful with the way difficult topics are presented and vet anything that's to be introduced to a classroom. And to be frank, most activists have a truly appalling grasp on what is age appropriate.

I think the complex relationship between male and female is often well explained here on the feminism board, where the framework is oppression via class-based categories (men as a class, women as a class). But this would not be easily understood by your average schoolchild and nor would it be particularly helpful to try and explain different academic subjects through this lens. This is not to say it is never relevant, but it's a much more mature analysis most suitable for older pupils and students.

It's also, frankly, a controversial lens. Lots and lots of parents in the US don't prefer the lens of oppressor/victim, and that doesn't mean they don't believe there are plenty of instances of historical exploitation.

Schools shouldn't be treating socially controversial theory as if it's uncontroversial.

@Wemaybebetterstrangers but powerful people saying it all out loud is such a shocking, public step that no one can avoid it. It’s like the emperor’s new clothes, someone has actually dared to say it. (Never mind the many, many women who have been fighting back and shouting into the void for years now.)

Exactly what I thought on reading this. I am all for biological reality but this statement is not something to cause anything but concern.
Trump is quite happy to push his own ideology and is the master of stoking division.
I am also still reeling from reading his latest mad theory that today’s awful plane crash was caused by diversity hiring in air traffic control meaning that people with “severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities” were employed.
How can anybody not see that no matter what he changes as regards men in frocks not being women, protecting safe spaces, stopping children being “transed” there is a much bigger and much worse agenda behind this.
We all know how he really feels about women. He wants to grab us by the pussy.
This faux standing up for women is like a pedophile luring in victims by promising them puppies and sweeties.
I also think Trump is beyond whether you are right or left leaning. He is in a sub class all of his own.

What is happening to schools in America is absolutely nothing to celebrate.

Agree.

Progressive politics in schools is generally hugely age inappropriate to the point of being damaging to developing children. They can't cope with the concepts and it's political, not neutral, not in their best interests. It also often goes hand in hand with adultification and attempts at parental alienation which are both safeguarding issues.

I'm reading Kara Dansky's book, 'The Reckoning - How the Democrats and the Left betrayed Women and Girls' at the moment, and the section on schools has left me reeling. I'd thought of myself reasonably well clued up but I had no idea of how deep this runs in US schools. My head is spinning. I can only imagine this taking years to sort out.

I've read everyone's responses and I appreciate them but by linking the issue with CRT I fear they have increased the likelihood of legal challenges which, even if they don't succeed, will surely delay implementation - and given that the Democrats appear set on doubling down, that does not bode well.

Maybe it would have been more sensible to have separate EOs for these issues. Can anyone think of any downsides to having them separate?

I'd have guessed Lisburn/Castlereagh myself. I'm probably distantly related to him if I could trace back far enough.

It's interesting to me that he's a Catholic convert, which I have to think is unusual for someone with an Appalachian Scots-Irish background, and his thinking draws on Catholic social teaching.

Mind you, lots of my American relatives ended up Catholic, but by a different route. They were a later group of emigrants who for some peculiar reason married heavily into the Sicilian community. I've read that Italian Americans didn't get on with the Irish, who controlled the church hierarchy, and the two communities definitely didn't intermarry until relatively recently, but Sicilians and Irish Protestants seem to have found each other acceptable.

Which just goes to show that ethnicity in America is complicated.

American patriotism may be cringe for Brits, but it really does have to be put in that context of the national myth - the nation of immigrants that was founded on high ideals, and maybe it's never quite reached those ideals but is always striving towards them.

It even informs traditonal American left wing thought. Someone like Noam Chomsky is mostly criticising the country for not living up to its ideals. The anti-patriotism of the current left is a much more recent thing, and really a graduate elite thing.

It's really interesting to me that, if you believe the exit polls from last November, the single Trumpiest ethnic group is Native Americans. I don't find that surprising. They're a blue collar demographic that's heavily based in unfashionable places and manual occupations that are subject to competition from immigrant labour. They don't have a graduate elite, which has to explain why so many Indigenous Studies professors turn out to be white people faking it.

