Most Progressive elites have no problem with the social justice agenda or in this case curriculum as long as it does not come close to home.
Case in point, The Bank Street School for Children located in upper Manhattan is promoting a race(ist) curriculum (Bank Street’s “Racial Justice and Advocacy” curriculum) that brainwashes white children from K to grade 8 into believing that they are inherently evil, privileged, guilty for what their ancestors may or may not have done and should be ashamed that they are white.
The Black children or “children of color” are placed in a “safe space” and taught that white people have oppressed their ancestors, continue to oppress them, are inherently evil, privileged and should be ashamed that they are white.
In other words, “children of color” are being taught brainwashed into believing that they are victims of evil white people (my emphasis) by those who once claimed that they were fighting to end segregation, racial intolerance and that one should not be judged by the color of his or her skin.
A slide from the Bank School shows the different goals for white children (right) and “kids of color” (left).
All of this takes place in an environment where Black students are segregated from their white peers, taught to hate and make white people feel ashamed of who they are.
It, therefore, comes as no surprise that white parents who have turned a blind eye (or were simply unaware) that educational institutions indoctrination centers across the United States have been brainwashing their children for the past couple of years into believing that they are less than worthy are outraged and rightfully so.
The curriculum being shoved down the throats of children starting at age 6 is despicable and an assault on that child’s self-worth if the child is white; but if the child is Black, he or she is taught that they are the cream of the crop and victims of white oppression.
School officials rationalize the divisive curriculum and sending six year olds home in tears by claiming that they are fighting discrimination and besides – “several other private schools” are teaching the same curriculum (see below). [Riverdale Country School, Brooklyn Friends School, The Cathedral School, The Calhoun School, Ethical Culture Fieldston School, and Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School.]
New York Post
An elite Manhattan school is teaching white students as young as 6 that they’re born racist and should feel guilty benefiting from “white privilege,” while heaping praise and cupcakes on their black peers….
“Ever since Ferguson, the school has been increasing anti-white propaganda in its curriculum,” said a parent who requested anonymity because he has children currently enrolled in the school.
Bank Street has created a “dedicated space” in the school for “kids of color,” where they’re “embraced” by minority instructors and encouraged to “voice their feelings” and “share experiences about being a kid of color,” according to school presentation slides obtained by The Post….
Children at the age of 6 know nothing of white privilege and/or that they’ve been discriminated against based on their skin color. I believe the correct term to be applied here is: GUILT TRIPPING.
…Meanwhile, white kids are herded into separate classrooms and taught to raise their “awareness of the prevalence of Whiteness and privilege,” challenge “notions of colorblindness (and) assumptions of ‘normal,’ ‘good,’ and ‘American’” and “understand and own European ancestry and see the tie to privilege….”
“One hundred percent of the curriculum is what whites have done to other races,” said another Bank Street parent. “They offer nothing that would balance the story….” (Read full article)
The school’s administration responding as Communist do is accusing anyone speaking out against their curriculum of racism. They have further stated that the New York Post who broke the story’s article was “biased, inaccurate, and did not make a serious effort to understand our work.”
In response to the article and the outrage, the Bank Street School posted the following letter on their website:
Bank Street College of Education Reading & Literacy Program(Facebook post)
A Letter to the Community
regarding the media representation
of the Race Curriculum at Bank Street
School for Children.
#TalkingRace #BalancingMedia – Bank Street – News
On Friday, July 1, the New York Post posted an article to its website regarding the Bank Street School for Children’s Racial Justice and Advocacy program. In response, the administration distributed the following letter to the Bank Street community, inviting feedback and opening a dialogue about the…
bankstreet.edu
Website:
On Friday, July 1, the New York Post posted an article to its website regarding the Bank Street School for Children’s Racial Justice and Advocacy program. In response, the administration distributed the following letter to the Bank Street community, inviting feedback and opening a dialogue about the article and the school’s diversity program:
Dear Bank Street Community,
As you may already know, the New York Post published an article about the School for Children’s Racial Justice and Advocacy Program yesterday. As leaders of the school, we are very proud of the work Bank Street educators and students do to understand, discuss, and fight discrimination. The equity and justice work at Bank Street belongs to all of us and has been one of the hallmarks of our academic program for decades. We are honored to have had Anshu Wahi leading this work in the School for Children over the past several years. She is a national leader in this area, and in February, when she announced she would be departing at the end of the school year, we knew it would be a real loss for our community.
At Bank Street, we believe it’s important for our children to examine their own identities and engage in dialogue about race, power, and privilege. We are direct and honest in our discussions about the history of discrimination in our country, and in our current lives. We also work incredibly hard to ensure that every student in our school—children of color and white children—are known deeply and are supported in their individual development.
Unfortunately, the article published yesterday was biased, inaccurate, and did not make a serious effort to understand our work. Students at Bank Street are not taught to feel guilty or ashamed, nor are they taught to think they are racist. They learn to think for themselves, to understand how the world works, and to act to address injustice. Many across our community have expressed justified outrage about this piece and we will work to respond appropriately in the coming days.
We are grateful for the outpouring of positive feedback and support from across the community that so many of you have shared. Yesterday, one parent forwarded an eloquent unsolicited letter to the editor from a graduating 8th grader, part of which is excerpted below. This student powerfully captures the value of the learning our students are engaged in:
I just read your article about Bank Street School for Children and I am literally fuming. When I was four and I first came to Bank Street, my classmates and I started to learn about the racial injustice that goes on in our world. From this age, we not only knew who Martin Luther King, Jr. was, but we also looked up to him. When we were six, we started learning about the civil rights movement. By the time we were ten, we were able to have in-depth conversations about racism and white privilege. I’ve grown up knowing about the huge privilege I have in this world just because of the color of my skin. I see this as a major advantage in life and I owe it to Bank Street for teaching me this. At Bank Street there is an affinity group called KOC (kids of color). In the article, it states that this is a form of segregation. It also states that white students are taught to feel guilty about their privilege. Let me be the first one to say: NO. As a white student who attended Bank Street for 10 years, I need to stress that I was NEVER made to feel “guilty” about my privilege. However, I was taught that since I am aware of it, it is my job to use my privilege to do good.
