Links - 19th July 2026 (2 - Book "Bans")

Censored! The new war on authors - "Until last week, Kate Clanchy was a hero in the publishing world... Then everything fell apart. The success that Clanchy, 56, had built up since publishing her debut poetry collection in 1995 was trashed. Perhaps even more painfully, so was the reputation she had acquired as a champion of migrant children... readers had accused Clanchy of racism in her memoir Some Kids I Taught and What they Taught Me. There was particular criticism for the description of one child’s “chocolate-coloured skin” and another’s “almond-shaped eyes”. She was charged with being “classist” and “fatphobic” and having “an outdated view on transgender young people”... Literary friends rallied to her defence, then backed away as the outrage became ever more ferocious. Pullman was disowned by the Society of Authors, of which he is president, for supporting Clanchy... a chastened Clanchy announced that she would be rewriting portions of the book and said: “I’m grateful. I know I got many things wrong, and welcome the chance to write better, more lovingly . . . You are right to blame me, and I blame myself.” It was a humiliating outcome for a book that had won the Orwell prize for political writing in 2020. Then, the judges had called it “moving, funny, full of love”. Now it faces the Orwellian fate of being retrospectively edited into line with contemporary sensibilities. For Kindle users, when the updated version is published, it will be as though the original never existed. The injury to Clanchy’s reputation, though, is permanent. In a column for the industry journal The Bookseller, Clanchy’s fellow author Pragya Agarwal condemned her for using her “power and privilege” to portray herself as a “saviour” while “benefiting from [her pupils’] stories”. As heartbreaking as this experience has presumably been for Clanchy, it’s just one more skirmish in the war of cancellation roiling through the publishing industry. While it’s arguable that Clanchy’s publisher could have forestalled this in the editing process, and certain that there are better ways to handle such a furore than accusing critics of lying, it’s also true that such outrages are increasingly common in the literary world, with a body count of ruined careers in their wake. Some of the biggest names in publishing have fallen foul of the censorious mood at large, and many smaller names stay quiet for fear of attracting negative attention. Most troublingly, much of the pressure to cancel authors over their views or attitudes — whether actual or attributed to them by critics — comes from inside publishing. An industry that might be assumed to have a foundational commitment to freedom of expression is increasingly setting its face against the very principle. That’s the environment that led the publisher Hachette to announce last year that staff could not refuse to work on a book simply because they disagreed with the author’s beliefs. Although the publisher supported its employees’ right to recuse themselves when directly opposed to a book’s contents, it stressed that this exemption did not apply when the disagreement was with an author’s views outside their work. In that case, a refusal would be “contrary to our belief in free speech”... she revealed that she was a survivor of domestic abuse and sexual assault. Under any other circumstances, such a disclosure would have made Rowling an object of sympathy. In this context, however, she was accused of using her experiences as a “shield to deflect criticism”. Appalled by Rowling’s failure to wholeheartedly embrace trans activism, staff at Hachette’s children’s division — reportedly mostly relatively junior and aged in their twenties — attempted to stall work on The Ickabog, despite that book’s wholesale irrelevance to the gender debate. Not every author receives the support that Rowling did, however. Just a few weeks earlier, Hachette’s American division had pulped Woody Allen’s memoir in the wake of a staff walkout... Even books that have already gone to print can fall foul of cancellation, as Blake Bailey learnt when his acclaimed biography of the novelist Philip Roth was withdrawn by the US publisher WW Norton... The decision, made in response to allegations of sexual assault against Bailey, had nothing to do with the content of the book (Bailey has called the allegations “false and libellous”). It shows the increasing pressure on publishers to avoid involvement with individuals whose lives — and not just work — are deemed problematic. The febrile atmosphere within publishing can make it difficult to support books once the staff has turned against them. Look, for example, at the reaction to Jordan Peterson’s Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life... a town hall meeting at its publisher, Penguin Random House Canada, left distraught employees in tears at the prospect of involvement with a book by Peterson, who, according to one attendee, is “an icon of hate speech and transphobia”. Another expressed fears about how the publication of the book would affect their non-binary friend... Publishing’s culture war threatens even books of certain historical value... more than 500 authors and literary professionals in America signed an open letter calling for a boycott of all memoirs by veterans of the Trump administration, including the former president. Such accounts could play a vital part in putting the events of the Trump era on record — political memoirs have a particular tendency to judge authors out of their own mouths — but, for some, purity is more valuable than history. And for all the high-profile examples that come to light, many less famous (or notorious) writers are stifled by an atmosphere of risk aversion in the industry. Agents report internal pressure from colleagues to drop clients who are seen as politically toxic. Editors will turn down proposals they are otherwise wholly positive about if a glance at the author’s social media reveals unfashionable political affiliations (one rejection along these lines that was shown to me included a strong hint that the agent who submitted the proposal should think about the harm done to their own reputation by association). In this environment it takes a particularly stalwart character to embrace a controversial book. Helen Joyce, the author of Trans: When Reality Meets Ideology, found support from the independent publisher OneWorld, but even after positive views and excellent word of mouth, the book is still reportedly up against resistance from booksellers. Prospective buyers have found high street booksellers reluctant to stock the bestselling book or secreting it in obscure locations when they do carry it. Publishing’s pursuit of social justice is laudable in many ways, but the extremity of its pursuit — and the highly specific set of values it involves — leaves it increasingly adrift from the book-buying public at large. It also leaves writers exposed, with even the Society of Authors liable to turn on them in the event of an outrage. The worrying conclusion is that, in the war between purity and literature, purity is winning."
From 2021. Of course, this doesn't count as a "book ban" since the left support it

Jamie Sarkonak: Education activists need to leave the kids alone - "Some Ontario schools use a little program called Strong Start to help kids learn to read. For years, it’s done so by using games: its “Three Bears Alphabet” board game centres around a mother bear, a father bear and a child bear; its “Treasure Hunt” game takes place on a sandy beach with trading ships off the coast. And the “Race to the Castle” game has children move along the board doing just that. But in a 2024 update to the program, all of these games have been replaced for diversity, equity and inclusion reasons. It’s yet another area within Canadian education that has felt the sector-wide iconoclasm: widespread destruction of works and symbols newly deemed unacceptable by a handful of zealots. Instead of religious images being burned and trashed, as has historically been the case, it’s Canadian heritage and tradition. Strong Start’s castle game, according to the program’s explainer, was far too Eurocentric for Ontario schools. It was replaced with one about a playground. In other games, the image of a queen to teach the letter “Q” was replaced with a quill. The diversity-minded people behind the switch evidently weren’t aware that castles and queens aren’t exclusive to Europe — though, even if they were, there was no harm in showing them to kids. Medieval fortresses inspire wonder, and they’re part of this nation’s roots, after all. Similarly, the Treasure Hunt game “had a distinct colonial theme” because it included a depiction of generic 17th-century ocean-crossing galleons in what was likely the Caribbean, as if elementary students enrolled in Ontario have the capacity to be traumatized by something that happened 400 years ago. A game about walking on a nature trail has taken its place, ignoring, of course, that park trail systems in North America are also creations of colonialism. Most egregiously, the “Three Bears” game “portrayed (a) narrow concept of family, stereotypical gender roles and the attribution of human characteristics to animals.” The classic mom-dad-child depiction of a family, which has propelled western civilization for ages, was problematic. They were too heterosexual, and that they were animals made it even worse: on the frontier of oppressor-oppressed thinking, it’s considered wrong to show children images of anthropomorphic animals while also feeding them real-life animals. Thus, this game was replaced with one about making an alphabet soup... “Equity-informed weeding” to cull books from school shelves — an ongoing phenomenon that shocked students in Ontario schools last fall upon finding their libraries half-empty — continues to be a recommended practice at Canadian School Libraries, a school library professional group. The group insists that equity-informed reading should never amount to censorship, even though its criteria for book removal is censorious: “classics” are overrated, it says, and removing “cultural appropriation” is of greater importance. Its recommendations have been taken into consideration all over the place. Waterloo’s public schools implemented them with a massive book audit in 2021 — to root out “harmful” content. New literature had been added to diversify collections, but that wasn’t enough, according to one staffer. The board’s policy even recommends that the books not be given away because they could harm the minds of children — instead, they’re to be trashed. At the Peel District School Board, a similar audit was carried out, resulting in one school losing all its books published prior to 2008. Later, this was attributed to an on-the-ground misinterpretation of board policy — a pretty big misinterpretation, if you ask me. The board denies that it has banned any books, and says it’s replenishing its collection. Unfortunately, the board didn’t make a list of resources to trash because it wanted teachers and librarians to apply the weeding principles themselves — to develop “critical consciousness” and train them to “recognize harm,” according to a district library administrator. Hints as to what the condemned titles might be can be gleaned from elsewhere: To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men were removed from a Surrey, B.C. school’s recommended list, and they were outright banned at Toronto’s Catholic school board. Aside from the books, it’s all the other little things. Even Mother’s Day is too traditional and non-inclusive for certain fragile school administrators. One Toronto school took down its student-created Mother’s Day sign last year which read, “Life does not come with a manual. It comes with a mom,” because it “does not reflect the inclusivity of our community.” And one province over, a Quebec school gender-neutralized Mother’s Day entirely. Celebration of normal parenthood, Three Bears or real-life, is slowly becoming off-limits. Like a proper iconoclasm, this movement in schools has reached some of our deepest, religion-sourced celebrations, too. Christmas concerts were cancelled at a number of Nova Scotia schools last year “In the spirit of fostering a sense of inclusivity, belonging and respect for diverse backgrounds and traditions.”... If students can’t even interact with boats and ships — and even the concept of heterosexual, monogamous, stable families — because today’s educational experts have determined that these are harmful ideas, we can’t expect them to learn anything. Instead, we’re priming them for a life of perpetual curiosity-killing shame: for their mystical identity-based privileges, for their country and for their collective history."
Book bans are good when they push the left wing agenda
Another example of how the War on Christmas is a right wing conspiracy theory and misinformation

Meme - Woman with "Read banned books" T-shirt: "WHOA NOW, LETS UH... PUMP THE BRAKES A BIT..."
*Woman with "2A" coffee mug reading "Expedient Homemade Firearms" by P. A. Luty*

Meme - Andrea Junker @Strandjunker: "Dear American citizens, whatever you wish more German citizens would have done in 1933, do that now."
Common Sense Extremists: "Burn even more books with child sexuality and communist themes?"

