The Brian Mudd Show

The Brian Mudd Show

There are two sides to stories and one side to facts. That's Brian's mantra and what drives him to get beyond the headlines.Full Bio

 

Winning Against Wokeness & Minding the Store in Public Education

Winning Against Wokeness & Minding the Store in Public Education – Top 3 Takeaways – January 26th, 2023 

  1. Minding the store in public education matters. It’s rare to see such a quick about face by the education establishment as what we’ve seen this week with The College Board. The Board, which creates and deploys AP courses in high schools across the country. While the political left lost their minds when Governor DeSantis and the Florida Board of Education blocked the implementation of The College Board’s new AP African American Studies Course, rushing to call the governor a racist in the process, what couldn’t be denied was the overtly woke agenda of the course. As I mentioned on Tuesday, included in the originally crafted course material was a section on Black Queer Studies. And what did learning about Black queerness entail? Building forms of queerness that reject the given realities of the government and the market. Yes, that’s a quote. Building forms of queerness that reject the given realities of the government and the market.  And Black Feminist Literary Thought with required reading that states our society is a “White Supremacist capitalist patriarchy”. And promotion of the discredited Black Lives Matter organization. And Critical Race Theory – already banned under state law. And who caught this before it was rolled out in our classrooms across the state and the country? The material was so overtly absurd that even the wokest of the woke didn’t attempt to defend the teaching of the material once DeSantis brought it to the light of day. They instead chose to focus on the perceived ignorance of their audience in simply projecting the image of DeSantis as a racist bad man for not wanting to teach Black History (which incidentally is mandated under Florida law). Anyway, with DeSantis’ refusing to back down based on principle, more people began to pay attention to what he objected to which I obviously was diligently working do, and when exposed, The College Board had...  
  2. No place to hide. In Florida’s official response to The College Board in issuing the rejection they said this: As presented, the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value. Tuesday the College Board’s official acknowledgment stated this: The official course framework incorporates this feedback and defines what students will encounter on the AP Exam for college credit and placement. In other words, they’re removing the wokeness. Now, here’s the thing. With Florida’s Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. and Governor DeSantis minding the store, they successfully headed off the clear indoctrination effort with the original course material. That’s great. But what if they hadn’t? And that’s the larger point here. The need to mind the store in public education. There’s no way they’re going to be able to keep tabs on everything happening in public education everywhere across the state, however we can. It’s as important as ever that we stay engaged with our children, what they’re being taught and what’s happening in the classroom. It’s imperative we continue to mind the store at school board meetings, minding the store regarding what their agenda is and what’s being implemented at the school district level. In our society we have many issues, many concerns and many who wonder what the heck has happened to our society?  
  3. It’s not as complicated as it seems. It’s all part of the long game outlined in Sal Alinsky’s Rules for Radials, which has been incrementally implemented by the public education establishment - starting in 1980 with the creation of the Department of Education. The teachers’ unions have been central to driving this agenda through course material, control of school board members in school districts and the teachers themselves who are members. Minding the store in public education matters. And most importantly, we continue to see in Florida that it works. The College Board's willingness to change the course materials in the AP African Americans Studies Course, is the latest acknowledgement that A) Public education needs more oversight & B) DeSantis' stance against the explicitly woke agenda in that course wasn't just posturing. None of our issues in society or within the education establishment are that complicated to explain. When you remove any sense of morality from society, from a point of education at an early age, replacing it instead with a woke agenda, what you’ve seen is what you get. And none of our society’s broader issues will be fixed overnight. It took over 40 years to get here and it may take another 40 more to course correct, but it, and most importantly our children, are worth it. 

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