Woke Culture Comes after America’s High Schools Related to post #107 above

Virginia Allen / @Virginia_Allen5 / December 03, 2020 / 82 Comments
Woke culture is rapidly infecting America’s public school curriculum, journalist and researcher Charles Fain Lehman says. (Photo: Alto/Frederic Cirou/Getty Images)
High schools across America are embracing a woke curriculum. Charles Fain Lehman, adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, says he is troubled by a trend in education of embracing wokeness above reason and fact.

Lehman, who is also a staff writer at The Washington Free Beacon, joins the show to discuss his recent article “American High Schools Go Woke” and how this development may affect the nation years from now.

We also cover these stories:

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the length of a quarantine after exposure to the coronavirus may be shortened from 14 days to seven to 10 days.
• CDC Director Robert Redfield says America could see a massive spike in COVID-19 cases this winter.
• Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, asks the Supreme Court to hear an emergency appeal on Pennsylvania’s election results.

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Virginia Allen: I am so pleased to welcome to the show Charles Fain Lehman, a journalist at The Washington Free Beacon and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Charles, thanks so much for coming on today.

Charles Fain Lehman: Thanks for having me on, Virginia. I feel glad to be here.

Allen: So today, we’re talking about a pretty popular subject, and that is woke culture. And that word, “woke,” is thrown around a lot. So I want to begin by just asking you to define exactly what we mean when we use that word, woke.

You wrote a great piece on this that we’re going to get into in just a minute, but I think it would be really helpful to start with just, what exactly do we mean by that? What does that term, woke, mean?

Lehman: Yeah, absolutely, and I think as a term, it contains contradictions or contains multitudes, as it were.

There’s an author, Wesley Yang, who I think the term is generally attributed to, but refers to what he calls the successor ideology, the ideology that comes after late 20th-century Clinton-ite, triumphalist liberalism.

And it’s really more of an inchoate thing, but it’s the set of increasingly dominant liberal-progressive ideas that really took off in the wake of Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012 when we see a lot of this churning up.

So it imports a lot of academic ideas from the 1990s and earlier, has a great deal of focus on race or critical race theory; on sex, gender, and trans issues broadly; and I think is characterized by this particular social justice outlook on how the world works. A fixation on identity categories and defining things in those terms and then defining the world as a set of struggles between those identity categories.

And also, in some senses by the degree of its interest in ideological purity, in getting people to commit themselves fully to the ideology and spurning the nonbelievers, even within their own circles.

I think most viewers, most listeners will recognize this as that increasingly dominant strain in the American left more broadly, especially the college-educated or elite left.

Allen: And you have done quite a bit of reporting on this subject. You’ve just wrote a piece called “American High Schools Go Woke.”

And in the area of education, for several years, we have seen this increase in woke curriculum being promoted, being endorsed. But after the death of George Floyd and then across the summer with protests and riots, it felt like a lot of that very, very progressive education was fast-tracked in schools.

So can you just give us an update, what exactly are we seeing now? What’s actually happening in high schools across America?

Lehman: Yeah, absolutely, and I think the first thing that I would do is I would encourage your viewers to type in the name of their local school district or type in the name of their local private school into Google with the word “anti-racism.”

And they will find almost invariably that there’s a set of resources, or [a] page, or a letter discussing the school’s commitment to the importance of anti-racism, whereby anti-racism what’s really meant is a set of particular active commitments meant to combat racism that’s distinguished from being not racist, as being a set of beliefs that are … about correcting racial injustices actively.

I think across the country, there are both private and public schools that have pushed huge quantitative of time, money, and energy into so-called anti-racist agendas since the summer, essentially.

So, for example, in my article, I looked at, on the one coast, there’s Harvard-Westlake, which is by some measures the No. 1 prep school in the United States, and they released a 20-page letter over the summer from their administrators saying, “Here’s all of the ways in which we are racist, and here are all of the steps that we’re taking to combat racism.”

For example, their 11th-grade U.S. history course is going to be overhauled to be taught from a critical race theory perspective, which means it will incorporate the latest in progressive pedagogy.

On the other coast, we at the Free Beacon have looked at Fairfax County, which is one of the collar counties of D.C. in Virginia, where they spent something like $20,000 to get Ibram Kendi, who’s a prominent race scholar, to come talk to them. This is $20,000 of taxpayer money.

I dug up the details on the Anti-Racist Reading List that was sent out to parents and students at one Fairfax area school. So really, I mean, I have identified very few schools that haven’t been touched by this stuff in some way, and they’re pushing the same ideas everywhere.

Allen: Yeah. I mean, I love the examples that you give in the article because it’s wild when you actually see what’s happening, and what’s happening not that far away.

You tell about one Connecticut prep school in your article, Loomis Chaffee, and they have introduced mandatory diversity, equality, and inclusion training for students. And they’re also requiring faculty to read Kendi’s “Stamped From the Beginning” and [Robin] DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” for what they call professional development.

So you obviously see that there is a problem here, that this kind of mandatory woke education is harmful. Why do you see it as so harmful?