NM’s ‘woke’ social studies standards get national spotlight
New Mexico’s failed education system has been a headline for years, with recent rankings showing the state dead last compared to all other states. However, fewer national headlines spotlighted New Mexico’s ultra-woke social studies standards being rammed down public school students’ throats — until now.
The Washington Examiner recently ran an op-ed by The Heritage Foundation’s Mike Gonzalez detailing the New Mexico Public Education Department’s (NMPED) Marxist standards, which the Piñon Post has covered for years.
Gonzalez writes, “Things couldn’t be that bad, you say? A typical sentence in the standards instructs teachers to have high schoolers ‘assess how social policies and economic forces offer privilege or systemic inequity in accessing social, political, and economic opportunity for identity groups in education, government, healthcare, industry, and law enforcement.’”
He continues:
Indeed, the standards, approved last year, mention “diversity” 65 times, “identity” 156 times (in just 104 pages!), and “equity” a comparably paltry 29 times. “Systemic,” meanwhile, appears 10 times — nine as in “systemic inequity” and once in the standard version, “systemic oppression.” “Power,” a key term to an ideology that sees all of life in terms of power dynamics, appears 43 times.
Taken together, the standards aim to use social studies to indoctrinate children and turn them into citizens filled with grievances, who identify not with America but with their given ethno-racial or sexual-gender category and who see the world only in terms of these categories jockeying for power with one another.
The classroom thus becomes the fulcrum of revolution, shaping a generation that hates the West and America. Whether it ends with revolution or not, it is almost guaranteed to end with unhappy citizens, for by generating people who hate their country and community, teachers will create people who hate themselves.
Gonzales wrote to the NMPED to reconsider the standards, telling them that these updates “will in no way help New Mexico students participate in their civic duties of our society if they are taught to abhor that society.”
Instead of turning schools into “laboratories of revolt,” Gonzales would rather have students learn historical facts without the far-left anti-American spin. The coverage of New Mexico’s failed education system and woke social studies standards is a rare sighting amid mostly silence from the mainstream media.