Montgomery County school curriculum to train K-12 students to “understand and resist systems of oppression.”

As noted by National Journal columnist Josh Kraushaar on Twitter, Montgomery County Public Schools has charged a team with drafting a K-12 curricular overhaul that “strengthens students’ sense of racial, ethnic, and tribal identities, helps students understand and resist systems of oppression, and empowers students to see themselves as change agents.”

Commentator Damon Linker responds:

“I’ll speak up: I wouldn’t want my kids’ sense of racial, tribal, or ethnic identity to be strengthened. I don’t want them to be trained to “resist” anything in particular. And most of all I don’t want them turned into “change agents,” which is corporatized activist-speak.”

I’d add, speaking for myself, that while families of varying political colorations might all agree that there are “systems of oppression” existing in the world, we are likely to disagree strongly on what those might be and where their definitional boundaries might be. For example, it’s routine for one or another consultant in the world of “anti-racist” training to label capitalism as a system of oppression, while others, like me, consider capitalism a system of liberation and compulsory state socialism a system of oppression. Whose view is going to prevail? Likewise, there are countless views of what does and does not constitute sexism, ableism, imperialism, ageism, racism, colonialism. When views diverge, whose will prevail? And even if agreement were reached on identifying some societal evil, who decides whether the appropriate response is to “resist” it in some visible and performative way, to set a better example by one’s personal conduct, to use one’s powers of persuasion and exhortation, or to withdraw from contact with and participation in the evil? Each approach has had philosophically serious advocates.

Some might even deem it an emergent system of oppression to employ the machinery of compulsory public education to remove children forcibly to a classroom where they will be indoctrinated into ideologies that may vilify or demonize beliefs held by members of their families, or even demonize those family members themselves, in a process to which members of their families would never willingly have subjected them.