Remember that Denzel Washington movie, Remember the Titans? There’s a famous scene where Washington’s character, Coach Herman Boone, confronts Coach Bill Yost for encouraging the team’s black players after Boone criticizes them for failing to play up to his standards. Rather than appreciate Yost’s attempts to make the team’s black players feel better, Boone explains a principle we seem to have forgotten in our country. “You think you’re doing these boys a favor taking them aside every time I come down on them,” Boone tells Yost. “The world don’t give a damn about how sensitive these kids are. You ain’t doing these kids a favor by patronizing them. You’re crippling them. You’re crippling them for life.” SEE ALSO: Unanimous Supreme Court Decision Slaps Police for Confiscating Firearms Without a Warrant I was reminded of this scene earlier this week when I learned about the new math curriculum currently being considered by California’s insane new woke “educators.” Minority students, these activists claim, don’t do as well in math classes as their white peers. Their solution isn’t, as Coach Boone might recommend, to hold all students to a higher standard by improving the clarity of the curriculum, spending more money on tutors, or firing bad teachers even if they’re part of a teacher’s union. Their solution is to get rid of math class entirely. You think I’m being hyperbolic, but as with most things happening in the Golden State, it’s impossible to overstate the inanity of the proposal. Williamson M. Evers sounded the alarm about the new curriculum in an editorial published in the Wall Street Journal. In an effort to “teach toward social justice,” educators in California will be forced to abandon all concepts of objectively and truth because such things are indicators of “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom.” Things like “getting the right answer,” teaching math in a “linear fashion,” requiring students to “show their work,” and grading them on demonstrated knowledge of the subject matter are all institutionalized forms of racism, according to these educators. “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false,” the manual explains. “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates ‘objectivity,’” and, therefore, racism. The framework, furthermore, rejects “ideas of natural gifts and talents” as “inequitable.” The goal, apparently, is to make everyone just as dumb as everyone else. Problem solved. SEE ALSO: Prince Harry Just Showed Again Why We Kicked the British to the Curb in 1776 Rather than imagining math as a neutral tool to be used for a variety of objectives, the curriculum encourages teachers to develop their students’ “sociopolitical consciousness” in the math classroom. Teachers will be required to adopt a “culturally relevant pedagogy,” which includes “the ability to identify, analyze and solve real-world problems, especially those that result in societal inequalities.” Rather than set a high bar and encourage students to overcome it on their own, California plans to lower the bar and effectively toss everyone over it. Students will no longer be encouraged to pass Algebra I by the 8th grade, as their counterparts in South Korea and Taiwan do. Instead, students can work at their own pace and won’t be forced to take calculus their senior year as part of advanced programs—because those advanced programs won’t exist. This is what happens when woke academics combine the soft bigotry of low expectations (“black kids don’t do well in math”) with the topsy-turvy world of moral relativity (“my truth is my truth”). Reason, logic, and objectivity get thrown out the window in favor of pandering, bigotry, and relativism. Rather than work to be better—and encourage our students to do the same—California is about to just make everything worse. Because let’s be blunt: this proposal isn’t just wrong-headed– it’s truly horrifying. It’s evil. And, if taken to its logical conclusion, will destroy the world as we know it. Again, I’m not being hyperbolic. If we stop teaching math, where will we get chemists, engineers, doctors, and astronauts? Math is perhaps the MOST objective thing there is. There are right and wrong answers. Period. California educators intend to drive us back to the Dark Ages. Actually, beyond the Dark Ages. Even in that time, academics and religious leaders could do math. Our “academics” today want us living in caves. But as long as everyone is appropriately “woke,” it doesn’t matter if we’re all freezing to death and dying of starvation and early disease. Perhaps then they will have achieved their utopia. This curriculum won’t help minority students. Instead, it will cripple them. It will cripple them–and the rest of the country–for life.
