Test Scores are abysmal for Amber, Chase, Juanita, and Jamal, but their woke scores are off the charts.

You’ve no doubt heard about the abysmal reading and math scores of America’s youth. Meanwhile, teachers are learning how to teach students all of the politically-correct genders and pronouns.  

In San Francisco, for example, teacher training includes the meaning of “gender fluid,” “pansexual,” “omnisexual,” “hetero-, homo-, lesbi-curious,” “hetero-, homo-, lesbi-flexible,” and “queer.” Teachers also learn that the pronoun “they” can refer to a singular person, that “it” can refer to a person, and that “caregiver 1” and “caregiver 2” refer to a mother and father.

For further details on the training, see the article at the following link.

Admittedly, I’m behind the times and have three strikes against me. First, I’m a liberal in the classical sense of the word, which is the opposite of today’s illiberalism on the left and right; second, I was at the leading edge of equal rights and diversity at a time when the hard-fought battles were over serious issues of justice instead of today’s wordsmithing and virtue signaling; and third, I was shortchanged in school.

The shortchanging began as a kid when my mom would use flashcards to drill me in vocabulary and grammar. Like my dad, she was raised by poor Italian immigrants who spoke mostly Italian at home but somehow found the means to send their kids to parochial schools. As such, my mom and dad knew how important it was to learn proper English.

By the way, Mom and Dad had a gay couple, Ken and Gerry, as close friends but didn’t put a sign in our front yard saying how enlightened they were.

It’s hard to believe, but my mom’s vocabulary drills didn’t include such words as “lesbi-flexible,” which sounds like a position in Kuma Sutra. How could my dear mother have shortchanged my education like that?

The shortchanging continued in elementary school, where my classmates and I had drills on the declension of sentences. (Is declension required anymore?) And in eighth grade, we were shown films of the Nazi concentration camps being liberated, including scenes of the stacks of emaciated bodies, the ovens, and the piles of hair and spectacles.

The films led me to buy the 900-page book, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” when it came out in paperback soon after eighth grade, in order to understand how humans could inflict such atrocities on each other.  It also led to a lifetime of reading history and moral philosophy, in an ongoing search for the answer—an intellectual journey that taught me the dangers of dogmatism of all political stripes, the dangers of utopians who want to use political power to remake the world into their image, the dangers of identity politics and victimology, and the dangers of injecting political agendas into schools. 

Then there was high school, where I had to take four years of Latin and read five classics of literature over the summer and be tested on them when school reconvened in September.  The classics conveyed moral lessons, provided insights into different cultures, and told the stories of victims of injustice.

Six years of college followed in a similar vein.

All of this has left me unqualified to be a K-12 teacher, for I have the old-fashioned notion that teaching reading and math is more important than teaching the meaning of “lesbi-flexible.”