How CRT Is Taught
“The running theme of the whole curriculum is emotion,” Steenman said. “If it’s anti-church, that will stir up emotion, anti-police, anti-firemen, anti-tradition—especially the racially charged parts—of course that will stir up emotion. You know, the imagery in K through five and a lot of these books is angry faces. You’re very hard pressed to find a smiling illustration in any of these books.”
Steenman singled out an example of the Civil Rights curriculum for grade two, which she said has “nine straight weeks of angry white people.”
The Moms for Liberty local chair and other concerned parents read through all the curriculum, including the books, for “Wit and Wisdom,” listing all inappropriate content they found in those books.
“You can see that through Wit and Wisdom there are many common threads that seem to surface in every other grade. And suicide ideation is one of them,” she said.
Steenman shared with The Epoch Times some quotes from three books in the curriculum that had suicide as a running theme.
A first-grade book from the curriculum titled “Brave Irene” that Steenman described as “a fairly dark tale” reads, “Why not freeze to death, she thought, and let all the troubles end. Why not? She was already buried.”
A passage from a third-grade book about a mouse in the water reads, “He began to wonder what it would like to drown. Would it take very long? Would it feel just awful? Would his soul go to heaven? Would there be other mice there?”
The fourth-grade book titled “Hatchett” discussed the suicidal thoughts of a 13-year-old, Steenman said.
It is not easy for parents to opt out of a particular book because there are several lessons tied to it that the child would lose, Steenman explained.
Emotion Over Objectivity
In the teachers’ manuals for the curriculum, “Wit and Wisdom” emphasizes subjective emotional learning starting in kindergarten over applying objective methods to analyze things, Steenman said.
“That is because emotions are never wrong. It’s all subjective,“ she added. ”It’s what your truth is, what your experience [is], but there’s no objective, black-and-white truth to measure that against. So it’s objectivity versus subjectivity.”
To illustrate her point, Steenman shared with The Epoch Times a page from “The Story of Ruby Bridges,” a book in the curriculum for the second grade, which reads: “On Ruby’s first day, a large crowd of angry white people gathered. The people carried signs, they said they didn’t want black children in a white school. Some wanted to hurt her.”
The teacher’s manual instructs the teacher to “point out the angry white faces, ask the children how it makes them feel, create a nonverbal sign for injustice,” Steenman said.
“There’s a lot of things to learn about the story of Ruby Bridges,” Steenman noted, such as the bravery of the little girl, as well as people who are on the wrong side of history, people who are on the right side of history, the story of redemption in the form of the Civil Rights Act, and the healing of America, she noted.
“None of that’s taught. Instead, a second-grader is going to go home and say and remember that the angry white people wanted to kill her—that’s what’s going to stay in their brain. And they’re going to look at the color of their own skin, and associate themselves, and that’s where you get shame in a child.”
Children at a young age won’t likely have a full appreciation for the time that has passed, or an understanding of the historical context, Steenman said.
Steenman, a former Air Force officer, pointed out that the teaching of CRT at work, at corporations, and government institutions targets adults who have had plenty of time to learn to think rationally and critically and judge it themselves. “But when you start putting this stuff in front of kindergarteners, first graders, second graders who have not achieved critical thinking yet—they really are a defenseless target,” she said.
In addition, Steenman said that children in the fourth grade who are exposed to age-inappropriate material and subjects such as rape, murder, and arson suffer psychological damage and can easily be traumatized.
Testimonies Steenman received from first- and second-graders included a child being ashamed of their skin color and another child saying that their family members should be killed because they were white.