California approves prayer in school… so long as it’s in praise of Aztec gods

The state’s new ‘Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum’ extends the left’s cultural dominance of California’s public education system, and seeks to destroy the “Christianity, capitalism and racism” white settlers brought to America.

The Department of Education in California – where else? – has approved a 900-page Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum designed to “decolonize” America. The program aims to right the supposed wrongs of the imperial Christianity that swept the Americas clean of their indigenous religions. The curriculum’s core promise is that it will help root out Christianity, and the capitalism and racism that apparently came with it.

To empower children as forces for ending such white colonialist hangovers, pupils are being instructed to pray in chants each day to Aztec gods that formerly sacrificed (and sometimes ate parts of) children and their parents. The curriculum instructs the pupils to invoke these gods to empower themselves as “social warriors”. 

With such empowerment, the new creed states, children will be better enabled to “challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial beliefs”. After all,that is what children should be burdened with doing – righting the wrongs created by adults who lived centuries before them. The theory goes that the longer you can make children enraged about social injustices they never personally bore, the better adjusted and happier they will be in their world as social warriors.

One special quality of the new curriculum is that it managed to anger almost everyone. During its development, numerous racial identities raged over how they were being expunged from the history of oppression.

Even those with Middle Eastern roots got into a brawl about being left off the list of those who are victims of white persecution. Jews and Palestinians accused each other of seeking to wipe the other off the face of the new curriculum during the rancorous debates that preceded its recent unanimous approval.

One report said: “Some [who] identified themselves as Jewish and the descendants of Holocaust survivors said the plan ‘erased the unique stories of Jews in the Middle East.’ Others criticized the curriculum as anti-Arab, saying it white-washed content about Arab Americans and erased earlier content about Palestinians.”

Even the educators behind the move “acknowledged that a curriculum on racial and ethnic issues was bound to be divisive…. ‘This criticism will continue. I can guarantee you that,’ said California Secretary of State Shirley Weber.”

Feeding the rage of the age

So now the Golden State has a richly divisive curriculum that gets everyone upset at everyone. Because the world is better and more free of racial hatred when all kids discover what they are supposed to be enraged about. Otherwise, they might just go outside and play with each other if simply taught to be nice to all. How, then, would they learn what racism is?

Luis Alejo, a former assemblyman and now a Monterey County supervisor, who began the debate over the curriculum back in 2016, told the EdSource news site: “Adopting the model curriculum today… is an extraordinary test that may not please everyone [or anyone], but facing our history is an uncomfortable endeavor and making landmark educational change is never easy.”

It’s easier, though, if you label it “landmark.” Makes it sound like it is worth the pain.

Manuel Rustin, a history teacher at Pasadena Unified high school, chaired the commission that drafted the model curriculum. For him, it is not enough that children understand the racial injustices of the past; it is vital that they do something about them.

Rustin’s contribution came in anchoring the new curriculum in “Critical Race Theory,” which focuses its teaching about racial injustice on oppression by whites against people of other colors in order to attain and maintain their power. It cannot simply be an unfortunate aspect of the human condition that all races mistreat other races. The roots of the theory go back to Marxist theoretician Paulo Freire, “who argued that students must be educated about their oppression in order to attain ‘critical consciousness.’”

R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, the original co-chair of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, infused his own book, ‘Rethinking Ethnic Studies’, throughout the curriculum. He argues that “Eurocentric, white supremacist (racist, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous), capitalist (classist), patriarchal (sexist and misogynistic), heteropatriarchal (homophobic)” whites began“grabbing the land… hatching hierarchies… and developing for Europe/whiteness”, creating “excess wealth” as “the basis for the capitalist economy.”

The new religion of racism

Huitzilopochtli, the former Aztec god of war and sun, is expected to be particularly helpful in the new curriculum’s mission to right these wrongs. Students are encouraged to entreat Huitzilopochtli (a deity who inspired hundreds of thousands of human sacrifices during Aztec rule) to endow themselves with “a revolutionary spirit” in order to bring “transformation” in combatting “white supremacy, racism and other forms of power and oppression.”

