A nasty turn in the classroom wars invades an affluent N.J. suburb

[Nevilledog]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/05/book-bans-right-wing-culture-wars-school-curriculum/

No paywall
https://archive.is/kIv5Y

By now, many of the goals of the reactionary culture-warriors working to reshape American education are sickeningly familiar. They are attempting to restrict classroom discussion of sex and gender, to sanitize the teaching of our white-supremacist past and to purge schools of anodyne romance novels under the guise of targeting pornography.

But there’s another story threaded throughout all this that has been overlooked: These campaigns appear increasingly designed to chill critical perspectives on current events in a way that undermines public education’s core goal of developing civically informed democratic citizens.

A battle has erupted in affluent Bernards Township, N.J., over the local school board’s recent decision to reject inclusion of a sociology textbook. The move — engineered by a right-leaning majority that recently won power on the board — angered parents who discerned an effort to inject a right-wing slant into the teaching of basic realities about contemporary America.

The objections to the tome — a widely used textbook called “The Real World: An Introduction to Sociology” — are striking. They take issue with renderings of recent major news events that are largely dispassionate and factually correct.

At a recent meeting, the board debated numerous such objections from its members. One was to the book’s accurate description of Michael Brown, who was killed by police in 2014, as an “unarmed Black teenager.” The book’s offense? It didn’t also describe Brown’s size and weight, or that he was scuffling with a cop when killed — apparently failing to depict the victim as threatening enough.

*snip*

[BComplex]

1. White nationalists are targeting elections to school boards across the country.

Their new plan, since the FBI/ DOJ has gone after the nationwide affiliates, is to go local, and they're running for EVERY office locally.