*By Julie Barrett – Originally published on Substack: (18) Racist Math & Decolonization in the classroom (substack.com)
Last week Pittsburgh School District Board of Directors voted to spend $50,000 to hire a consulting firm, Quetzal Education Consulting, to work with teachers on how to dismantle racism in the classroom that they say is embedded in the teaching of math.
The school board agenda for October 25th described this training:
This professional learning experience with provide math teachers across all schools with additional foundational knowledge of anti-racist math pedagogy, and tangible learning experiences that can be implemented with students across all schools. Teachers will engage in an ongoing workshop series of 6 sessions covering the topic of antiracist math instruction. Quetzal Education Consulting will provide support by offering both an introductory workshop for math teachers and a leadership series for administrators, and teachers to build educator capacity for future learning. The purpose of the introductory workshop series is to identify, disrupt, and replace ineffective and oppressive practices in math instruction with practices that center the wellness of students of Color and to provide opportunities for math departments and math teachers to grow their anti-racist math praxis collaboratively in pedagogy and instruction.
On the homepage of Quetzal’s website, they define their goals as: Decolonize, Reclaim, Reimagine.
“Quetzal supports your antiracist goals to tangibly and impactfully disrupt oppression.” Notice on their website they spell women with an “x”. These people who don’t even spell words correctly because they’re so woke have absolutely no business educating anyone.
You’ve likely been hearing the term, “decolonize”, a lot lately. Since the Hamas terror attack on Israel we have seen protests across the United States and beyond in support of Hamas, Palestine and terror organizations. Many of these protesters are chanting about decolonization.
According to Frantz Fanon in his book The Wretched of the Earth in 1962, decolonization is “the replacing of a certain ‘species of men’ by another ‘species of men.’”
Essentially, decolonization seeks to dismantle the current American society and way of life and replace it with something entirely different. And very bad. Decolonization is the goal of DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) which has become part of nearly every institution in our country – schools, government entities, private businesses and even in many churches.
Decolonization in the classroom is extremely dangerous…and very effective for the decolonization movement. “Decolonization is a death and rebirth process through creating disorder, violence and destruction to bring the “death” to the previous dynamic and the creation of new men” (James Lindsay) and the quickest way to bring about this death is by indoctrinating the children.
There are many resources available for teachers to learn how to “decolonize” their classroom. Most people are familiar with the term “CRT” (Critical Race Theory) which is now embedded in every aspect of education and this, too, is part of the decolonization movement.
We are seeing policy being made at state and federal levels that require schools to include CRT (often by the term “ethnic studies”) in the classrooms. These policies are usually sponsored by Democrat lawmakers, but often times Republicans are voting in support of these bills. Either they do not understand the issue or they do and they support it. I believe it is the latter.
Pittsburgh School District is just one example of a school district contracting with a company with the goal of decolonization. This is so dangerous for our children and ultimately, dangerous for our country. The best thing parents can do is pull their kids out of government schools and make a way to homeschool. I believe this is how we will save America!