School System Pulls 2 Books With Graphic Sex From Libraries - "A northern Virginia school system said it is removing two books from school libraries, including an illustrated memoir that contains explicit illustrations of sexual encounters involving children, after a parent expressed concern about them at a school board meeting.  Stacy Langton, a parent in the Fairfax County school system, questioned the school board at a public meeting Thursday about the books' availability in high school libraries. As she quoted from explicit passages in the book, a school board member interrupted her and chastised her for using explicit language... it said it was pulling “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe and “Lawn Boy” by Jonathan Evison from circulation pending a more detailed review... “Gender Queer" publisher Oni Press issued a statement Friday saying that limiting the book's availability is “short-sighted and reactionary.”... “Gender Queer," an illustrated memoir, contains explicit illustrations of oral sex and masturbation. The novel “Lawn Boy” contains graphic descriptions of sex between men and children. Both books were previous winners of the American Library Association’s Alex Awards, which each year recognize “ten books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults ages 12 through 18.” Langton said the fact that school board members felt compelled to interrupt her when she read graphic passages aloud illustrates her point about the books' inappropriate nature."
What an ignorant board member. Why does he want to engage in homophobic censorship? Just because adults are too fragile to hear depictions of adult-underaged sex doesn't mean children are too

Georgia parent reading sexual content from library at school board meeting is cut off: 'Inappropriate' - "A Georgia school board member cut off a mother reading sexually explicit content from a book available to high school students in the district, saying the passage was "inappropriate" for any children to potentially hear.  "Excuse me, we have children at home," Cherokee County school board member identified as Patsy Jordan told the angry mother after she read a sexually-charged passage from the book "Homegoing." The school board member pointed out that the meeting was being livestreamed and said reading the passage was "inappropriate."   "Don’t you find the irony in that?" the parent responded. "You’re exactly saying exactly what I’m telling you! You’re giving it to our children! I would never give this to my children!"... "All this happened under your watch," the parent told the board. "Maybe if you spent more time reading these books instead of calculating the statistical demographics of those submitting the books, you wouldn't grooming our children. You're saying that we're embarrassing you? Well, you're embarrassing us and our kids. It's not OK! You are supposed to be giving them a safe space in school. These books? If I can't email them to you, if I can't say them, they shouldn't be in the school!" The board then told the mother her time was up... The unidentified mother at the meeting told PJ Media that parents have been bringing explicit books to the attention of the school board since about November of last year. The mother circled back with other concerned parents in January, only to find the books in question were still available to students"
Weird. We keep being told that "book bans" (though you can still buy the books in any bookstore) are homophobic and transphobic, and only crazy right wingers think that the books are obscene or sexualise children
Of course, if she had refused to shut up and been dragged from the room, left wingers would've been cheering that - even as they claim to be outraged when left wing protesters refuse to leave premises and need to be forcibly kicked out

'If I gave a child one of these books I'd go to jail': Georgia mom speaks out about school libraries - "Brown began reading from the award-winning novel in a bid to illustrate why it should be banned from the 42,000-student district.  'Excited now, he pushed into her as she squeezed her eyes as tightly as she could,' she read.   'Her tongue circled her lips. He pushed harder, his breath heavy and labored. She scratched his back and he cried out. She bit his ear and pulled his hair.'  She added: 'There's lot more to it. It's Fifty Shades of Grey in CCSD [Cherokee County School District].'... Brown added that 'this is not about book-banning.'  She said that instead it was a question of ensuring 'obscene' material does not end up in the hands of children."
It's too obscene to be read aloud by adults in public, but is available to kids

School board members object to parent reading from graphic book available to students - "The chair of the Osseo school board warned a parent reading from a sexually-explicit book available in the district’s libraries that there may be children in the room. “Last month we had some kids in the audience and some of the language was offensive to some,” said Chair Jacquelene Mosqueda-Jones during Tuesday night’s meeting.  The room of parents erupted in laughter. “That’s exactly it,” responded Natalie Sonic, a parent of two children at Maple Grove High School. “I think we should continue, Jackie, because that’s exactly my point.”  Sonic then attempted to continue reading, only to be stopped again.  “Hold on, I would like decorum in the audience as well,” Mosqueda-Jones said. “I just want to warn you about who may be in the audience.”...  Another member of the board then appeared to interrupt, saying the content wasn’t “appropriate for a school board meeting.”  After Sonic finished speaking, parents in the room applauded her speech and were chided again by the board chair who threatened to throw people out of the room for clapping."

'This is for kids': Father cut off from reading sexually explicit library book to Alaskan school board - "An Alaskan father has pulled his children from a public school district after he was prohibited from sharing concerns over a sexually explicit book found in its library catalog.  Jay McDonald... read a passage from "Let's Talk About It: The Teen's Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human," a graphic novel he claims was recently purchased for ASD libraries. The book has previously been criticized by parents for its sexually explicit imagery and commentary, and it was pulled from a Florida school district this week after Governor Ron DeSantis's administration called it "pornography." McDonald alleges an entire chapter of the book is devoted to tips on sexting, which the authors refer to as "sending your naughty masterpieces around the world."... McDonald was quickly cut off by board vice president Carl Jacobs, who asked the father to cease his reading and defer all book-related concerns to the ASD superintendent."
The fact that school board members don't want excerpts from these books read aloud shows that they know that claims about "book bans" are sophistry and that if most people knew the kind of s e x related content that was in these books, they would agree with the "book bans"

'Let's Talk About It: The Teen's Guide to Sex, Relationships and Being a Human' outrage: Sex book sparks backlash with Australian libraries loaning publication to teenagers - "A graphic book about sex that advises young readers on how to look up porn and send naked selfies has sparked outrage in Australia.  The book 'Let's Talk About It: The Teen's Guide to Sex, Relationships and Being a Human' by US cartoonists and comic book creators Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan says it is aimed at teens from 14 to 17 or 'whoever needs it, whatever your age'.  While it contains a disclaimer there are serious 'serious legal consequences' of sharing naked photographs of children younger than 18, the book goes onto to give its young readers advice on how to take them.   'Before you start sending your naughty masterpieces around the world, take some time to get friendly with photo-editing software or apps,' the book says.  The book has sparked outrage in the US with several schools having already banned it - but it is currently available to be borrowed from several libraries in Australia. The book also encourages its readers to experience pornography, calling it a 'fun, sugary treat' and it also suggests experimenting with sex toys, including butt plugs.  'Just make sure any objects you put up there have a flared base; otherwise, your hungry heinie can gobble it up and the only way to get it back out is a trip to the hospital,' the authors say.  The book contains graphic images of sexual intercourse and genitals, as well as chapters on masturbation and kinks.   While the book has largely flown under the radar in Australia, it has been banned by several US schools.  In Florida the administration of Governor Ron DeSantis, who is a Republican presidential candidate, classed the work as 'pornographic'.  Teacher and children's author Amelia Donnelly argued that along with 'Welcome to Sex', the US book threatens to 'traumatise' children... When mother-of-three Angela Rojas raised her objections about the book at a Playford Council meeting in Adelaide's northern suburbs in February, the images had to be blurred for video streaming. 'This book should be in a restricted area and treated like a restricted adult publication,' Ms Rojas told Sky News.   'If it's too sensitive for YouTube, too sensitive even to film and put on the news, because I'm sure you'd have to censor these images, why should it be unrestricted?'... Sky News Australia found the book is available in 36 public libraries across Australia, some holding multiple copies, and can be found at major booksellers such as Dymocks, Angus & Roberts and QBD Books."

