Pardon Me While I Throw Up

This just in from the University of Minnesota (via Fox).

"A branch of the University of Minnesota may require all education students at the school to understand and accept that they are either privileged or oppressed..."

Some of the proposed curriculum requirements are:

• "Future teachers will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression."

• Teachers will be able to articulate a "critical analysis of this story of America, for what it illuminates and what it hides or distorts" including:

- "myth of meritocracy in the United States"

- "historical connections between scientific racism, intelligence testing, and assumptions of fixed mental capacity"

- "alternative explanations for mobility (and lack of it)"

- "history of demands for assimilation to white, middle-class, Christian meanings and values"

- "history of white racism, with special focus on current colorblind ideology"

• "Future teachers are able to explain how institutional racism works in schools" and recognize that "schools and classrooms are often structured in ways that advantage and disadvantage some groups but are also critical sites for social and cultural transformation."

Some of the assignments students would have to complete:

"They must reveal a 'pervasive stereotype' they personally held about an identity group, and evidently must argue in a personal essay that this view has now been 'challenged' on the basis of their experiences with that identity group. So if you say, 'well, actually I don't have a pervasive stereotype' … you're probably going to get a bad grade," he said.

As for how university professors will learn to assign those grades, the report proposes "required training/workshop for all supervisors."

"Every faculty member at our university that trains our teachers must comprehend and commit to the centrality of race, class, culture, and gender issues in teaching and learning, and consequently, frame their teaching and course foci accordingly," it says.

* * *

All this sounds like some left-wing nightmare imposed on other living human beings. Not a word about anything noble or lofty like promoting the equality of all human beings -- just a giant exercise in excusing underachievement via the promotion of perpetual victimhood. Oh yeah, and the racist project of "blame the white guy".