Jennifer Rubin Gathers Her Strawmen

They don't want their children to learn!

My daughter has the misfortune of growing up as the child of a historian, so she gets to spend her summer vacations on family camping trips that include “just a couple hours” at a variety of grim historical sites. (We’ll get ice cream right after, I swear!) She’s been to Manzanar, and Tule Lake, and Sand Creek; she’s walked through Captain Jack’s stronghold, and stood at the base of Canby Cross, and heard me drone on about what those places mean. She’s heard her share of ranger talks that go, “Now, the killing began here, and the survivors of the first wave tried to shelter in this gully right over here.” There has been heavy sighing. She has maybe not quite forgiven me for the level of detail we learned about the repatriation field at Sand Creek, and what gets buried there.

Some children go to Disneyland

But life has cruelty in it, and pain, and it’s part of the package. The past has stories of courage and progress, and it has stories of misery and brutality. It’s all part of life’s rich pageant, right? I think, and we can debate this, that children who grow up being sheltered from reality become debilitated as adults, and then they get jobs covering social media for the Washington Post. Don’t let this happen to your children. You have to tell them what happened, the whole range of it.

However. Taking great care to show our daughter the mixed realities of the past, we also took her out of a school that taught third-graders about America’s racist past by telling white children to abuse black children so they could see what it was like.¹ This is really a thing, now, an established bit of Woke pedagogy:

Now, here’s Jennifer Rubin, analyzing people she doesn’t know:

Jennifer 'I stand with Ukraine' Rubin 🇺🇦🇺🇦 @JRubinBlogger

the MAGA crowd is frantically maneuvering to halt education “about the truth of the history of racism and white supremacy, of the struggle for justice in this country.” The goal is to stymie the development of children’s empathy and awareness of racial injustice.

This isn’t happening, full stop. What’s happening is a discussion about timing, about developmental stages and age-appropriateness, about effective pedagogy and thoughtful curriculum, and about the, I’m sorry, absolutely fucking insane viciousness of wokester teachers, exposure to which is the thing that actually stymies “the development of children’s empathy.” WE NEED TO SEGREGATE THESE CHILDREN SO THEY CAN LEARN THAT SEGREGATION IS WRONG. They can talk about how bad racism is in their racially separated affinity groups, see, so they can learn not to divide people by race:

What parents are fighting against isn’t education about the truth of history; we’re fighting against pathological, destabilizing cruelty dressed up as learning. You MAGA idiots don’t want your children to learn the truth about historical racism, Jennifer Rubin tells parents who are upset about the segregation experiment performed on their children at school. “Arsonist decries anti-fire department sentiment, news at 11:00.”

The same discussion — the same — is happening around sex and public schools.

Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok

The Dept of Education held a training for teachers to learn how to be inclusive of tran and non-binary K-12 students. This trans teacher says he teaches inclusive language like not everyone who produces eggs is a woman. The official U.S. Dept of Ed is promoting these ideas.

Eggs come from ovaries, not from women, and if you don’t want your child to learn that, you’re against education.

Parents are discussing truthfulness, appropriateness, and the degree to which teachers are building a curriculum that is or isn’t insane; the people attacking those parents are changing the topic of the discussion. Here’s the mother of an eight year-old telling a school board about a third-grade teacher who was holding sexual orientation study sessions three days a week:

Clearly, what this mother objects to is learning.

When you object to X and the reply is that people say, “How dare you oppose Y!”, you’re not in a debate; you’re not talking to people who are making the slightest effort at good faith. The burden shifting and narrative deflection tell you everything you need to know. Respond with hostility.

1. Details not forthcoming, because the subsequent events ended with an NDA.