Circe on X - "Anything the left considers to be a “banned book” has its own neat section at the front of every mainstream bookstore meanwhile anything the right considers to be a “banned book” costs upwards of $1K at some online retailer with user interface that hasn’t been updated since 1998"

Meme - Heath Taws @HeathTaws: "Tried to buy these books but the guy behind the counter said, "sorry, these are all banned.""
"BANNED BOOKS. TRENDING IN DYSTOPIAN FICTION"

Julianne Moore ‘stunned’ after Trump bans her children’s book Freckleface Strawberry - "Julianne Moore’s children’s book “Freckleface Strawberry” has been banned from military schools by the Trump administration, the actress has said... “As part of the review, books potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics as defined in the executive orders will be relocated to the professional staff collection for evaluation,” a department of defence education activity spokesman told CNN.  “During this period, access will be limited to professional staff.”  The Pentagon agency said that some books have been removed on a temporary basis as part of the review but none have been banned so far."
Left wing logic - a book being under review means it's banned. I guess this means that anyone who is charged with a crime has been found guilty

Wiretap Media on X - "REPORT: The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) is preparing to sue the Alberta Government for removing books in school libraries that depict child molestation and kids performing oral sex, calling it textbook censorship."

Alberta’s Book Ban Is a Blatant Act of Cultural Vandalism : r/canada - "Okay so, kids may see pornography on the internet, therefore we have to allow this book in school?  Why not allow pornography since they see it anyways? Why can't a kid bring a bunch of porn print outs too school to show his friends at lunch?"
"Yes, easy access to porn is a good reason to have books like this in junior high and high schools. Adolescents need to learn that most porn is just as fake as a car chase sequence in an action movie, and that requires access to educational materials that deal with sex in more realistic contexts."
"So you're saying that, yes, kids should be allowed to bring pornography to school and share it with friends?"
"This literally already happens."
Left wingers want to expose kids to pornography

Alberta’s Book Ban Is a Blatant Act of Cultural Vandalism : r/canada - "Your kids will access things without your knowledge. Were you ever a teenager before? Somehow you’re Making me Feel like you weren’t. Your teenage kids are allowed a degree of autonomy free from your influence. Seeing a picture of oral sex isn’t going to turn them into some Kind of deviant. I want my kids to be able to talk to me about anything. You’re just trying to control what everyone else is doing because you’re uncomfortable with homosexuality. "
"My kids will access things without my knowledge, therfore the school should provide them with a book where oral sex is depicted with a visible penis?  I'm not understanding the logic here. Should schools provides my children with everything they may want to access without my knowledge? What's the limit?"

ABC7 News on X - "A San Francisco bookstore will no longer carry the "Harry Potter" series due to author J.K. Rowling's political actions toward excluding transgender women from gendered spaces."
WindTalker on X - "Wasn’t banning books bad like 5 minutes ago?"

Meme "Uh-oh, looks like I got caught reading BANNED BOOKS!"  *Gender Queer. White Fragility. How to be an Antiracist*
"Oh, you're a fan of banned books too? Here's a couple that I can recommend!" *Camp of the Saints. Unintended Consequences. The Poor Man's JAMES BOND*
"OH MY GOD, I AM LITERALLY SHAKING! THIS DISGUSTING FAR-RIGHT PROPAGANDA NEEDS TO BE BANNED IMMEDIATELY!!"
"I AM ON FIFTEEN DIFFERENT TERROR WATCHLISTS"

Meme - "somebody told me my kids needed to read banned books. thought it was odd, but I went ahead and got them this"
"THE HOMOSEXUAL THREAT TO CIVILIZATION. A SPEECH BY HEINRICH HIMMLER. WITH SEVEN APPENDICES ROM OFFICIAL SOURCES REVEALING THE EXTENT OF THE HOMOSEXUAL PROBLEM IN MODERN SOCIETY. NEW TRANSLATION. ANNOTATION AND APPENDICES BY DR HERMANN HITZINGER"

60 Minutes on X - "Margaret Atwood, author of 64 books including “The Handmaid’s Tale,” has seen her work banned for content deemed overly sexual, morally corrupt, and anti-Christian."
Matt Walsh on X - "If by "banned" you mean "the book is available everywhere that books are sold and has been obsessively promoted by every major media outlet for decades and adapted into six seasons of a streaming show on Hulu and not actually banned anywhere in any form at all" then yeah the book has definitely been banned"

The Hidden Curriculum of Antizionism: What the Slogans Hide

The Hidden Curriculum of Antizionism: What the Slogans Hide

The scandal is not what antizionist syllabi teach. It’s what they have to hide.

In graduate school, the conclusions often arrived before the evidence. The texts were already chosen, the interpretations already implied, and the rooms had a temperature you learned to read fast. Occupation. Apartheid. Settler-colonialism. Resistance. These weren’t just assigned readings—they were the vocabulary of belonging. You used them or you were the collective sigh when you raised your hand. These terms were canonical, the syllabus was the scripture, and the professor was…well, I’m sure you’ve met some.

I used them. I was good at theory and I cared about justice, so of course I’m going to side with the colonized, the subaltern, the wretched of the earth. I knew Fayez Sayegh, Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi and Patrick Wolfe, and I felt like I was doing the serious, morally grounded work that was needed in our neo-liberal hegemony. I was, in the language of Philip Jackson, being educated in the hidden curriculum.

The Hidden Curriculum

Not the assigned texts. The unwritten rules. The things the room transmits without ever naming. The lesson underneath the lesson. Those intangible social norms, expectations, and values that influence your perspective. Jackson coined this term in Life in Classrooms (1968), after a B.F. Skinner-trained career of measuring children like lab rats. He attended a Stanford seminar on primates that made him realize he’d been studying kids the way researchers studied monkeys.

His student, Elliot Eisner, named its companion in 1979: the null curriculum. The subjects and authors who get buried because they complicate the lesson. The texts that are never assigned. The non-canonical works. The ones that complicate the trajectory of your arc. 

Every course has both the hidden and the null. I didn’t notice the hidden curriculum until I took courses that made students uncomfortable. Or, until I did. I remember giving a presentation on the horrors of the First Crusade in front of Muslim and Catholic students. Not as easy as it sounds. I took a course on American Religious history and the room got silent when I asked how the settlers could think America was so special, like it was some kind of garden of Eden. The silence was broken by a Mormon student.

I read a syllabus for one course, and could not help but ask the professor why the chips were stacked so tightly in favor of his perspective. He paused, “You know, you’re right. They do.” Seems he had never thought of it before.

The point I’m making is that sometimes the only way to see the unseen, is for others to make it obvious. I had never had an awakening to Jewish pain outside of my studies, until October 7th made it impossible to ignore.

And here is what I know—don’t need to be told, just know—what those rooms do to Jewish students. To be the student whose people’s right to exist as a nation is a question at the colloquium. Where Zionism is deployed as a synonym for evil. Where you understand, quickly and without ambiguity, that the room is not built for you. That your identity is the complication the curriculum cannot concede. We all saw what that environment eventually produced—the encampments, the chants, the faculty letters, the Jewish students who hid their Stars of David. This didn’t come from nowhere. It came from syllabi. From what got assigned and what didn’t. From classrooms like the ones I sat in. 

The Missing Syllabus

I started thinking: what would the other syllabus look like? The one I never got in graduate school or saw after the massacres. The one I never was assigned. I wanted to make the null curriculum visible. I want to compile the texts that assisted in my transition from antizionism.

The full syllabus is online, with a link at the end of this post.

Here’s what I built.

I started with a name. One that reminded me of an image. A horrible image. Amit Soussana. A forty-year-old lawyer from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, who was dragged from her home on October 7th. She fought several Hamas members in a field and there’s video of it. Only watch if you can handle it. Amit was held for fifty-five days. Chained by her ankle to the frame of a child’s bedroom, the walls covered in SpongeBob SquarePants posters.

Her guard, who called himself Muhammad, began asking about her sex life within days. He raped her at gunpoint. Afterward he cried and told her: “I’m bad, I’m bad, please don’t tell Israel.” She says that after the sexual assaults she would break down, but during them she wouldn’t cry. When asked by another hostage how she managed this, she said, “I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction.” In March 2024, she became the first released hostage to put her name and face to what Hamas had done to her. She received the International Women of Courage Award at the State Department. The National Organization of Women issued no statement. UN Women published no response. Organizations that had spent years building entire platforms on the principle of believing women, met Amit Soussana’s testimony with the one thing they had given her from the beginning: silence.

That silence would not have been discussed in any lecture I attended. I know because I attended them. And I know exactly why naming it would invite malaise. The theory that says “Zionists oppress and revolutionaries liberate”—doesn’t survive Amit Soussana. So she stays off the syllabus. She’s on mine, not hidden, not silent. 

The Null Curriculum

The next thing I pulled was the Hamas charter. Not a summary—the document. The charter of the governing entity that has controlled Gaza since 2007, that runs schools and courts and police and a military apparatus, quotes the Quran saying the Day of Judgment won’t come until Muslims fight and kill Jews. Not Zionists. Jews. Their 2017 update softened the language, but didn’t reject the original. Both are freely available online and neither takes but ten minutes to read.

Assigning Hamas’ charter requires explaining why you assigned it. In liberal academia, that explanation is the beginning of a very uncomfortable conversation—one that may end with your commitment to Palestinian liberation being questioned. So, often the charter stays off the syllabus. The movement it governs stays abstract and its stated goals remain unread. I’m not implying Hamas get portrayed positively, but it’s important to remember they were called a “resistance” after October 7, and praised by professors at Yale, Cornell, Virginia Tech, and unsurprisingly, Columbia. 