That said, we are not doing this work to make a point to the outside world. We are engaged in it because it reflects our shared values and aspirations for our children.
We recognize that conversations about race can be uncomfortable and realize that it’s not always easy to raise honest questions or concerns about programs like this. We are an organization that continuously learns. Our curriculum has always evolved in response to how children, teachers, and families experience it. Where you have questions or concerns, we want you to share them, so we can engage and think about how to strengthen this work together. Where you see success and growth, please share these insights too, so we can build on what’s working.
Let us be clear: we will not step back from the important task of nurturing well-rounded, civic-minded, engaged children who understand the world in which they live and can use the skills they’ve honed in the classroom—language and reasoned thought—to make the world a better place for everyone.
We’ll be around all of next week and available if you’d like to schedule time to discuss this further, so please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Many thanks,
Shael, Jed, and Laura
Another typical response.
Progressives, rather than point out the alleged inaccuracies, respond (if you can call it that) by espousing nonsense, i.e., propaganda as one parent did on her Facebook page.
Gail Lauren Karp – 11 hrs · New York, NY ·
#progressiveeducation #bankstreet #educatingupstanders
I’m not going to link here to any recent media inaccuracies that have helped me to decide to write this post. (Anonymous tabloid attacks do not deserve to be given more attention than they already get.)
I am going to use the occasion instead to frame my own narrative of support and gratitude —
I’m lucky enough to be the mother of two phenomenal kids, one of whom is black and the other of whom is white.
I am even more lucky that my two kids attend the School for Children at Bank Street College of Education, one of the brave and thoughtful schools in New York City that follows a curriculum of intentional diversity, the open and honest study of race.
For years now, my children’s school has been a (THE) national leader in this curriculum — it teaches children from an early age, (usually 1st grade), that it’s okay to talk about race, because race is a part of each of our integral identities and how we experience the world.
It teaches children to be unafraid to say what hurts them, to be empathetic when others are hurt, to tackle the elephants that inhabit and influence every room, to stand up for others and for themselves. To be, as my children say, “upstanders” in the world.
As part of this curriculum (which is both time-tested and always-growing, reviewed and revised regularly), children are allowed to self-identify as kids of color if that is how they see themselves, and to discuss some of the topics in “affinity group” settings. Self-identified kids of color therefore sometimes meet in spaces with other kids of color; the other children in the class meet simultaneously to study the same civil rights and social equity curriculum, which is called “Racial Justice and Advocacy”. All of the children are taught to understand that every society has structures, and that those structures have historic weight and biases built into them. In 2016 Trump-addled America, the privilege of whiteness is certainly on display, and we who believe in equality have to work to lessen the consequence of that.
Because my children’s father and I are raising kids of two different races, we sought out this curriculum.
We wanted our black child to have a context that we can’t offer ourselves, one that is filled with students and teachers who have shared some of her core experiences. She participates in the affinity group at school and it has been all that we hoped for her, helping her to become a confident, expressive young woman who tells us exactly what we need to know about her ideas. As a transracially adoptive family, we are all subjected to the worst kind of stranger comments regularly. Thanks to the RJA curriculum, and the Kids of Color affinity group, my child can handle these situations often better than I can. She is an awake and self-actualizing human being, as we hoped and expected she would become in this setting.
What we DID NOT expect is that it is in fact our white child who gains as much, or maybe more, from this curriculum. But that is the truth.
He is smart enough to see the injustices around him in the world and is actually relieved to be learning effective ways of standing up and addressing them. The young “advocates” who are white do not learn a history of guilt or hopelessness. They do not learn that they are somehow to blame for human suffering, or somehow personally racist. They learn instead the opposite: that they are uniquely empowered. Unlike so many adults in our society, my son and many of his classmates are quite clear that there is a meaningful difference between personal racism and institutional racism. Whatever they may have gained from their privileges, they are taught to think about using it for the betterment of society, and therefore for the betterment of themselves. The thoughtful understanding that my son has, and that we his parents have, gained from this kind of critical and empathetic thinking can not be overstated.
I can’t answer why any families who do not value progressive education, with its central mission of social justice, would choose a world-leading progressive school for their children. To me, that is the same as parents who do not believe in science choosing, say, Bronx Science for their children’s education. If they did, they would not expect Bronx Science to change its focus from science — and if they did that, their efforts would of course not be successful.
Similarly, adult bullies will never be successful in dismantling the progressive components of our progressive school and community. (They are in fact exactly the reason that it must exist.)
The education that our children (and we) have received has been a highlight of all of our lives, transformative in every way. I hope that this post is one of many, by many, moving beyond petty attacks into unifying and teachable moments.
We are so proud of Bank Street, of our community and of the teachers who have taught our children so well there. Many special thanks to Anshu Wahi, whose leadership of this curriculum as Director of Diversity and Community at Bank Street has been marked by deep commitment to each and every child at the school.
Gail Lauren Karp
parent, Bank Street SFC
Of course, moonbats came pouring out of the closet to praise Mother Moonbat for her commentary.
As for the school’s Facebook page, not so much.
Finally, in no form or fashion does Bank Street School officials or Mother Moonbat mention that the New York Post included supports to back up is article.
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