California has long been at the forefront of educational trends. In 2019, for example, the state board of education introduced a radical new Health Education Framework that instructed students as young kindergarten how to ward off HIV and other STDs and embrace “healthy attitudes” towards sexual orientation, gender, and relationships. Sexually explicit content on fisting, blood play, and oral sex was also included, much of it without parents’ knowledge or consent.
Striving to remain at the vanguard, one California school is now reportedly teaching third-grade students how to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities so that they may understand and rank themselves in terms of their own “power and privilege.”
In an article in City Journal titled “Woke Elementary,” Christopher Rufo, director of Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty, chronicles the recent goings-on at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in Cupertino, Calif., a wealthy community in Silicon Valley. There third-grade students were assigned a book titled “This Book Is Antiracist,” in which, according to Rufo, they learn:
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… “[T]hose with privilege have power over others” and … “folx [sic] who do not benefit from their social identities, who are in the subordinate culture, have little to no privilege and power.” As an example, the reading states that “a white, cisgender man, who is able-bodied, heterosexual, considered handsome and speaks English has more privilege than a Black transgender woman.” In some cases, because of the principle of intersectionality, “there are parts of us that hold some power and other parts that are oppressed,” even within a single individual.
After this lesson was taught, the school received feedback from parents, many of whom were less than thrilled.
“The irony,” Rufo goes on to acknowledge, “is that, despite being 94 percent nonwhite, Meyerholz Elementary is one of the most privileged schools in America. The median household income in Cupertino is $172,000, and nearly 80 percent of residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher. At the school, where the majority of families are Asian-American, the students have exceptionally high rates of academic achievement and the school consistently ranks in the top 1 percent of all elementary schools statewide. In short, nobody at Meyerholz is oppressed, and the school’s high-achieving parents know that teaching intersectionality instead of math is a waste of time — and potentially dangerous.”