Then I found the Henry Jackson Society’s 2025 report on Hamas’ human shield strategy—what they called the “missing chapter” in all the UN and NGO analysis on Gaza. The number that stopped me was 367. Since October 7th, the UN has issued 367 reports on Gaza. In those 367, the phrase “human shields” appeared exactly four times—always as an Israeli “claim,” an “allegation,” an “unverified report.” Never a fact. Never a subject warranting investigation.

Meanwhile the UN issued more than ten reports critical of Israeli conduct in the same period. Four mentions versus ten reports. That ratio is egregious. One accused Israel of genocide without a single sentence about how Hamas actually fought the war. No mention of being embedded in hospitals, schools, mosques, residential buildings, or beneath Al-Shifa. No hospital director confessing on record that his staff were members of Hamas. 

Then I reached the heavy-hitter. BESA Center’s September 2025 study—led by Prof. Danny Orbach—documented a 500-km tunnel network with 5,700 shafts embedded inside civilian infrastructure. They found war-casualty data riddled with manipulation, that aid deliveries going into Gaza during most of the war exceeding pre-war levels, no evidence of an Israeli policy to target civilians, and that starvation claims were built on a misrepresented baseline figure the UN left unchallenged. These formed months of alarmist headlines, and quiet retroactive corrections buried months later. 

I kept going. The UN’s dashboard tracks daily aid flows throughout the war. 54,000 aid trucks entered Gaza in 2022 alone. I also found documented record of Hamas diverting that aid—selling portions on the black market at inflated prices, handing the rest to loyalists while other Gazans went hungry. The BBC’s Palestinian Gaza correspondent reported in August 2025 that the UN itself admitted 88% of the aid trucks it collected over recent months did not reach their destinations due to looting. This is in the UN’s own data. Raise it in a graduate seminar and you’re deflecting from Israeli culpability—as if documenting who steals the food is an argument against the people who are hungry. The standard curriculum teaches that Israel starves Gaza. The null curriculum is who eats what gets through. 

Then I found the money. Khaled Mashaal—current leader of Hamas — is reportedly worth between two and five billion dollars. Ismail Haniyeh, before his death, was estimated to hold a comparable fortune. Mousa Abu Marzouk, founding member and chairman, has been estimated at two to three billion. They negotiate ceasefire terms from five-star suites in Doha while the people they claim to love starve. President Mahmoud Abbas’s net worth has been reported at over $100 million. In 2012, the US House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing titled “Chronic Kleptocracy”—naming Abbas and his sons as the beneficiaries of hundreds of millions in diverted Palestinian Authority funds and USAID contracts. 

In 2012, the International Labour Organization—a UN agency—reported that Gaza’s tunnel trade had created “over 600 new millionaires.” In the academic spaces where antizionism functions, pointing to any of this is treated as deflection—a Zionist talking point. It’s a financial record. The standard curriculum teaches that Palestinian leadership represents its people. The null curriculum is what it actually does.

I then read the UN Watch report on UNRWA. It documented a Telegram group-chat with 3,000 of their workers. Thirty endorsed the October 7th massacre in real time. One woman called the hostage-takers heroes and wished them a safe return with their “booty.” Another wrote: “dying in the name of God is our most divine aspiration.” They found 150 staff sharing content glorifying Hamas, Hitler, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Israeli intelligence indicated that 12 percent of their UNRWA’s staff in Gaza—roughly 1,468 people—had ties to Hamas. A Canadian official was told by the head of UN Relief: “I am sure there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll.” Eighteen countries pulled their funding. The standard curriculum taught me that UNRWA is a humanitarian organization. The null curriculum is what its employees were saying while the bodies were still warm on October 7th.

To bring Ms. Soussana and reports like hers back, I grabbed the Dinah Project. Named for the biblical figure, the project documents sexual violence during the October 7th attacks. Rape at the Nova music festival, on the road to Kibbutz Re’im, in kibbutz homes, and in open fields. UN Rep. Pramila Patten submitted findings to the Security Council noting clear and convincing evidence of rape, sexualized torture, and cruel and degrading treatment of hostages. 

Hamas responded with a statement calling Soussana’s testimony “difficult to believe.” UN Women declined to formally condemn the attacks for weeks. I sat in seminars with people who called themselves feminists and I know—I know exactly—how this evidence would have been received. It would have been the same as the experiences as Danielle Ofek and Nataly Livsk, the women who started #Metoo_UN_less_UR_A_Jew. It’s an example of a culture saying to believe all women, and a curriculum that decides Israeli women are the exception. 

Lastly, I got to the peace offers. In 2000 at Camp David, Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat a Palestinian state on roughly 94 percent of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and a capital in East Jerusalem. Arafat said no and offered nothing in return. At Taba in 2001, Israel improved the terms. Still no. In 2008, Ehud Olmert put forward what many analysts considered the most generous proposal in the conflict’s history. Mahmoud Abbas did not respond. I’ve spoken about this before and been told the offers had conditions and the context was complicated. It’s always complicated when the conclusion is inconvenient. The standard curriculum taught me that Israeli’s block peace. The null curriculum is the record of who walked away from the table, when, without a counteroffer, and in silence.

This is the syllabus I would never have received.

The annotated syllabus with full sources and live links is here: https://thenullcurriculumsyllabus.neocities.org/

What’s missing is the part where I pretend none of this exists, so the room stays comfortable.

Links - 21st June 2026 (1 - US Schools)

Meme - "In Finland, charging fees for tuition is illegal, which means rich kids have to mix with normal kids, which means rich families had to make sure the school their kid went to was good which meant the rich were prompted to invest in public schools. Finland, take a bow"
Private education is not prohibited in Finland - "Since August 2020, more than 18,000 users have shared on social media claiming that private education in Finland is “forbidden” , “eliminated” or “abolished” . In September 2021, it circulated again, but it is false: Finland does have private schools. What is prohibited is basic education for profit."
Left wingers love control and hate choice (the unanimity in the comments was notable). They love fake news too

Nicki Neily on X - "ICYMI: @DefendingEd obtained internal NEA documents showing the union’s upcoming training doesn’t focus on academics, but on attacking Republicans as “racist and transphobic,” pushing race-class-gender narratives, and promoting gender-transition guides for staff."
Poor student results are proof that they need to spend even more on education

Ohio school under fire for material prompting kids write about sex - "An Ohio mayor is asking all five school board members of his town to resign or face possible criminal charges over high school course material that he said a judge called "child pornography."  Hudson, Ohio Mayor Craig Shubert made the statement during a board of education meeting after multiple parents complained about the content of some writing prompts contained in a book called "642 Things to Write About" provided to high school students  enrolled in a college credit course called Writing in the Liberal Arts II.  Parents said there was a prompt that asked students to "write a sex scene you wouldn't show your mom," and another which said "rewrite the sex scene from above into one that you'd let your mom read." Another prompt asked students to drink a beer and describe how it tastes. Parents said they felt these writing prompts and others were not appropriate for high school students.  One speaker said he was "appalled" by the content and requested that cameras be put into the classroom so parents could monitor what is being taught to their children. Another speaker said the material was "disgusting" and that it amounted to "grooming.""

Connecticut school district asks eighth-graders to share their sexual desires in assignment - "A school district in Enfield, Connecticut was left with pie on its face after asking eighth-graders to share their sexual desires in the form of pizza toppings.  'Now that you know this metaphor for sex, let's explore your preferences!' explained the instruction pamphlet distributed to students in a recent health class at John F. Kennedy Middle School.  'Draw and color your favorite type of pizza,' it added. 'What's your favorite style of pizza? Your favorite toppings? What are your pizza no-nos? Now mirror these preferences in relation to sex!'  As if that wasn't explicit enough, the instructions offered some suggestions.  'Here are some examples:  Likes: Cheese = Kissing.  Dislikes: Olives = Giving oral.'"

Meme - Frank McCormick @CBHeresy: "One thing I’ve realized after working with teachers for 12 years is that it’s very hard to get them to commit to political or ideological neutrality in the classroom because:
A. They view teaching as an inherently political act intended to turn students into political units (activists/“change agents.”)
B. They attach moral value to their beliefs, and thus view the proliferation of those beliefs as a moral obligation.
C. They do not recognize particular beliefs as political or ideological, and believe they’re “just teaching truth.”
D. When trying to be balanced, requiring students to compare two sources or opinions, they engineer- purposefully or unwittingly- the lesson to bring students to certain conclusions."
*French cartoon of life in the year 2000 with students all listening via headphones to books thrown into a hand-cranked machine*

Stunted Capital on X - "Some K-12 schools used to group kids by ability based on test scores to pursue the most reasonable amount of academic rigor for every child It was mostly abandoned due to black kids disproportionately testing into the below average groups Everyone should read "Hobson v. Hansen and the Decline of D.C. Schools" By Jack Despain Zhou"

Niels Hoven 🐮 on X - "Yes, grouping kids by ability is one of those obvious educational interventions that shows positive results every time we try it.  Students are happier, teachers are happier, and test scores go up.  Naturally, it's opposed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the National Education Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, and many other groups who drive education policy"

SPENCER on X - "idk why we treat academics & sports differently"

Michael Druggan on X - "If lowering gaps at all cost is the goal we should start hitting the smart kids in the head with a hammer"
Niels Hoven 🐮 on X - "Modern education policy is basically “how do we hit the smart kids in the head with a hammer, legally?”"
Niels Hoven 🐮 on X - "Since roughly the 1990’s, the main goal of education policy has been to “close the achievement gap”. When high achieving students excel, they grow the achievement gap, and so education policymakers look for ways to hold them back"

wanye on X - "Education is such a mess, because the actual practitioners of education don’t understand that basically the entire point of education is to widen gaps. That’s literally what education is. You take a mixed group of people who can only get so far on their own and then you give them all the tools they need to excel and the smartest and most capable people in the group are going to use those tools to pull away from everybody else. That’s literally what education is."

