From The Guardian:
A Florida school has received backlash after it required parents to provide written consent allowing their children to engage with a Black author’s book. The permission form detailed an activity in which “students will participate and listen to a book written by an African American”.
Chuck Walter, a parent at Coral Way K-8 in Miami, posted a photo of the slip on X, writing: “I had to give permission for this or else my child would not participate???” He tagged the Miami-Dade county public schools superintendent, Jose L Dotres. (Dotres’s office did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.)
Walter’s post comes days after another Miami school, iPrep Academy, drew ire for asking for parents’ permission for students to participate in “class and school wide presentations showcasing the achievements and recognizing the rich and diverse traditions, histories, and innumerable contributions of the Black communities”.
The permission slips indicate how some Florida schools are trying to comply with the state’s “Parental Rights in Education” law, more commonly known as the “don’t say gay” law, and the “Stop Woke Act”, both signed by the governor, Ron DeSantis, in 2022. The former prohibits discussions of sexuality and gender in classrooms, while the latter regulates how race and race issues can be taught in schools. Critics have suggested that Florida lawmakers are aiming for erasure or to teach a false history to the state’s children.
The Florida commissioner of education, Manny Díaz, called the situation a “hoax”, posting on X: “Florida does not require a permission slip to teach African American history or to celebrate Black History Month. Any school that does this is completely in the wrong.”
But DeSantis and other Republican lawmakers in the state have created an environment in which teachers are severely limited in how they can discuss race, gender and sexual orientation in all grades, and officials have not provided concrete guidance on how to comply. As a result, some teachers and districts have created policies, like the permission slip policy, to ensure they are acting in accord with the law.
For Miami-Dade county public schools, compliance has included requiring parental consent for all club meetings and events, guest speakers, college adviser visits and other enrichment activities, the Miami Herald reported. Teachers now face time- and resource-consuming hurdles to ensure their students are able to hear from Black historians and Holocaust survivors, for instance, which has been a normal practice in local schools in previous years.
Link to the rest at The Guardian
From Wikipedia:
Florida Man is an Internet meme first popularized in 2013, referring to an alleged prevalence of people performing irrational or maniacal actions in the U.S. state of Florida. Internet users typically submit links to news stories and articles about unusual or strange crimes and other events occurring in Florida, with stories’ headlines often beginning with “Florida Man…” followed by the main event of the story. Because of the way news headlines are typically written, they can be creatively interpreted as implying that the subjects of the articles are all a single individual known as “Florida Man”.
PG wonders if Florida Schools will be the next big Florida _____________ meme.
Every time I hear about another ideology-promotion book catfight, I find myself wondering what exactly those books bring to “reading, writing, ‘rithmetic”. Which, considering the state of graduate skills in those core disciplines strikes me as a wee bit more urgent than making sure they vote for the favored camp in ten years or so.
But, hey! Priorities, right?
Terrible thing, this. Asking PARENTS to make decisions on what ideas their CHILDREN are to exposed to.
But, no, I must agree with the others – this is a sabotage operation. At least it is if all they ask for is permission to read black writers, without any indication of which black writers. (It is also blatant racism to ask only about black writers.)
If I were still a parent of a public school child, I wouldn’t want to know the melanin content of the writer’s skin. I would want to know who they are, and what they write. Ibram “X” Kendi – NO! Thomas Sowell – YES! Robin DiAngelo – NO! Victor Davis Hanson – YES!
This frankly sounds like a combination of bureaucratic tail-covering and sabotage–“We don’t like this law, but we’re not going to violate it, instead we’re going to get people to turn against it by implementing it in the most heavy-handed and ridiculous way possible.”
Inventing a strawman, as it were
Right. The law was designed to keep schools from bringing in sexualized content to age-inappropriate class groups (so sexualized, that parents have been directed to stop reading from the books in open, adult-only school board meetings, lest they make the public aware of just how inappropriate the content is). And, because making an argument to teens about the government-sponsored discrimination against Black people is a very different thing from delivering that message to kids in the concrete-operational stages of thinking, who will reduce a complex message to:
White people – Horrible! And, any actions against them are completely deserved.
Black people – Excellent! And, any actions they take against White people are completely justifiable.
Nuances are lost below a certain mental age.
Funny, the curriculums never seem to mention that the Democratic party was behind Slavery, Jim Crow, and denial of voting rights. Only a few Democrats breaking ranks allowed the Voting Rights act to pass – with the near unanimous votes of the Republicans in Congress.
We see the same kind of muddy thinking in the debate over the Gaza War:
Israelis occupiers (despite their tribes living in that region for 5000 *continuous* years) = evil and deserving of everything they get from…
Arabs (which is what palestinians are–the “white trash” of arab tribes that nobody else wants) = good and puisant and allowed to anything to anybody, including *themselves*. So intentional, self-documented and proudly admitted rape and infanticide campaigns (and isn’t that the very definition of genocide?) are not only excusable but endorsed.
By now everybody has heard of this exemplar of that kind of thinking, right?
https://www.foxbusiness.com/fox-news-tech/google-pause-gemini-image-generation-ai-refuses-show-images-white-people
Note the policies the chatbot lists for refusing to dispay images of “pasties”, most notably balancing past injustice (with modern institutionalized racism).
Youtube is rife with laughably idiotic examples of what such ” education” leads to:
– pictures of WWII *german* soldiers who are anything and everything but ethnically german or even vaguely caucasian.
– and then there’s the images of vikings…
– pictures of the US republic’s founding fathers that might come from the Hamilton musical or DC’s Earth 3. 😉 Everything from chinese to inuit.
Try an online news search for ever more ridiculous output.
It is now a test of chatbot training to ask it to depict a middle class white family.
Seriously.
And if you read the googlebot screencap, it self-righteouly and condescendingly instructs the user to “do better”. Because that is how it was trained to reply to queries.
I imagine the Bill Maher writers room is licking their chops at the prospect of thr standup routine they can craft off just one image. The only way it could be more farciclas is if it replied in ebonic patois.
And to top it off, this is the ME2 software that Google wants to offer to businesses to handle their data analysis and customer relations.
What else to expect from Marxists?
“Karl Marx asserted that history has a tendency to repeat itself, and when it does, it does so initially as a tragedy, but later as a farce.”
If this were a drinking game, you’d die of alcohol poisoing:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13108515/Google-Gemini-racist-white-people.html?trk=public_post_comment-text
Gotta love the viking dreadlocks.
As the programmer said, you gotta wonder how they managed to get the chatbot to do that. Scrubbing everything white from the training dataset?
Maybe ask for a picture of a gang-banger?