2020 may or may not be the “Great Tribulation”, the apocalypse I’ve been expecting since I was brainwashed in a doomsday cult, but it sure is a shitshow. Those sworn to serve and protect are committing violence against peaceful protesters who dare to demand an equitable society. Meanwhile, COVID-19 slowly strangles the U.S., spurred on by science deniers, those people left ignorant by religious worldviews, our education system, and media clickbait culture.
Black Lives Matter. Science is real. No qualifiers needed.
I’m a white, middle class homeschool mom. I feel the weight of my privilege every day, and use it however I can to throw wrenches into the wheels of our white supremacist oligarchy through education. My homeschool curriculum is one of my favorite wrenches, and probably the only one I should admit to online. Social Studies class can expose institutional, systemic racism instead of support and perpetuate it, and Science, done right, promotes curiosity and logic, not to mention a firm grounding in objective reality.
A key failing of our educational system is the notion that getting something wrong is “bad” when, in fact, getting things wrong is how we become WISE. Then we take things further by ranking children according to their test scores on mostly irrelevant questions, as if rote memorization has anything to do with the contributions a child may someday make in the world. Make no mistake, the U.S. educational system was created to churn out factory drones who are knowledgeable enough to eek their way through life, but conformed enough not to question it being that way. Bad scores make smart kids think they are stupid, and someone who has been convinced they are stupid, will be, because they stop being curious. And they will grow up numb, or angry because they feel the indignity their own society heaped upon them without understanding how it happened.
If you are stressed out because you’ve got more responsibility for your children’s education than ever before, I get it, it’s a huge responsibility. Stop a minute and ask yourself if the system they are in is serving who they will be and the world they will inherit. Now is a pretty good time to take this terrible gift of a global pandemic and shift everything you took for granted. Stop trying to make things go back to normal. The pre-2020 world is gone. Fucking deal with it and get on with it. Change your kids’ world to change the whole world.
Also, maybe go demonstrate in front of the police station nearest you on the regular to demand police money be reallocated to community efforts that support BIPOC. Take the kids. And wear a goddamn mask.
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