Meme - Rachael Jefferson, PhD: "Ability grouping feels intuitive, but decades of research shows it often widens gaps rather than supports learning. Mixed-ability classrooms can do this through flexible grouping, targeted feedback, and open projects (as you suggest). It is a wicked problem though!"
Niels Hoven @NielsHoven: "Yes, that is literally the point. We should allow smart kids to excel instead of holding them back to the lowest common denominator They will achieve more if we let them"

John Rich🇺🇸 on X - "PARENTS: Start dropping lawsuits on your schools, and on the actual, specific individuals at that school who are targeting your kids. READ THIS👇 Exposing children to obscene or pornographic material is very often considered a form of child sexual abuse, child endangerment, or a specific offense such as “exhibiting obscenity/harmful material to a minor.” The exact criminal charge depends on the jurisdiction, the age of the child, the nature of the material, and the intent or context. Federal law: 18 U.S.C. § 1470 makes it a federal crime to knowingly transfer obscene material to a person under 16 via any means (including the internet), punishable by up to 10 years."

Meme - "Why is talking sexually at work considered sexual harassment, but talking about sexuality to kids in elementary school considered essential?"

Emil Kirkegaard on X - "A reminder that educational interventions do not generally work.  They sometimes appear to work because researchers cheat with the analyses (p-hacking, fraud etc.). However, occasionally, 3rd parties do planned studies with large samples. Given this high quality evidence, the results are basically 0. Almost nothing works. This actual gold standard evidence sets the prior for every other random intervention that no one has done an actually rigorous evaluation of (so far)."

Libs of TikTok on X - "Minneapolis Schools SUED over alleged ANTI-WHITE DISCRIMINATION  The DOJ has launched a lawsuit against Minneapolis Public Schools over a policy that shields "teachers of color" from layoffs and requires the district to rehire them first.  The lawsuit also claims that members of an organization called "Black Men Teach Fellows" were given priority for special benefits.  UNREAL"

Mike Solana on X - "imagine paying $50 billion for public schools. they're about as dangerous as the locale juvenile detention center, and half the kids can't read. every year you're told their failure is your fault, because you don't give the communist teacher's union enough money."
Palmer Luckey on X - "The NYC Department of Education spends more on education than Japan's Ministry of Education spends on the entire country of Japan."
Clearly, the problem is they don't spend enough mouney

Meme - late stage capitalist @bentboolean: "Has anyone tried to figure out where the money goes? My kid's class has 30 kids, the teacher might make 150k all in.... Where does the other 1.1mm go?"
Jessica Riedl @JessicaBRiedI: "Assuming an average of 2 school-age kids per family, that's enough money for NYC to instead hire 450,000 recent college graduates and give each family a full-time, in-home school tutor at an annual salary of $70,000 plus health care, school supplies, etc."
"New York City Public Schools Spend $42,000 Per Student Annually Amid Low Proficiency and High Absenteeism. New York City public schools spend $42,000 per pupil annually, the highest in the U.S. Only 56% of students are proficient in reading and math, with 35% chronic absenteeism. Elite schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science perform well, contrasting with overall system performance."

Only a third of NYC 4th graders deemed 'proficient' in math as Big Apple students lag behind state, national averages: test scores - "Two-thirds of New York City fourth graders are not proficient in math and even fewer proved proficient in reading, the “Nation’s Report Card” released Wednesday shows – despite the Empire State funneling more money into its schools than any other state in the nation.  The abysmal results reported in the national exam officially known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress came to light as New York school districts are spending a whopping $89 billion this academic year.  And across the five boroughs, public schools spent an average of $21,112 per student in fiscal year 2023-24, though dozens of schools shelled out a large chunk more – up to $60,000 a student, records show... The shockingly low scores are compounded by the fact that New York state spends more money than other states on nearly everything — teachers’ salaries, benefits and pensions, school construction, services for immigrants or non-English speakers and even electrifying school buses, according to an analysis by the Citizens Budget Commission."
Clearly, this is because of racism and the fact that they don't spend enough, and it's all Republicans' faults. Time to mock red states and spend even more money on teacher salaries

New York’s Class-Size Law is Wreaking Havoc - "In September 2022, Governor Kathy Hochul signed S960, a bill limiting the size of classes in New York City public schools. The law phases in class-size limits—20 students for grades K–3; 23 students for grades 4–8; and 25 students for high school—over six years.  Fast forward to today: the implementation of the class-size law is causing predictable disruptions in Gotham. Parents and experts warned from the beginning that the law would be expensive, hard to implement, and generate, rather than reduce, inequality. Three years in, their fears remain valid. Smaller class sizes mean more classes—and more teachers. New York City’s Independent Budget Office (IBO) estimated that the new law would cost the city between $1.6 billion and $1.9 billion annually to hire the number of additional instructors required to comply with the law. This would make the city’s public schools, already projected to spend more than $42,000 per pupil, even more inefficient.  And that’s before construction costs. Most public schools lack space to accommodate new classrooms and will have to expand their existing buildings, or erect new ones, to comply with the law. The Class Size Working Group’s minority report estimates that fully implementing the law will require $17 billion to $22 billion in school-construction costs. Even if the city could afford these expenses, it’s unclear where schools would find qualified instructors, given Gotham’s teacher shortage.   The law’s most troubling effect will be to worsen inequality. Schools with the largest class sizes are typically high-performing and in the highest demand. Reducing these schools’ seats gives students fewer opportunities to attend high-performing schools. The law does nothing for low-performing schools, which typically serve low-income students and are already under-enrolled...   In School District 25 in Queens, the Community Education Council passed a resolution to remove all pre-K and 3K classes from the district’s elementary schools to comply with the law. The resolution suggests that their only other option would have been to repurpose rooms currently used for arts, science, or libraries...   As then-chancellor David Banks warned in a 2023 interview with the Daily News: “If you’re going to prioritize the budget for class size, that means you’re going to have to deprioritize the budget for other things, which could be after-school programming or arts programming or mental health services or a whole range of things that aren’t about opening new classrooms and hiring new teachers.”   Mayor Adams initially opposed the class-size law, but Albany and the United Federation of Teachers eventually forced his hand. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has spoken in the law’s favor and voted for it as a state assemblyman in 2022. If he pushes forward with full implementation and disrupts the city’s most popular public schools, he will inevitably face backlash from parents and educators."
This doesn't stop the people obsessed with class size

Thread by @StatisticUrban on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Blue states tend to do better in K-12 education because they are wealthier and have higher rates of parents with tertiary education.  But if you adjust for those ingrained advantages, blue state performance diminishes, and the south broadly emerges as leaders.
Obviously not universal - many blue states retain a top 20 score, two in the top 10.  But it's underwhelming to say the least. For worse or better, many education reforms undertaken in the past 15 years in blue states have been duds, while the playbook states like Louisiana and Mississippi followed has yieled incredible results.
Methodology
Here's just flat raw scores if you prefer.
And you may compare with funding."

Thread by @Austen on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Mississippi switched to a phonics/science of reading curriculum and began requiring that students who weren't reading at grade level be held back.  Worked like a charm.  California Teachers Union is vehemently in opposition of doing the same thing, killing the bill in CA.
There are two near-universal truths when it comes to K12 education in the United States:
1. The research on what works is clear and empirical, and has said the same thing for a decade
2. Teachers Unions vehemently oppose doing what the research suggests
It really is a tragedy. The Unions are 100% to blame. It's an IQ test we're failing year after year."
By sabotaging children's performance, left wingers can lobby for ever increasing funding. It's brilliant.

