Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. Recently, the Roaring Fork Schools in Colorado adopted the 3Rs curriculum. That stands for Rights, Respect, and Responsibility. That sounds promising.
But as Kate Anderson of the Alliance Defending Freedom put it, and I quote, in the 3Rs curriculum, kindergartners are taught explicit anatomical terms and asked how they like to be touched. First graders complete a worksheet on reproduction, and by second grade, once optional vulgar slides become mandatory. and the curriculum instills gender ideology through all grades, end quote. And as troubling as that kind of a curriculum is, the more troubling fact is that a school would adopt it to begin with, and a teacher would agree to teach it. The ideological capture of teacher education in America has green lit dangerous and destructive ideas on even the youngest of adults.
Along with what are they teaching the kids these days, every American should be seriously asking, what are they teaching these teachers these days? And a new report from the American Enterprise Institute offers an answer to that question. The report's author, Daniel Buck, analyzed syllabi from leading graduate schools of education across the country. It found courses that clearly advance political agendas, teacher activism, sexual extremism, and social justice goals. According to the report, these grad programs generally promote, and I quote, dogmas grounded in progressive and critical theory frameworks rather than exposing prospective teachers to intellectually diverse ideas and training them in pragmatic instruction and classroom management methods, end quote.
As Lau Asher acutely assessed all the way back in 2018 in the Chronicle of Higher Education, education schools, and I quote, have long been notorious for ideological orthodoxy and low academic standards. The AEI report contained numerous examples of this. At California State University Northridge in a class on reflective teaching, students are assigned articles entitled Integrating Feminist Theory, Pedagogy, and Practice. Into teacher education and queering elementary education, a queer curriculum for fourth grade. At UCLA, students are encouraged to, and I quote, embody a social justice agenda and mirror the diverse, caring, anti-racist, socially responsible learning communities.
Buck clarified, any mention of instruction, assessment, or learning objectives is notably absent from the program's guiding principles. A review of the MA in Education program at UT Austin found that 90% of the readings in one of the tracks could be classified as critical theory. Assigned articles included, is an anti-racist and decolonizing applied linguistics possible and raciolinguistic exceptionalism, how racialized complements reproduce white supremacy. And for the critical pedagogy and social justice class at Texas Tech University, the required text had a chapter in it titled Sexual Education and Desire. Describing the report, a Wall Street Journal op-ed said it this way, quote, children learn a great deal about race and gender in schools these days, but not nearly enough about reading and math.
But look, the rotten education programs is actually not new. It began at least a century ago with education theorist John Dewey. Chuck Coulson talked about Dewey this way. He rejected the biblical view of the child as a creature of God and maintained instead that the child As nothing but a biological organism. The result was an emphasis on trendy educational theories over transcendent standards and permanent truth.
Gone were supposedly outdated goals like transmitting cultural heritage, learning from the past, teaching eternal principles and virtue. Instead, education was seen as the means of humanity's passage to the next stage of evolution. And that's a distorted view of redemption. In it, education becomes the means of redeeming society in a new social order that reduces truth claims down to power of politics and treats ideas as expressions of race, class, and gender. And in How Now Shall We Live, Coulson also identified a prescription for this disease that was infecting education, saying this, if we hope to reform the educational system, we have to learn to analyze and critique the worldviews that have spawned these disastrous teaching methods.
And then offer an alternative worldview that is decisively Christian, one that will yield a theory of education capable of improving the schools for all students. Note, he wasn't just talking about wrong worldviews in various disciplines, he was talking about the wrong worldview shaping the entire theory of education. And tragically, the most progressive department on very many Christian college campuses is the Education Department. Having adopted a good mission of sending Christian teachers to public schools as missionaries, they're nonetheless then held captive by the accreditation standards and program requirements. It's a form of ideological capture.
These schools of education have lost a distinctive Christian voice and vision for education and have just become fellow catechizers of a government school agenda. And we should also mention that most of the time those who run those programs earn their graduate degrees in education.
So many are as indoctrinated into progressive educational theory as are their counterparts at non-Christian universities. Oh, this is why the Colson Educators Program exists to begin with, because so many Christian schools express to us a need for teacher training and worldview formation within a truly Christian vision for education. With free digital courses, on-site trainings, and an academic affiliate program, the Colson Educators integrates Worldview Formation into professional development. Learn more by visiting colsoneducators.org. That's colsoneducators.org.
When teachers understand that their role as educators fits within the biblical framework of creation, fall, redemption, and renewal, the potential is absolutely amazing. They will become agents, as English poet John Milton wrote, of repairing the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright and out of that knowledge to love him. to imitate him, to be like him. by possessing our souls of true virtue. That's a great vision of education.
For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Andrew Carrico. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, please leave us a review wherever you download the podcast. And for more resources or to share this commentary with more people, go to breakpoint.org.
