Bonnie Snyder (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) Guest-Blogging About "Undoctrinate" …

"How Politicized Classrooms Harm Kids and Ruin Our Schools―and What We Can Do About It."

I'm delighted to report that Bonnie Snyder of FIRE will be guest-blogging this week about this new book; here's an excerpt from Undoctrinate.org:

The purpose of Undoctrinate.org is to expose and address the growing problem of biased teaching and indoctrination in K12 classrooms.

Indoctrination is antithetical to education. When a school, teacher, or class promotes an "orthodoxy" (a preferred point of view), students perceive that only certain opinions are welcome or allowed. This creates a "chilling effect" which short-circuits the thinking process. Students quickly learn to self-censor, stop questioning or thinking independently, and simply memorize expected responses in order to please the person in charge of assigning grades. Biased teaching and orthodoxy lead to many long-term societal problems, such as diminished critical thinking ability and impaired reasoning, decreased creativity, and declining support for free speech and misunderstanding of established civic norms, at the college level and in society.

Our goal is to "undoctrinate" our schools – i.e., restore robust intellectual diversity, open inquiry, reasoned dialectic, rigor, credibility, ideological curiosity and inclusiveness, and respect for our shared enlightenment inheritance and traditions. These traditions include humility about the limits of one's own knowledge and understanding, participation in the ongoing, shared search for "truth" (veritas), and tolerance for dissenting, minority, or unorthodox views.

Comments

[DaivdBehar]

The Lower Merion School District hired a law firm to stonewall my Right to Know request about their Equity curriculum and about their sex education. I replied, they are better off publishing that content to their website, where it belongs than with federal discovery. In federal discovery, all embedded child porn is referred to the FBI for investigation of how it got into a school computer, and what it was doing there.

Scapegoating kindergarten girls for the atrocious underperformance of diverses is emotional child abuse. It is highly demeaning to black kids, that a little white girl is the cause of their problems.

I may also make a claim to the guideline maker, the county health department, that masking a child is without medical benefit to the child. Thus is a form of restraint and physical abuse. They and the schools would be on the hook for guideline maker liability and for a mass physical abuse claim.

[CJColucci]

In federal discovery, all embedded child porn is referred to the FBI for investigation of how it got into a school computer, and what it was doing there.

Interesting. I've re-read all the discovery rules recently and don't see anything about that. In federal discovery, Party A produces stuff to Party B. Who does the referring to the FBI? Party A? Party B? There isn't some third party who reviews the stuff unless there's a controversy between the parties. That leaves aside that almost nobody embeds child pornography in potentially discoverable stuff. And a request for "all child pornography on your computer" will meet either with a denial that the recipient has it, which will require the requesting party to make a plausible showing that the denial is false, or an objection, which will require the requesting party to show, in addition, something to which the alleged child pornography is relevant.

[DaivdBehar]

In federal discovery, the curriculum is not requested. The search logs, the devices are requested. Those devices often contain problematic material. School officials are also mandated reporters subject to penalties for failing to file a report.

It is easier to do the right thinh from the outset, which is transparency of the curriculum. Conservative views are just being shut out in this 70% Democrat district.

[CJColucci]

Well, then, good luck with that.

[Jaypd]

Remember when liberals pushed this as a way to protect minorities based on race, ethnicity, nationality? Isn't is weird to live in a time when conservatives push it to protect wanting to undermine democracy?

[bevis the lumberjack]

WTF are you even talking about?

Free speech and the 1st amendment undermine democracy?

[Brett Bellmore]

That IS the current left-wing line on free speech, yes. Essentially that it turns out that the idea that the truth wins out in a free debate wasn't right, and so, in the interests of truth winning out, we can't have free debates anymore. Which is OK because, after all, error has no rights anyway.

So, they want to censor to protect democracy from the spread of 'false' ideas.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Biased teaching and orthodoxy lead to many long-term societal problems, such as diminished critical thinking ability and impaired reasoning, decreased creativity, and declining support for free speech and misunderstanding of established civic norms, at the college level and in society.

Our goal is to "undoctrinate" our schools – i.e., restore robust intellectual diversity, open inquiry, reasoned dialectic, rigor, credibility, ideological curiosity and inclusiveness, and respect for our shared enlightenment inheritance and traditions.

Egads! We start with, "no-to-orthodxy," and within a few lines arrive at, "Our goal is to "undoctrinate" our schools – i.e., restore robust intellectual diversity, open inquiry, reasoned dialectic, rigor, credibility, ideological curiosity and inclusiveness, and respect for our shared enlightenment inheritance and traditions." [italics added]

It is small wonder that prevalence of that kind of, "insight," invites stuff like critical race theory as a corrective.

[DaivdBehar]

That is stale recycled criticism of the USA by Mao Zedong in the 1960's. Zero tolerance for that.
Unlike some neighbors, I oppose the killing of Commies. I support the arrests, one hour trials and summary executions of the oligarchs behind the Commie takeover of our country. They are servants of the Chinese Commie Party, to enrich themselves by access to China.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

This is the clingers' euphemistic "traditional values" approach to promoting racism, superstition, misogyny, backwardness, dogma, xenophobia, and gay-bashing. Just as some are using "free speech" to describe FIRE-Federalist-Volokh-Republican-style "free speech."

[DaivdBehar]

Artie. When do you get replaced by a diverse? Diversity is the strength of our nation. Time to be replaced, white Boomer. I know your age because that is all Boomer bullshit in your comments.

[bernard11]

So the Enlightenment didn't lead directly to the Bolshevik Revolution and (shudder) the New Deal after all?

[Krayt]

Not sure what either of you were getting at, so I looked it up as more than a buzzword.

The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on the pursuit of happiness, sovereignty of reason, and the evidence of the senses as the primary sources of knowledge and advanced ideals such as liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.

Sounds reasonable, unless one is tarring it with a sad poisoning of the well, an appeal to emotion of guilt by association.

[Alphonse Tomato]

"Undoctrination" seems like a fine goal, so long as it is applied even-handedly (some topics it should attend to are nationalism, stolen-electionism, antivaxism, biases for or against religions, etc.).

If it's going to specialize in right-wing bête noire, not so much.

[DaivdBehar]

No Maoist criticism of our country should be tolerated anywhere.

[QuantumBoxCat]

I applaud the effort to indoctrinate children into the doctrine of undoctrination.

[LawTalkingGuy]

Oh Lord. I don't see how this author is associated with FIRE at all, that undoctrinate website is just a bunch of conservative talking points and links to astro-turfed anti-CRT groups. This author is not a person who is serious about opening up critical thinking and free speech in schools, she just thinks that her favored topics and religion isn't getting instilled in kids enough

https://undoctrinate.org/1065-2/
An actual quote of the person who wants to take indoctrination out of schools: " Socialism and communism also enshrine breaking the 10th commandment against coveting your neighbors’ goods and activate the deadly sin of Envy."

Oh and it wouldn't be a conservative with an ax to grind if they didn't have a completely ahistorical take on Martin Luther King:

"Some CRT concepts contradict foundational Judeo-Christian teachings, probably best articulated by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. when he said that his wish for his children is that they will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their characters. CRT upends this notion. "

Yet another person who never read anything MLK ever wrote or even listened to the entire speech that quote is from.

No a serious person at all. Disappointed but not surprised EV is promoting her and pretending she's some kind of champion of freedom in education, when what she really wants is the freedom to enforce her conservative views on everyone else.