There's one Native American in the Senate. That's Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma. Unlike most senators, he's not a lawyer or professor or financier, he's someone who made his money in the family plumbing business. He's a huge Trump guy. I know he's a sample of one, but he talks about the Native American experience of racism and about not wanting race essentialism taught to small kids in school.

CRT might be a useful theory in certain academic contexts. But I think it's discredited itself by a dumbed down version of CRT being taught in schools, and then the teaching unions denying that they're teaching CRT at all.

My understanding was that he came to Catholicism via that sort of online-right revival of it, right?

Well, I don't know about that, but I don't think he came to it via any kind of USCCB messaging.

If there are any converts these days, it's usually through unofficial channels.

I think those who are uneasy about the patriotism in the EO don't really understand US culture. People in the UK often make the mistake of thinking, because we share a language, we're basically the same. It's not true. Americans (in my experience, and I've lived there) feel no shame at all about being patriotic and openly so. It's seen as an obvious virtue.

I don't really understand what's so wrong about patriotism and standing up for the values your country was built upon? Why's it supposed to be bad?

‘I think those who are uneasy about the patriotism in the EO don't really understand US culture. People in the UK often make the mistake of thinking, because we share a language, we're basically the same. It's not true. Americans (in my experience, and I've lived there) feel no shame at all about being patriotic and openly so. It's seen as an obvious virtue.’

Absolutely

I'm not USAian, but this is my impression too. Whenever I visit (various states, both Red and Blue), I'm always struck by the number of US flags waving everywhere, on ordinary houses too and not just for special occasions. And they say the pledge every week in school, that sort of thing?

From a British self-deprecating don't-make-a-fuss perspective, it seems a bit cringe. But that is their culture and it is not, in itself, creepy or wrong.

@SionnachRuadh "It even informs traditonal American left wing thought. Someone like Noam Chomsky is mostly criticising the country for not living up to its ideals. The anti-patriotism of the current left is a much more recent thing, and really a graduate elite thing."
Yes, thanks for this - you've reminded me of how strange I found Bowling For Columbine back in the day, Moore's patriotism made me cringe.
@OneAmberFinch you can read Vance on his conversion here,
https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/how-i-joined-the-resistance

Honestly I think it's better the EO covers both. It's the same top down, authoritarian mindset of 'we know best' and developmentally inappropriate political propagandising towards children (dressed up as fact) at the same time as adultification. I don't think you can address one without the other. They're not the same and there is nuance but they are linked by the failures to safeguard children and put their needs first and have due regard to what is known about child wellbeing and development.

Detention with an extra spoonful of shame then…

Did they call them 'struggle sessions'? Fucks sake.

Thanks for that, I think I had read that a while ago and forgotten about it. I think he skims over some of the sources for his conversion though - he talks mostly about why the ideas started to appeal to him, and why he found them valuable in his family life etc. But less about where they came from, which is from that kind of post-liberal, ironic-reactionary online intellectual right. One that moved on from Slate Star Codex & co but was still influenced by that way of thinking and debating online.

I think it's a movement that started looking for an institution that represented the post-liberal values they were starting to reach for (let's say 5/10 years ago) and latched onto Catholicism as being the closest match. It's just my theory, but I think this is why a lot of the "New Right" or whatever you want to call them will sometimes, say, quote scripture in slightly oblique ways that are different from how passages are usually understood - because they're retrofitting the ideas into a new worldview.

I do find it interesting that he talks about moving beyond "just seeking achievements to fit in with the elites" and then talks about how he decided to read Rene Girard to impress Peter Thiel! or if not him directly, then certainly his peers in that very active online milieu. Because as we all know, that's the group that is doing quite a good job of seizing power in the US - if that's not the new elites then I don't know who is.

Sorry - apologies for the diversion! I find it interesting that there's not more interest/scrutiny in him, likewise there's much more chatter about Elon Musk when I think Peter Thiel is more quietly influential...