Meme - Kane @kane: "Please bro just one more tax will fix it trust me bro"
"California: Change in Spending and Scores since 2013
Spending grew 102% to ~$18,600 per pupil.
Math 8th grade scores fell during the pandemic and are continuing to decline alongside recovery investments.
Reading 4th grade scores fell through the decade even as spending increased."
John Collins @Logically_JC: "So many of our problems could be fixed by properly funding public education."
Clearly, this is Trump's fault and they need to spend even more money to counter the pernicious effects of white supremacy
Left wingers think and/or claim all social problems are because you don't spend enough money. They just want a huge state

Daniel Buck, “Youngest Old Man in Ed Reform” on X - "Oh this is hilarious. Sad but hilarious. This study finds (and others confirm) that a teacher earning a graduate degree has a NEGATIVE effect on student achievement Attending a graduate school of education literally makes teachers WORSE at their job"
HOW AND WHY DO TEACHER CREDENTIALS MATTER FOR STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT?
Clearly, teachers need not one but two graduate degrees so they can teach better

Wall Street Apes on X - "This woman’s 6 year old son “expressed conservative values” in his classroom  The teacher created a certificate for him that said “Most likely to become a Dictator” and presented it to him in front of his entire class while classmates called him a “Naziphile”  The indoctrination taking place in our education system is a national emergency"

Thread by @arctotherium42 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In 2022, 45% of high schoolers polled say they were taught that "America is built on stolen land" in class at school, and another 22% heard it from an adult there. Students taught all of the "critical social justice" (CSJ) concepts were in fact more likely to agree with them; among those taught "America is built on stolen land" 73% agreed. Among those students taught 5 CSJ concepts, 75% believed whites are responsible for the inferior social position of black people and 44% support preferential hiring and promotion of blacks. Among whites, 58% felt guilty for this. Members of all races felt less comfortable with criticizing a black classmate with more CSJ concepts taught in school. Anyways, teaching students in public schools that the country is illegitimate is crazy and reminds me of the late Russian Empire. media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/…"
The left wing cope is that there's no indoctrination at school - this is just them learning facts

Book Review: ‘The Cradle of Citizenship,’ by James Traub - The New York Times - "It is hard to think of a period in American history when there were not angry controversies over public education. Still, by any measure conflicts in America today, over everything from history curriculums to school library collections, have become wild and destructive. At bottom, people still ask the right questions — about what kind of country we are and what kind of citizens we want our children to be. But the screamers at school board meetings and the national politicians riling up anxious parents are hardly setting a good example for our children. In the midst of all the cannon fire, it is good to have a cleareyed, unflappable observer like James Traub, the author of “The Cradle of Citizenship,” an illuminating portrait of America’s current education landscape... he saw few examples of overt partisanship from instructors in the classroom, apart from a Minnesota science teacher with a Black Lives Matter poster and a Gay Pride banner on her classroom walls. As in most organizations, the people on the ground were just trying to get the job done while dodging directives raining down from above. But that’s where the good news ends. The real crisis of civics education, Traub discovered, is not that students are learning about 1619 rather than 1776, or the reverse. It is that so many are learning nothing at all. And here he lays responsibility at the feet of the American educational establishment, which has, in the words of one scholar, been turning the “meat of academic subjects into meatloaf.” One of the peculiarities of the American educational system, compared with those in other democracies, is that most public school districts prefer hiring graduates with degrees in education rather than in specific academic subjects like history and physics. This leads to a greater focus on the methods of teaching, expressed in jargon phrases like “inquiry-based learning,” than on acquiring particular knowledge. Traub found a real allergy among public school educators to memorization of vocabulary, chronology and narrative — the elemental material out of which reality-based opinions and arguments can be formed... In other states, too many teachers just seem to have abdicated their responsibilities out of despair, convinced that their students are no longer capable of reading whole books or remembering what they read. “History has been pushed to the side within social studies because there’s too much reading and writing,” as one frustrated teacher in Illinois puts it, on the verge of tears. “That creates too much stress, and it makes the kids feel bad about themselves.” If students do want to engage, their dependence on social media simplifies their views. As Traub discovers, their credulousness toward online sources renders them dependent on present-day culture war influencers whose historical claims they are unprepared to challenge. Against this tide, teachers struggle to get their students to see how the world of the past could be both alien and instructive in a way that might stoke their skepticism. Not all state-funded schools are alike. About a quarter million American children currently attend so-called “classical” schools, many of them charter schools that receive public money but are privately run. In these schools, memorization and recitation are prized, as are classic texts from the Western canon, like Plato’s “Republic” and Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” Many liberals see red when classical charter schools are mentioned, because of their perceived religious bias and a feeling that such schools drain resources from less advantaged ones. One senses that Traub shared their concerns. But as his book progresses, these schools begin to appear as inspiring examples of more rigorous and civic-minded education for many young Americans... In a ninth grade Western Civilization class, children who had started studying Latin in third grade were reading and intelligently discussing an essay by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. In a medieval history class at another classical charter school in Phoenix, one girl argued that St. Anselm must have been more popular in his time than Thomas Aquinas since Anselm believed, as Traub writes, “that faith preceded reason." She was in seventh grade. “It was in classical schools,” Traub observes, “rather than mainstream ones, that I had most often heard the kind of reflective discussion that civic education seeks to foster.” Yes, a large part of the curriculum is devoted to old books. But “if you can speak thoughtfully about ‘The Nicomachean Ethics,’” he remarks, “you can do so about the fairness of our tax system.”... whatever model is used should impart “a solid foundation of linguistic skills, historical knowledge and habits of reflection” and offer “an alternative to the consumerist, vocational, instrumental culture of today’s public education.”"
An education degree actually makes you less good at teaching, so. Left wing theory is not the same as real life practice

Geoffrey Miller on X - "American 'Schools of Education' teach mostly outdated, wildly inaccurate theories about human nature & childhood learning that were debunked decades ago in real behavioral sciences. Often worse than useless."

Meme - The Kids Are Not Alright: "Education has been replaced with activism."
Paut Rossi, Paleoliberal @pauldrossi: ""Kindergarteners are natural social justice warriors." "If we just build upon the mindset of a kindergartener... you can get them to do fabulous things in the social justice realm.""
"Foundations of the work
DIVERSITY
EQuITY
INCLUSION
JUSTICE
The first three terms are the standard. My favorite part of the year is when we talk no just about injustices, but what we can do about it. Kindergarteners are natural social justice warriors
And it's absolutely truly fascinating."
The cope is that this is not indoctrination - just teaching them to be decent human beings

Minnesota middle school removes F from its grading system and will allow students to retake tests - "Students at a Minnesota school will no longer be seeing an 'F' on test papers - no matter how badly they do - and they could be allowed to retake tests. Sunrise Park Middle School in White Bear Lake released a YouTube video this week detailing its new grading system which it says, in part, helps fight systemic racism... Grades also will not be increased or decreased over behaviors, attitude, tardiness, and whether the assignment was turned in late or on time... In the past, the school has made headlines for allowing students to choose how much privilege different social groups have."

Right Angle News Network on X - "BREAKING - A disturbing new trend is emerging across the country, showing leftist teachers guiding very young children, some no older than kindergarteners, in protests against ICE and President Trump."

Black Rebel on X - "Police locate a juvenile driver accused in a hit-and-run that injured a student and instead of keeping kids in class, Fremont Public Schools had them out at a demonstration while administrators “Supervised.” Let that sink in. Kids go to school to LEAR(N) not to be marched outside for activism."

Why Higher Ed Won’t Look Itself in the Mirror

When left wingers use the term "Critical", they mean "Critical Theory", not "Critical Thinking":

Opinion | Why Higher Ed Won’t Look Itself in the Mirror

"I traveled to Washington for a meeting of American education scholars. The opening panel focused — appropriately enough — on Trump’s threats to university funding, free speech on campus, and more. Then it was time for questions, and I raised my hand. I said that I agreed with all the critiques of Trump, but I also wondered what those of us who work in higher education might have done — or not done — to bring about this awful moment. Could we use it to look in the mirror, I asked, and not just to circle the wagons?

Dead silence. Then another member of the audience spoke up. “I just wanted to say that I was deeply offended by Professor Zimmerman’s use of the term ‘circle the wagons,’ which connotes a hateful history of Native American displacement and genocide,” she said, as I remember it. More awkward silence. Finally, the moderator of the panel interjected with something along the lines of: “Thank you for reminding us that we need to be careful in the language that we use to describe others.” So the panel began with a diatribe about Donald Trump’s assault on free speech and it concluded with a warning to watch our words.

For the past 75 years, academics have been telling a story about how we enhance democratic dialogue and understanding. Yet we don’t really believe it. If we did, the moderator would have asked the objecting scholar to say more about why she bridled at my phraseology. Then the moderator would have asked me to reply, and eventually we might have gotten around to the substance of my question, which concerned the delicate matter of what degree of introspection, what sort of critical self-examination, might be required of professors and teachers amid the current crisis. None of that happened, of course. The moderator drew the panel to a moralistic and satisfyingly evasive close, and we all went out to lunch. 

“Out to lunch” is where much of higher education is — oblivious about how we got here and how we might change course. Yes, Trump represents a dagger at our heart; and yes, we must join hands to resist him. But long before he came to power, growing numbers of Americans — and not just Republicans — were starting to see higher education as something of a scam. We charge ever-higher sticker prices for degrees of increasingly dubious worth, even as we proclaim our commitment to the public good. To make good on that ideal, we cannot simply circle the wagons. We need to look in the mirror...

Truman received a pair of high-profile reports that defined the contours of American higher education for the next half a century. The first, Science: The Endless Frontier, called on the federal government to subsidize university research that would improve Americans’ health, national security, and standard of living. The second, Higher Education for American Democracy, urged the government to help people attend college. That would create a more equal society, as well as a more virtuous one: Bringing greater numbers of students into higher education, it would also foster the skills and the understanding that good citizenship demanded.

Universities would receive considerable autonomy in deciding how to use federal dollars and in exchange they would provide the technical know-how and the democratic spirit to sustain the nation. Education scholars call this the “academic social contract.”...

