“The ACT Party is calling on teachers and Ministry of Education staff who feel uncomfortable being forced into Critical Race Theory training to reject it,” says ACT’s Education spokesperson Chris Baillie.
“ACT revealed yesterday that more than half of Education Ministry staff have been through a course called ‘Courageous Conversations about Race.’ The course teaches them that “guilt and shame” are natural responses to “white privilege.”
“The American program has been reported as requiring people to stand up and list their privilege. It sounds like something Pol Pot or Mao Tse Tung would require. People must acknowledge they are bad and commit to a new mantra. They should be able to reject it without consequence.
“We’ve also heard of school children who have been asked to acknowledge their ‘white privilege’ in the classroom.
“All New Zealanders should be treated equally, not divided against each other based on who their grandparents were.
“The New Zealand Bill of Rights says: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief, including the right to adopt and to hold opinions without interference.”
“Education Minister Chris Hipkins needs to show leadership and tell the civil service whether these ‘courageous conversation’ re-education boot camps are mandatory, or optional.
“I was a teacher for 22-years and I know the pressure teachers can face.
“If they’re optional, he should make it clear that civil servants should not face any repercussions for refusing to feel ‘shame and guilt’ for things that other people of a different skin colour did in a different century before they were born.
“Who knows, once we have got past political re-education of civil servants and teachers, the Government could focus on getting kids to school and learning useful things. While the Government focuses on importing intellectual fads from America, student attendance and achievement in New Zealand is in free fall. Those declines can’t be caused by racism, unless the Government believes racism has increased on its watch.
“ACT finds it abhorrent that kids may be treated differently by teachers because if their race. It’s time for the Minister to be clear about what the agenda is here.”
K R Bolton said:
The method is called ‘self-criticism’. It is a primary element in brainwashing, used extensively by Jim Jones at his egalitarian utopia; by the Khmer Rouge, Bolshevik Russia and it remains in use in China.
In the West, the same method, also called ‘sensitivity training’, was developed shortly after WWII by the Tavistock Institute, which had begun as a psychological warfare department during the war, and became a fad in the USA during the 1960s. It is used widely in both public and private sectors, and is an integral part of the ‘human relations’ industry.
It 1968 the method was applied to race relations issues in the USA by the authors of the influential book Black Rage, and has since proliferated as a lucrative business, while serving governments to impose their dogmas.
That is the background from which the Institute for Courageous Conversations about Race emerged. It is run by mostly privlieged ‘persons of colour’. The NZ branch of the Institute is partnered with Unitec, and is run by Ripeka Evans, whom some readers might recall was during the 1970s and 80s among the most extreme of Maori, involved with the Maori People’s Liberation Movement of Aotearoa. .
How much ‘courage’ does it take to tow the party line? The name itself is double-think.
Waikanae watchers said:
‘self-criticism’ is also the practice in the land of the other Dear Leader, North Korea.
Joyce Glennie said:
Agree. This nonsense must STOP. This is destroying New Zealand. We are one nation. One people. The government must stop this racial divide.
Joyce Glennie said:
Good one ACT party. EXCELLENT David Seymour. You have my vote in the next elections. The Labour party and our Dear Leader must be stopped! The future of NZ and our democratic freedoms must be returned before Labour turns NZ into a fascist communist state