It is not enough, apparently, in today’s ethnic studies to learn about other religions. Children must be made to practice those religions in order to find empowerment for the causes of their oppressive instructors.

Californians have long admired Aztec religions. A few decades ago, San Jose erected a statue to one of the Aztec gods, or idols. As the mayor stated, the Aztec religion sought “to elevate the human consciousness to a higher plane.” I’m guessing this probably occurred just before a high priest, using razor-sharp obsidian blades, sliced open the chests of his sacrificial victims and offered their still-beating hearts to the gods.  

I expect the mayor might not have enjoyed that higher plane quite so much if he were the sacrifice du jour. After all, the crimson that’s still visible on many ancient Aztec stones isn’t ochre.

As the book ‘The History Of The Conquest Of Mexico’ by William Hickling Prescott reminds us: “At the dedication of the great temple of Huitzilopochtli, in 1486, the prisoners, who for some years had been reserved for the purpose… were ranged in files, forming a procession nearly two miles long. The ceremony consumed several days, and seventy thousand captives are said to have perished at the shrine of this terrible deity!... It was customary to preserve the skulls of the sacrificed, in buildings appropriated to the purpose. The companions of Cortes counted one hundred and thirty-six thousand in one of these edifices.” 

The book (no doubt to be dismissed as white revisionist propaganda) adds: “The great object of war with the Aztecs was quite as much to gather victims for their sacrifices, as to extend their empire.”

So California’s children will be imploring a bloodthirsty ancient Aztec god of imperialism to overcome latter-day white supremacist colonialism; a move that merely changes the skin color of the oppressor from white to brown.

Revenge of the gods

White settlers, Cuauhtin argues, practiced “theocide” against indigenous gods, killing them and replacing them with their Christian one. The new California curriculum proposes to fix this slur by using today’s children to restore them to their rightful place. The old gods will have their revenge. Cuauhtin’s formula is to “name, speak to, resist, and transform the hegemonic Eurocentric neocolonial condition [via] transformational resistance.”

As part of his goal to “decolonize” America, he employs similar methods to Adolf Hitler’s youth program, deploying children to battle for the “regeneration of indigenous epistemic and cultural futurity.”

(If he keeps using words like this, however, he just might lose his young disciples.)

So the newcurriculum “recommends that teachers lead their students in a series of indigenous songs, chants, and affirmations, including the ‘In Lak Ech Affirmation,’ which appeals directly to the Aztec gods.”

As the pupils chant and clap to the gods, including Tezcatlipoca (the vengeful god of night and sorcery), Quetzalcoatl (the feathered serpent regarded as the god of wind and rain), and Xipe Totec (the life-death-rebirth deity who wears a suit of flayed human skin), they will be instructed to seek “healing beliefs” while attaining revolutionary empowerment. The students will shout “Panche beh! Panche beh!… You are my other self,” appealing to the gods to give them critical consciousness. 

Who will save the children from their educational oppressors?

I don’t dispute the injustices of the past or the need to talk about them, but I certainly question the appropriateness of turning children into “social warriors.” This seems more an agenda of the adults around them, who are using children for their own militant aims.

This intense indoctrination of young people into new state-endorsed practices is the formation of a new religion of racism to dominate and replace the old. Who will save the children from their modern oppressors, when they should just be playing on monkey bars and being kids?

Is there not room for just teaching love, forgiveness, fairness and kindness to all as a way of replacing the darkness in human hearts with light, rather than to filling their young minds with worship of some ancient, bloodthirsty gods of war?

This new curriculum makes every child a victim. There are those who were victims of the past, and there will be those who will be victims of the new future – an induced self-genocide as they drown in white guilt for things they never did. Is this debased and debauched levelling down something we should be proud of?

Just as with the old gods we’re now supposed to admire, our children are once again being sacrificed – this time on the altar of radical far-left, racial ideology.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.