Ideologues’ standard playbook for injecting radical race and gender theories into K-12 classrooms and elsewhere: Do it on the sly and, when caught, rush to cover their tracks.
The latest example? The world’s largest education publisher, Pearson, started a clumsy purge of its digital footprint after a Heritage Foundation report exposed its obeisance to the ideas animating critical race theory.
Pearson, like so many other corporate behemoths, rushed all-in on “equity” in 2021, with new editorial guidelines vowing to make woke concepts like “intersectionality” and “colonial discourse” part of everything it does.
Thursday, Heritage researcher Jonathan Butcher let the larger world know about it. His report drew some media scrutiny — and poof!
The guidelines vanished from the web along with videos promoting the same ideas, and the company’s chief flack went into full-bore denial, insisting, “Critical race theory is not included in Pearson K-12 materials for public schools or in any materials for government contracts.”
It’s always bunker mode as soon as these efforts get the tiniest bit of attention. You’d think fearless social justice warriors would be proud of their efforts!
But not Pearson — which operates a massive digital learning platform, produces materials for every grade level of US schools and plays a major role in both teacher licensure and federal agency hiring.
Maybe the company’s corporate leadership belatedly realized critical race theory is dangerous nonsense that has no place in any classroom (and should never be anywhere near federal hiring practices).
Or maybe they just woke up to how even mouthing this idiocy could tank their business.
That is, they’d rather avoid a Bud-Light style blowback than keep appeasing the lunatic left.
Just remember: All it took to throw a huge scare into this $7.5 billion market-cap company was a brief white paper from a think-tank wonk and one online article.
Woke is weak. And if you don’t like it — as most Americans don’t — all you have to do is say so, loud and clear.