The term “collectivism” is one I know well from my tenure as a Providence school teacher. Back in 2021, teachers at my school, Esek Hopkins in Providence, Rhode Island, were given new DEI pedagogy to use in the classroom. We were told to embrace a concept called the “Whole Child” and to familiarize students with the term “collectivism”.
It wasn’t long before I noticed that “collectivism” had far reaching consequences that meant the abandonment of American values, history, and literature. It was pressed upon teachers and staff that all students “belonged” to the school. Policies usurping parental authority were created, classic literature was thrown out into dumpsters at the back of the school. Absent from my curriculum and classroom library were my books on the Holocaust like Anne Frank and classic American novels like James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare and many more.
In place of the classics we were mandated to use curriculum platforms that included hundreds of cartoon paperbacks with zero literary merit, instead the books mocked America and reflected racial division, class division and religious division.
The American flag was disappearing from the classroom, while flags from other countries were flown.