When did the contract start to unravel? One common story links it to the student demonstrations and social upheavals of the 1960s, which soured taxpayers — especially those on the right — against higher education. Ronald Reagan won the governorship of California in 1966 by pledging to “clean up the mess at Berkeley,” which had exploded in protest two years earlier. (He also railed against campus “hippies,” whom Reagan famously described as “someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.”) Yet tuition remained free for in-state students until 1970, when California instituted a nominal $150 fee. The big nationwide tuition increases did not kick in until the 1980s, as state legislatures started to slash their higher-education budgets. After Reagan ascended to the White House, the federal government reduced student aid by 25 percent over five years.

Yet the universities were backtracking on their side of the bargain, too. Despite the Truman-era promise to educate young people for democracy, universities eliminated core courses designed to introduce students to the liberal traditions of Western thought; in some quarters the West itself was imagined as a source of oppression rather than liberation. Colleges also cut back on distribution requirements, which had forced students to take classes in a wide range of disciplines in what used to be described as “Gen Ed.” Now each student would choose their curricular adventure: They were paying their own way, so they also got to select their own courses. 

At the same time, higher education created systems that rewarded faculty research and downgraded undergraduate instruction. Any professorial effort in the classroom meant less time in the laboratory or the library, where careers were won or lost. That was already apparent in 1947, when the Higher Education for American Democracy report called on professors across the disciplines to teach and model the habits of democracy...

The report also demanded that every professor receive rigorous training in how to teach... most professors still receive almost no formal preparation for these tasks. To get a Ph.D., you must spend six to eight years mastering a field and making an original contribution to it. But at the University of Pennsylvania, where I work, teaching assistants receive three days of training before they are thrown to the undergraduate wolves.

Professors cannot fulfill their obligations to their students — and to our democracy — if they are not deeply committed to educating them. That means exposing them to a wide range of ideas, which was once the heart of the liberal ideal. But no longer. In a recent study, the political scientist Jon A. Shields and two colleagues surveyed course syllabi to see if professors who assigned Edward Said’s Orientalism also asked students to read Ian Buruma’s and Avishai Margalit’s Occidentalism or other critiques of Said. They also looked to see whether teachers teaching The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander’s now-canonical account of racism in criminal justice, also assigned scholars who took issue with Alexander, such as the Yale Law School professor James Forman Jr. or the Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey. Shields’ conclusion was sad and altogether predictable: These kinds of pairings, these efforts at fairness and complication, are extremely rare.

Despite our rhetorical commitment to “critical thinking,” we typically present one side of an issue — the left-wing side, almost always — and call it a day. Such a practice is not simply a reflection of political bias, although it is surely that. It is also a mark of bad teaching.

Professors generally refuse to admit any of this, which compounds the problem. We are like little children who close their eyes in the hopes that nobody can see them. That was apparent during the fateful testimony by three college presidents in December 2023 before a congressional committee investigating antisemitism on campuses following the Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza. Asked whether calls for genocide would be protected speech, the presidents answered — correctly — that it depends on the context.

But here is what they did not say: Universities have not defended this principle consistently. At Harvard, for example, the eminent evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven was effectively pushed out for saying that there are a multiplicity of genders but only two sexes: male and female. “In what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?” Harvard president Claudine Gay was asked. She replied that Harvard supports “constructive dialogue, even on the most complex and divisive issues.” The Hooven episode proved the opposite, of course.

When Gay was asked whether Harvard prepared its professors to engage students in that dialogue, she dissembled still further. “We devote significant resources to training our faculty in that pedagogical skill and prioritizing that in our recruiting and hiring,” she said. Really? I have been a professor for three decades, and I have never seen a hiring decision or a tenure decision that hinged on teaching ability or accomplishments. Nor have I witnessed any required pedagogical training for faculty.

We all have Centers on Teaching and Learning, which began in the 1960s in response to student protests about poor instruction. But the centers cannot force anyone to participate in their programming, and they certainly cannot reward good teachers or penalize bad ones. If we truly valued teaching, we wouldn’t need a separate unit of the university that was devoted to it. Designed to elevate instruction, the centers demonstrate our low estimation of it. Ditto for teaching awards, another legacy of the 1960s: Everyone knows you can make more money by finishing your book — and getting promoted to the next salary rung — than you can via a one-off prize...

I am also mortified that our own institutions have done such a poor job in upholding the values that Trump is undermining. The big question is whether we can rediscover them, and how.

In Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. Most of my colleagues aren’t there yet. The trauma of Trump is too fresh, too raw, too painful. When a group is under attack, its initial impulse will be to defend itself. Thus, everything our team says is right and everything the other team says is wrong. Mocking the idea that universities are biased against conservatives, the American Association of University Professors — our most august academic organization — recently posted that “fascism generally doesn’t do great under peer review.” In other words: The reason we have so few Republican professors is because they are brownshirts in disguise. We do not have to engage or debate them; indeed, we must not engage or debate them.

As an analysis of the views of people with whom liberals disagree, this is shameful. Our interlocutors may be wrong, but that does not make them evil. And this kind of condescending dismissal is also a terrific way to avoid the hard questions about our own complicity in the degradation of the university...

We know that growing numbers of Americans have lost faith in us. And so we tell ourselves that they are racist, or anti-intellectual, or so blinded by the Trump cult that they cannot see how good we really are. And we imagine that anyone who doubts us must be on his side. This is what conservatives mean when they talk about Trump Derangement Syndrome: It prevents us from thinking straight. It is a cognitive impairment nearly as obscene as Trump himself. But surely we can circle the wagons against him while continuing to look at ourselves in the mirror. Or maybe not so surely — but we must try...

The big problem in higher education is not our scientific-research apparatus, which was the envy of the world before Trump took a sledgehammer to it. It is our abandonment of the ideal that propelled us to build up universities in the first place: the cultivation of citizens. Students come to college for all kinds of reasons: to have fun, to get a job, to find a mate. But they generally do not come here to become better citizens in a democracy, as the report to Truman envisioned they would. 

What would it mean to reconstitute our universities around that goal? Several universities — including my own — are developing new core courses for first-year students that explore the history and the challenges of democratic government, alongside other fundamental themes in the humanities. Other institutions have established programs around civic engagement and “dialogue across difference,” which has become something of a cliché at the Trump-era university. And over 100 academic leaders — calling themselves College Presidents for Civic Preparedness — have partnered with the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation) to create new classes and other campus initiatives to “prepare the next generation of well-informed, productively engaged, and committed citizens.” This is all fine and good — indeed, it is great — but it also feels a bit like our Centers for Teaching and Learning: If we embraced our civic purpose fully and honestly, we would not need to create special courses and initiatives to enhance it.

Nor would we need separate schools of civic thought...

There is no organization called College Presidents for Teaching Preparedness, because we do not prepare people to teach in our colleges. That needs to change if we want to make good on our democratic charge. Every department that produces new faculty members should have a set of required courses devoted to the instruction of that discipline. And every professor’s teaching — like their research — should be judged by their peers. Student evaluations are important, but they are not enough. I have taught at Penn for nine years, and nobody has observed me in the classroom. I could be doing anything — or nothing.

We also need a set of institutional rankings around teaching, so that students and their families can make informed choices about where to go to college. When we survey Americans and ask them what makes for a good university, they’ll often point to teaching quality. But there is no way for them to know which institutions promote teaching excellence in their classrooms. It is wonderful that many colleges are reviving their curricula to address citizenship and democracy, but without skilled and informed teachers, curricula alone are unlikely to make much of a difference. 

Effective teaching resembles a workable democracy in that it is premised on free and open exchange. And if you think we have protected and nourished that value at our colleges and universities, you haven’t been paying attention. The current academic culture of fear, timidity, and conformity is inimical to both education and democracy. Trump has ramped up that fear, but he certainly did not create it. We created it. It is up to us, therefore, to undo it."  

California Ethnic Studies Curriculum Revives Aztec Religion

From 2021. Apparently the First Amendment only means schools can't sponsor Christian prayer. It doesn't mean students can't be made to worship other gods (while the indoctrination project has stalled... for now, the attempt is still very revealing).

 

California Ethnic Studies Curriculum Revives Aztec Religion | National Review
Apparently, for the sake of the state's schoolchildren, we need to set the record straight on the blood-soaked worship of ancient deities.

T he Board of Education in California recently voted unanimously to approve an Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum for use in all of the state’s public schools. As our editorial pointed out on the day the vote was taken, this curriculum is “probably the most radical, polemical, and ideologically loaded educational document ever offered up for public consideration in the free world.” It’s a purpose-built program of indoctrination into the worst kind of tribal politics — a project of social engineering designed to erase the unique personal distinctiveness of the human being and remake each of us into avatars of our immutable characteristics. The knowledge that entire generations of Californians will soon be catechized in the dogmas of such a bleak and thoroughly political gospel is almost too grievous to bear.

As I noted a few weeks ago, the most astonishing part of the curriculum is the section that deals with religion:

Students are to be taught that white Christian settlers committed “theocide” against indigenous tribes when they arrived in the New World by murdering Native American gods and replacing them with the Christian God. According to the curriculum, this replacement ushered in a regime defined by “coloniality, dehumanization, and genocide,” and the “explicit erasure and replacement of holistic Indigeneity and humanity.” But all is not lost, we are told. For students will learn that they have the power and the responsibility to build a social order defined by “countergenocide,” which will eventually supplant the last vestiges of colonial Christianity and pave the way for the “regeneration of indigenous epistemic and cultural futurity.”

