A bill before the California senate needing a signature from Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom would force all school districts to offer their high school students a semester-long ethnic studies class starting in 2025, likely with a model curriculum that currently states the course should “build new possibilities for post-imperial life that promotes collective narratives of transformative resistance” as well as teach the students the “four I’s of oppression.”
The model curriculum that would likely be implemented from bill AB 331 includes statements like these:
Include information on the ethnic studies movement, specifically the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), and its significance in the establishment of ethnic studies as a discipline and work in promoting diversity and inclusion within higher education.
Students will be exposed to a multitude of histories, perspectives, and cultures, with the goal of students being able to build critical analytical and intercultural communication skills; developing an understanding of geo-historical and cultural knowledge and contributions; fostering of humanism and collaboration across lines of difference; learning the value and strength in diversity; and developing a rigorous historical understanding of the development of racial and ethnic identities in the United States; and engaging in civic action, community service and/or community education to bring positive change that helps build a future society free of racism and other forms of bigotry associated with white supremacy, white nationalism, and institutional racism.
Discussions of systems of power should include both the struggles that come with being entangled and impacted by these systems, but also resistance to them. Systems of power can be analyzed using the four “I”s of oppression (ideology, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized).
Among the statements in approved course outlines are these examples:
Students will acquire and expand on an awareness in the value of speaking about the agency, power, and the creative genius of ethnic minorities while acknowledging the processes of slavery, colonization, discrimination, and bigotry that also color the American experience.
Students will be presented with a different perspective of the conquest of North America. This will start with Christopher Columbus’ genocide of the native population, continue to the relocation efforts of early America and to the development of reservations up to the reorganization of said reservations and the American Indian Movement.
Students will write a paper detailing certain events in American history that have led to Jewish and Irish Americans gaining racial privilege. They will be asked to think critically about why and who is allowing this evolution in white identity and how this shift is affecting the identity of Irish and Jewish Americans.
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board wrote:
The model curriculum now on the education department’s website says the course should “build new possibilities for post-imperial life that promotes collective narratives of transformative resistance.” Yes, this is a course for K-12 students. It suggests teachers provide “examples of systems of power, which can include economic systems like capitalism and social systems like patriarchy.” Students can then be taught “the four ‘I’s of oppression”—ideological, institutional, interpersonal and internalized.
The state guidance includes more than 200 pages of approved course outlines. Some of these seem to mandate student political activities, potentially raising First Amendment concerns. “Students acquire tools to become positive actors in their communities to address a contemporary issue and present findings in a public forum,” says one outline. Among the approved topics: “Racism, LGBTQ rights, immigration rights, access to quality health care, income inequality,” and so on. What about the fifth “I” of indoctrination?