Forget qualifications and educational experience; those assets may not get you far when trying to get a teaching position today. What will, an educational watchdog organization has revealed, is adherence to far-left orthodoxy.
In fact, found the organization, the National Opportunity Project (NOP), this discrimination manifests itself in “hiring guidance, interview questions, teacher job postings and evaluation criteria,” as Fox News relates. The outlet continues, writing that the NOP
sent public information requests to 74 school districts, 69 of which showed discrimination in their hiring practices based on so-called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts, according to its report reviewed by Fox News Digital.
“What we learned is that in numerous schools across the country, they are looking to hire teachers to teach children as young as kindergarten age, not based on their qualifications necessarily, or on their educational experience as teachers, but oftentimes because of where they stand politically,” NOP’s President Patrick Hughes told Fox News Digital. “The way that this is characterized throughout the process of looking to hire these folks is through diversity, equity and inclusion, which sound fair and things that people can get behind, but in reality are just a pretext to sort of backdoor in a particular … social-ideological point of view.”
Hughes stated that the report was commissioned because Covid-justified remote learning gave parents a window into the Hades that is modern education. “They [parents] saw for the first time … what their kids were being spoon-fed in the classroom and unfortunately, what was being taught to them went well beyond what we typically would think in K-12 classrooms: English, math, science, history,” Fox quotes him as explaining. In fact, he said, parents witnessed how teaching these fundamental topics was often subordinated to left-wing “indoctrination.”
The NOP provides in its report examples of how the hiring bias manifests itself. To wit: An instance of “coded ideological language” is, “Chicago Public Schools says it wants ‘inclusive educators’ with ‘cultural competence.’”
Note the dishonest wording. Of what should the educators be “inclusive”? Since inclusivity of traditional beliefs, such as a Christian conception of sexuality, would likely mean not getting hired, is this really about “inclusivity”? And with the multitude of cultures extant, what is “cultural competence”? It’s another euphemism for embracing the left-wing “culture” the social engineers aim to make unassailably dominant.
Then there are “politically-charged job postings,” writes the NOP, such as, “Denver Public Schools says qualified candidates ‘will have an anti-racist mindset and will work to dismantle systems of oppression and inequity in our community.’”
“Anti-racist” is again a euphemism, a linguistic Trojan horse, for anti-white racism and grievance politics. The so-called “systems of oppression and inequity” these activists mean to dismantle are actually the systems that maintain civilization.
There also are “application” question examples. Quoting the Edina Public Schools in Minnesota, for instance, the NOP writes, “‘Describe a time when you experienced or witnessed an inequity. What steps did you take in response to the situation?’” Something tells me that, “I saw a white man being passed over for a less qualified minority” and “I overrode the hiring decision” aren’t the answers they’re looking for.
Regarding the above, leftists have transitioned from touting “equality” (problematic itself) to their new favored propaganda term, “equity,” which actually references officially sanctioned, politically correct discrimination.
Note, the above are just a few of the numerous hiring-bias examples the NOP provides.
Pondering this language manipulation brings to mind how, when asked to name a civilizational change he’d like to effect, ancient Chinese sage Confucius mentioned “the rectification of names.” “How can you do a good job,” he explained (I’m paraphrasing), “if you’re lying about what you’re doing [via language]?”
You can’t, of course. But the idea here isn’t to do a good job, but to do a job on Western civilization. This teacher hiring bias is just another example of the Gramscian march through the institutions; i.e., placing left-wing activists in positions of influence so they can transform society.
This agenda is all quite sinister. Yet since it’s empowered by millions of rank-and-file Americans (e.g., naive teachers) who believe in it, it’s important to understand the philosophical wind beneath its demon wings.
At bottom, this pedagogical decay reflects the relativism, the disconnection from absolutes, permeating our age. Consider the “cultural competence” demand, which smacks of notions such as punctuality and industriousness being “white norms” that, we’re warned, shouldn’t be foisted on black students. This is related to the more general theory that different races and ethnicities require group-tailored curricula (e.g., “Afrocentric” teaching for blacks).
This could only be believed by those fancying that all is relative, a matter of perspective or preference, and that, consequently, we’ve no business foisting “our truth” on anyone else. Ignored is the Truth:
Everyone needs virtue — i.e., that set of objectively good moral habits.
What you’d find on the ingredients label if morality came in a jar, virtues are things such as Faith, Hope, Honesty, Charity, Courage, Justice, Temperance, Prudence, Chastity, Diligence, Patience, Kindness, Forgiveness, Humility, and Love. Back in the days when people grasped that there was no such thing as a value-free education and, therefore, the “values” projected should be virtues, schoolchildren learned them by writing, for example, copybook headings. Now, kids aren’t even taught to use their heads.
They are, rather, seduced into following their hearts, which are twisted by vice-ridden demagogues who know that if they bend the young to their will, the young, upon growing older but not wiser, will aid them in bending civilization to their power lust.
That’s the formula — and here we are.
