It’s true that the landscape of education has eroded over time. Every year, public school districts face budget shortfalls due to mismanagement of funding and declining enrollment.

And, every year, public school districts scratch their heads and wonder why. There are also young, passionate, college students who want to make a difference in the classroom who walk into a university lecture hall to get his with a bunch of BS that will not help Johnny learn that 1 + 1=2 but will help him transition to Jenny should he decide to.

Take this class from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign entitled “Identity and Difference in Education”. A student whistleblower sent along PowerPoint slides from professor, Gabriel Rodriguez’s EDUC 201 course and boy, it’s a doozy.

It’s very obvious that [the course] is pretty liberal. The first week, my professor opened up with, you know, teaching in polarizing times, and he talks about how you need to be political and really, what he meant was you need to be liberal.”-student whistleblower

The professor, Gabriel Rodriguez, is a stone-cold liberal. We only need to look at his framework of research to make this brilliant deduction:

…his research has four broad areas of focus: 1. Latine youth schooling experiences (identity & placemaking) in suburban schools, 2. racially minoritized youth’s political education and activism, 3. justice-oriented educators’ activism, and 4. critical methodological and theoretical approaches to qualitative research in education.

His research draws on anthropological and sociological perspectives in education, as well as frameworks from critical youth studies, critical race studies, critical policy studies, ethnic studies, and geography.”–education.illinois.edu

He’s been published in journals, y’all! Words like identity, placemaking, minoritized, activism, justice, and his “critical methodological and theoretical approaches” say it all. I’m surprised that dang word “pedagogy” is not in there somewhere. (God, I hate that word with the heat of a thousand suns!) Wait…just kidding, it was used in the syllabus. And, yes, of course, he uses his pronouns.

This course, designed to be an introductory course for teaching majors at the university highlights ‘”Understanding the Current Landscape’, and cites the ACLU, making the claim that 2024 was a ‘record year for anti-LGBT+ legislation,’ and that 18 bills were passed in 2018 that “curtailed students and/or educators rights.

The same slide cites America’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association (NEA), itself a left-wing organization, saying that LGBTQ+ students are more likely to face bullying and harassment.” -Peter D’Abrosca-Fox News

The same NEA that wants teachers-err-educators to advocate for “better pay and benefits, better working conditions and better learning conditions for students” (because they care soooo much). The same NEA that also has Becky Pringle at the helm:

In other words: let’s focus on more victimhood and, of course, sexual grooming because the abysmal test scores of students across the nation in reading and math are not enough of an indicator that our public education system is an utter failure.

The blunt bias of Professor Rodriguez comes out in Slide #9:

Remember: Schools are a part of a larger political system. As such, education, at its core is inherently political. School is a political place because so many adults (e.g., educators, policymakers, parents) have a vested interest in the future generation.”-Gabriel Rodriguez

Sounds like Rodriguez is trying to sound smart. Remember kiddies: it’s your job to impose your political ideologies on these young minds BEFORE asking them to add some numbers, read a paragraph and construct some sentences. The most important lesson of all? Pronouns.

The end of the presentation is geared toward queer and transgender teachers, and features quotes from a letter to those teachers written by Harper Keenan, a professor of gender and sexuality research at the University of British Columbia.

Those who now call themselves queer and trans people have been teaching the world since before those words even existed – the acceleration of queer language development and reclamation over the last century is but one example. You have important knowledge to bring to the work of education,’ says a quote attributed to Keenan.”-Peter D’Abrosca-Fox News

Again, it’s more important to indoctrinate kids in using their teachers’ pronouns, and changing their own pronouns, than learning how to math.

I just think to push that on young children is just so wrong. To tell little kids who don’t know much about the world – when you’re a kid, you’re growing and going through all these changes. I guess they need to be reaffirmed in their biology and not reaffirmed in their delusion.”-anonymous student

These teachings are problematic for many reasons. For all of the talk of bullying coming from the far left, this curriculum embraces the subtle tactic of passive-aggressive coercion: hop on our team, embrace our collective ideas/ideals and no one gets hurt. If you don’t embrace these ideas in lecture hall, YOU are part of the problem and don’t deserve to be dubbed an “educator”. Talk about squashing someone’s dreams. But, don’t dare squash a 5 year-old boy’s DREAM of having a vagina. No, young grasshopper, you need to enable and facilitate that sh#it!

For one, I am for standardization. This will solve lots of problems. Here’s my class: How to Raise Test Scores and Enrollment 101. First off: Get rid of the SEL curriculum and throw in more reading, math and science. Make it MANDATORY for educators to log a certain number of hours PER DAY on teaching the essentials. If they’re ineffective as educators/teachers (whatever they want to be called) and DON’T meet these benchmarks, FIRE THEM. Bring back penmanship lessons so high school seniors, some who are 18, know how to sign a legal document. I am sure enrollment numbers and test scores will go up.

There. FIFY, oh lovers of the pedagogy!

For now, though, we live another day as the school bell rings and schools up and down the left coast make land acknowledgements and mute out the Pledge of Allegiance. While more educators and administrators scratching their noggins on how to remedy the disaster that is our public education system and more professors like this he/him, gainfully employed.

Featured image via Wokandapix on Pixabay, cropped and modified, Pixabay license