The Merced City School District isn’t exactly killing it — unless, that is, what it’s killing are its students’ academic fortunes. Only about 22 percent of its pupils are proficient at math, just 35 percent at reading. Black kids in the majority Hispanic California district are doing considerably worse still, too. So in response, you might expect its education officials to emphasize discipline and the three R’s.
Instead, they’ve spent $610,000 teaching black students how to rap.
Moreover, while the program is supposedly designed to eradicate “hate and ignorance,” its rap “take[s] direct aim at white patriarchy.”
Read It (If You’re Not a Merced Student You May Be Able to) and Weep
The New York Post reported on the current story Saturday, writing:
In January, the Merced City School District in the Central Valley — one of the state’s lower-performing school districts based on test performances — signed a $270,000 agreement with Fresno-based School Yard Rap [SYR], which describes its approach to learning as “edutainment.”
The contracts include a summer “Rap Camp” and an “African American Affinity Group”, which is capped for 100 African American students, raising questions about whether the programming complies with federal law.
… In a little over a year, Merced has handed out three contracts worth a total of $610,000 to School Yard Rap, which operates across 28 states, including New York, New Jersey and Texas.
Programming includes history lessons, songwriting, DJing and performances.
The camp focuses “on African American history and the diaspora,” adds its founder, ex-schoolteacher Brandon Brown.
Now, as indicated, some believe the program runs afoul of federal anti-discrimination law. The camp is on Washington’s radar, too, though no investigation has yet been launched.
Responding to this, Brown calls the allegations “politically driven.” He claims his camp “is open to every single student grades 3rd to 8th.” But whether or not all children will have equal opportunity to be degraded by the program is not the point.
Degradation is, too, many would say, what’s being delivered. While Brown claims that “more information about the culture of others ‘helps eradicate a lot of hate and ignorance in the country,’” related The College Fix, just consider some of the program’s content. As the Fix reported:
According to its website, School Yard Rap’s “vision” is “Equity all year, Diversity every day.”
One of its “signature programs” called “Moor than a Month” features Brown (as “Griot B”) in the style of the hip hop group Migos and “take[s] direct aim at white patriarchy.”
“History books have a white male skew, but believe me I ain’t blaming you,” the lyrics state. “That’s who wrote it on paper — it’s a cycle by nature. We give what we got, but I’m here to break it and bring education on what is not taught, trust it’s a lot.”
A related tweet follows.
Note one line from the song above:
I’mma be black every day that I’m here, no cap, for more than a month, just like every black kid in class.
Also consider that in the second video above, Brown is seen demagogically teaching the children left-wing, activism-oriented slogans. Now, question:
Is this what black kids really need?
Realize here that a philosophy of bitterness, racialism, anger, and “victimology” already often plagues these youngsters. Programs such as this — which essentially claim that sound education is “white” and thus illegitimate — only exacerbate the problem.
Worse still is that SYR is but one example of school districts wasting taxpayer dollars on bizarre, destructive teaching models. Just consider another: the offerings of the Pacific Educational Group (PEG). It has collected millions of dollars for teaching “white privilege” peppered with Marxist dogma to America’s schoolteachers.
And how much does the United States spend on corruptive new pedagogies provided by SYR- and PEG-like groups overall? That’s hard to ascertain. But the figure is likely more than $100 million — and perhaps far higher.
The Real Issue
Now, animating this, of course, is the underlying and persistent cultural devolutionary effort to destroy Western civilization. But there’s also a more innocuous-sounding rationale: the idea that blacks, and other groups, need curricula specially tailored for them. (This notion was expressed in Louis Farrakhan’s claim, “A White Man’s Heaven Is a Black Man’s Hell.”) So it’s feminism for girls, Latino pride for Hispanics, afro-centrism for blacks, etc. The issue?
Different races, ethnicities, and sexes are not different species. While there are differences among groups, everyone needs certain basic things. We all require, for example, survival needs satisfied, such as food, water, and shelter. All humans also need love to develop properly and flourish. Commonalities exist with educational requirements as well.
That is, students must be taught what is objectively true and important.
For instance, history is supposed to present significant events and people from the past, especially, in our case, those relating to Western civilization. And what if this means the vast majority of our historical figures will be white men? This is then for the same reason why 75 percent of NBA players are black men. It reflects achievement in the given realm.
With English teaching, too, standards must be non-negotiable, with our common tongue taught in its proper form. Oh, sure, language norms are often relative. What’s not so, however, is the truth that people need a common language spoken in a common way to bind them together. And, of course, it should be even more apparent that math and science concern what’s objectively true.
Academic Asininity
Despite this, consider what we’ve heard from the educational establishment. Mathematics “operates as Whiteness,” punctuality and industriousness are “white norms,” and Standard American English “privileges white communities.” Going back even further is the notion of “white male linear logic.” Such theories attack sound education’s credibility and are thus destructive; they harm kids. These ideas deserve no tolerance — and those spreading them should be removed from education.
And why is this happening? Money is a factor, of course. SYR, PEG, and other such entities get rich peddling their educational snake oil. As for the school districts, they’re not just failing — but flailing in vain. Awash in relativism, their officials don’t believe in the objective. They don’t know or understand the virtues and that all children need them. They don’t grasp that attempting education is a waste of time without first securing discipline and obedience among the students. (Why? Well, how can someone learn from you without first listening to you? Listening is a prerequisite for learning.)
So, instead, they buttress the illusion they’re accomplishing legitimate goals via lavish spending on the latest shiny thing. Then they can, too, tell the parents about all the resources they’ve devoted to “cutting-edge pedagogies.”
Oh, and after this, Tyrone may still not be able to read — but he’ll sure know that “I’mma be black every day.”
