At NYT, "Arizona Law Curbs Ethnic Studies Classes." Plus, from LAT, "signs bill targeting school district's ethnic studies program":
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has signed a bill targeting a school district's ethnic studies program, hours after a report by United Nations human rights experts condemned the measure.
State schools chief Tom Horne, who has pushed the bill for years, said he believes the Tucson school district's Mexican-American studies program teaches Latino students that they are oppressed by white people.
Public schools should not be encouraging students to resent a particular race, he said.
"It's just like the old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it," Horne said.
Brewer's signature on the bill Tuesday comes less than a month after she signed the nation's toughest crackdown on illegal immigration — a move that ignited international backlash amid charges the measure would encourage racial profiling of Hispanics. The governor has said profiling will not be tolerated.
The measure signed Tuesday prohibits classes that advocate ethnic solidarity, that are designed primarily for students of a particular race or that promote resentment toward a certain ethnic group.
The Tucson Unified School District program offers specialized courses in African-American, Mexican-American and Native-American studies that focus on history and literature and include information about the influence of a particular ethnic group.
For example, in the Mexican-American Studies program, an American history course explores the role of Hispanics in the Vietnam War, and a literature course emphasizes Latino authors.
Horne, a Republican running for attorney general, said the program promotes "ethnic chauvinism" and racial resentment toward whites while segregating students by race. He's been trying to restrict it ever since he learned that Hispanic civil rights activist Dolores Huerta told students in 2006 that " Republicans hate Latinos."
District officials said the program doesn't promote resentment, and they believe it would comply with the new law.
Nope. No ethnic resentment here.
BONUS: An absolute doozy of an attack by Michael Eric Dyson on Arizona's State Schools Superintendent Tom Horne (who comes back quite well, thank you):
3 comments:
Tom Horne is right and right to quote Martin Luther King. Some of these classes, in particular, the Raza-based classes are revolutionary, anti-American electives. This is an outrage and abuse of tax payer money. No one is against the teaching of the great works of Latinos and African-Americans in high school classes. Further, go to any public university in the U.S. and you can get ethnic studies on the baccalaureate level. Higher education is the proper level for deeper ethnic studies after educational basics are taught. This is high school. The bill specifically states that classes in high school cannot be taught that promulgate the "overthrow the American Government," or that promote ethnic separatism.
you talk so much about the government stepping in too much and fears of tyranny, but isn't this bill exactly that??
this is expected from a totalitarian state, not the "leader of the free world".
Ethnic studies, by their very definition, are racists. The same could be said for gender studies being sexist. They are both exclusively about a specific class of race or gender. They are exclusive of the society as it exists instead of being inclusive. They unnecessarily divide people into race and gender instead of dealing with people as individuals. They are the ultimate "stereotype" and "hate speech."
They do not belong in a society that values "diversity" and individual merit. They are meant to create "separate" and unequal. They should be an anathema to any thinking and fair minded individual.
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