The curriculum presents the pagan gods of the Aztec empire as worthier objects of study and veneration than Jesus of Nazareth. This presentation does not rest at the level of theory or academic inquiry. As Christopher F. Rufo has observed, teachers are encouraged by the authors of the curriculum to lead their students in an “ethnic studies community chant,” which takes the form of worship offered up to these deities:

Students first clap and chant to the god Tezkatlipoka — whom the Aztecs traditionally worshipped with human sacrifice and cannibalism — asking him for the power to be “warriors” for “social justice.” Next, the students chant to the gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totek, seeking “healing epistemologies” and “a revolutionary spirit.” Huitzilopochtli, in particular, is the Aztec deity of war and inspired hundreds of thousands of human sacrifices during Aztec rule. Finally, the chant comes to a climax with a request for “liberation, transformation, [and] decolonization,” after which students shout “Panche beh! Panche beh!” in pursuit of ultimate “critical consciousness.”

Even a passing knowledge of Aztec history raises serious questions about this ritual (a passing knowledge of the First Amendment raises even more, but that’s a different matter). None, though, is more important than the question of what, precisely, has brought these deities back to life after so many centuries of slumber. Why do teachers and administrators in California want to revive these Aztec cults and set them favorably against Christianity?

We can’t ask this question properly — let alone answer it — without taking at least a cursory look at Aztec history and searching for the virtues that California’s Board of Education thinks it has found in the cults of these Mesoamerican deities.

The principal place of worship in the Aztec empire was the Templo Mayor in the city of Tenochtitlan, which was made up of twin pyramids, one dedicated to Huitzilopochtli, god of the sun, and the other to Tlaloc, the god of rain. Like all the Aztec gods, Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc had an insatiable appetite for human sacrifice. The priests of Huitzilopochtli would appease their patron deity by laying out a sacrificial victim on a stone at the apex of the god’s pyramid, carving out said victim’s heart (while he or she was still alive), and then rolling the body down the side of the pyramid, at the base of which it was then dismembered and either disposed of or eaten. Post-conquest sources report that at the reconsecration of this pyramid in 1487, about 80,400 people were sacrificed in this way over the course of just four days. Even historians who regard this number as an exaggeration concede that the victim tally was probably still in the tens of thousands.

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.

Tlaloc was an even less attractive figure. He had a particular predilection for the sacrifice of children. The remains of more than 40 boys and girls were discovered at the excavation site of the great pyramid, most bearing the marks of severe and prolonged torture. This was to be expected given that the Aztec pictorial codices that have come down to us invariably show the children crying before being sacrificed. The priests of Tlaloc believed the tears of innocent children to be particularly pleasing to the god, and they took great care to ensure that their little victims were crying before and throughout the ceremony so that the smoke of the sacrificial fire would carry their tears up to the god above at the moment of death. The ritual began with the bones of the children being broken, their hands or their feet burned, and carvings etched into their flesh. They were then paraded before the celebrants of the ritual while crying. Insufficient tears from the children were believed to result in insufficient rains for the crops that year, so no brutality was spared. At the end of it all, the mutilated victims were burned alive.

But Jesus called the children to him and said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”

Tezcatlipoca, who also makes an appearance in the new Californian catalogue of venerable deities, was thought to be the most powerful of the Aztec gods. He held sway over darkness, night, sorcery, and witchcraft. He also had it within his power to disrupt the social comity and felicity of the gods themselves and was, for that reason, particularly to be feared. He was worshipped with many different forms of sacrifice. One of these involved dressing the victim in splendid warrior regalia and then tying him to a stake or a wall. Aztec warriors would then “battle” with him in a mocking and derisory manner, drawing this ritual of humiliation and torture out so as to entertain the god and themselves for as long as possible.

And when they had platted a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand: and they bowed the knee before him, and mocked him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” And they spit upon him, and took the reed, and smote him on the head. And after that they had mocked him, they took the robe off from him, and put his own raiment on him, and led him away to crucify him. 

These are the deities to whom the Christian god owes theological reparations in the eyes of California’s education establishment. Italicized passages from the Christian scriptures have been interspersed above so that readers can judge for themselves which of the two religions is better characterized by “coloniality, dehumanization, and genocide.” I have discussed just the three most prominent Aztec gods, but the reader inclined to follow up with his or her own research will find in the entire pantheon of Mesoamerican deities not a single redeemable characteristic.

It was long thought by historians of an anticolonial bent that the conquistadors greatly exaggerated their accounts of Aztec cruelty for polemical purposes. This is no longer the case. Ample documentary and archaeological evidence now exists showing that the Aztecs were as gratuitously cruel as the Spanish colonists originally reported them to be.

The question remains, then, as to why a cabal of social engineers in California want to present these religious beliefs in a positive light to American children. It’s certainly not because they think these gods and their human servants were morally impressive or humane in and of themselves. A few loons in the QAnon crowd might think so, but those in possession of their higher critical faculties would never even entertain the notion.

No, the real reason that the authors of California’s Ethnic Studies Curriculum take a positive view of Aztec religion and a negative view of Christianity is because the Aztec gods lost the battle of religious orthodoxies and the New World and the Christian God won. It really is as simple as that.

In its most radical form, left-leaning social and historical analysis begins with the axiom that coercive and violent power is the only variable in human social arrangements. Life is conceived as a zero-sum competition between groups. All other factors that might be said to account for the disparities in success between these groups — in terms of human capital, material conditions, or governing ideas — are seen as elaborate veneers disguising the raw power-struggle of group conflict. This axiomatic starting point leads inevitably to the conclusion that the reigning social order achieved its dominance by oppressing the groups it is thought to have marginalized. This is why words like “dominance,” “oppression,” and “marginalization” have become commonplaces of our political lexicon.

The classical Marxist variation on this theme is, of course, an economic one: The story goes that the capitalists and the bourgeoisie have established and cemented the current global economic system by oppressing the proletariat. But a great deal of the post-1960s Left has supplemented Marx’s economic categories with a whole host of others: race, gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, nationality, and so on. The great oppressor is no longer just the capitalist but the straight, white, imperialist, European, cisgender, Christian male capitalist. This is the innovation of intersectionality. Any advantage that people belonging to the dominant groups have gained over marginalized groups across the centuries is thought to be the result of a rigged social order. The advantages — or “privilege” — that the descendants of the historic oppressors enjoy are presented as ill-gotten gains.

Understood within this framework, the story of the Aztecs is a simple one. They were a Native American, non-Christian people who were conquered by European Christian imperialists. Their defeat at the hands of Western civilization, which has had the temerity and the wickedness to last as long as it has by oppressing the downtrodden of the Earth, is enough to endow their religious practices with a nobility and a virtue that is entirely separate from its content.

For the most extreme elements of the Left, the mere fact of being powerful or successful is incriminating. The mere fact of being the insurgent underdog is exonerating. Noam Chomsky’s long and ignominious tenure as useful idiot in chief to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and his concomitant downplaying of the killing fields is only one example of this. Another is the common idea that white people cannot be the victims of racism. Because white people have, according to many on the intersectional left, achieved hegemonic power in society through the use of violence, they cannot be deemed victims of racism in any sense unless and until people of color have exercised enough violence themselves to overturn the oppressive existing social order. Until that point, which is never concretely defined, a white person can have no legitimate complaint against a person of color. No room for historical complexity or attention to detail is allowed.

When John Locke pulled the disparate elements of classical liberalism together into a coherent philosophy, he did so not for the purpose of framing a government but for justifying revolution. Overthrow, rather than order, is the basic political instinct of liberalism, which is why, once the War of Independence was won, the Founding Fathers had to turn to classical republicanism for language suitable to framing a constitution. The zanier offshoots of liberalism’s wild-eyed cousin progressivism merely take this spirit of revolution to the nth degree. Gods of child sacrifice can be championed within this framework so long as they are insurgent gods; so long as they are underdogs sticking it to “the Man” — even when the Man is Jesus Christ himself.

The early Christians were of the view that the pagan gods were not necessarily unreal; rather, they were simply demons that human beings had been duped into worshipping as deities. This seems strange to us moderns, who are so reflexively suspicious of the supernatural. But the particular demands of the Aztec gods are, I think, depraved enough to cause even the most skeptical among us to consider for a moment that there might be more than material evils at work among us. Whether or not one takes a metaphysical or a metaphorical view of the matter, it cannot be denied that our social tendency to give the benefit of the doubt to defeated parties, to failed insurgents, has unleashed demonic forces into the world. Playing on that American tendency, Hamas, Hezbollah, the IRA, and other terrorist groups have drawn ill-informed support for their violent ends over the years. The authors of the new California curriculum are now exploiting precisely the same sympathy in the arena of education.

In many ways their curriculum is a lot like the stone altar that once stood at the top of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan. It’s at the apex of an ideological edifice that has taken decades, if not centuries, to construct. The values that it consecrates wouldn’t be tolerated without this edifice, which lends it legitimacy, authority, and respectability. And, most importantly and terribly of all, many of our children will be sacrificed on it if we accord the cult it serves more respect and more tolerance than it rightly deserves.