New Mexico's new education standards teach ethnic, social identity lessons to kindergartners
Categories: US Education News
New Mexico’s sweeping new changes to the state’s social studies standards, which would introduce racial and social identity lessons to children as young as 5, has some Republicans in the state crying foul.The standards finalized by the New Mexico Public Education Department in late February state that kindergartners will be required to learn about "identity groups" and will be able to "identify some of their group identities." They will also learn to "describe ways they are similar and different from people who share their identities and people who don’t."In third grade, public school children will be introduced to the subject of "community equity building." By fifth grade, they’ll be able to "explain how the treatment of groups of people in the past and present impacts who they are." Seventh-graders will study "the impact of unequal power relations on the development of group identities and culture." By eighth grade, students will be able to "assess how social policies and economic forces offer privilege or systemic inequity in accessing social, political, and economic opportunity for identity groups in education, government, healthcare, industry, and law enforcement."High schoolers will be required to "examine the experiences, activism, and legislation impacting the LGBTQIA+ communities," as well as "analyze the complex relationship between dominant cultures and minority groups throughout world history, including but not limited to constructions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, differently abled, nationality, class, religion, reactions, and long-term effects of oppression." "As local school officials, you are morally obligated to reject these standards and to proceed serving your community as the autonomous school official you were elected to serve as," Montoya wrote in a letter shared Tuesday by Republican officials."New Mexico is a state of friendship and united cultures," she tweeted Thursday. "The last thing our children need after two years of social isolation is to be taught they are oppressors or oppressed based on gender or race they didn’t choose."