In his excellent book, The Marxification of Education — reviewed in Education Reporter last November— author and mathematician James Lindsay, Ph.D exposes Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire’s considerable influence on American education during the past 40 years. While Freire died in 1997, his destructive pedagogy is alive and well today in classrooms across the nation, essentially holding that the role of an educator is to teach students to become dutiful Marxist revolutionaries.

One example of this philosophy in practice recently came to light in a post on X by parent Ramona Bessinger, which exposes the K-12 “Wit and Wisdom” curriculum in North Kingstown, Rhode Island’s 8th-grade English Language Arts (ELA) class. Purportedly available nationwide, Bessinger cautions that it may be known by different names in different areas of the country.

A photo of “Lesson 26” is immediately telling, with a title asking: “How do teens effect social change?” Bessinger explains that students are to “identify elements of effective strategies for social change from [assigned] articles, such as getting a large number of people involved in a social change movement instead of reading vetted literature.”

One of the posted pages instructs students to write “a one-sentence description of Malcolm Gladwell’s point of view of social media as a strategy for creating social change....” Gladwell is a Canadian journalist and author who in the year 2000 published the first of his seven books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. The book is a recipe for making sweeping social and cultural changes using small and seemingly inconsequential means. At a glance the book does not appear to be overtly controversial, but the question is why 8th-graders are being directed to put their efforts behind exploring the “how” of social activism rather than studying examples of English literature to which they should rightfully be exposed at this point in their education.

Bessinger posted an 8th-grade grammar lesson, “Experiment with Gerunds,” that embeds the word “uprising” in various contexts. She observes: “There is no part of a child’s education that is not influenced by social justice ideology. Every moment a child is at school is filled with DEI indoctrination. If you wonder where the hate and violence come from, look at K-12 education, then blame the U.S Department of Education along with the AFT (American Federation of Teachers).”

A lesson for small groups requires another Malcolm Gladwell reading (this time from his essay, “Small Change”) which involves discussing the topics of “strong-tie activism,” “high-risk activism,” “motivation and participation,” “traditional activism,” and “social media activism.” Bessinger notes that these “are taught to 13- and 14-year-old children. By the time [they] get to college, they are pros at activism and discrimination. This is all your child does at school. Everything revolves around protesting.”

An “Explore Content Vocabulary” lesson features the word “radicalized.” Discussions of related words and terms build on this chosen word, including “sit-ins,” described as a technique for protesting and creating change; “spread,” — ideas and actions that spread social change from person-to-person and group-to-group; “joined,” — as in people who join a group can make a difference; “fever,” meaning that “the message of social change can spread like a fever.”

Bessinger says in her district of North Kingstown, 14-year-old students “are taught to use social media or a ‘sit-in’ style protest as a possible way to be an effective activist.” She notes that several other curriculum platforms offer the same content but have different names; for example, the American Reading Company. “[The platform] may have a different name, or be arranged differently,” she adds, “but the themes are always the same: racial division, hate, activism, anti-Americanism, collectivism, or communism, etc. It’s important to look closely at the content because they change names and rebrand.”

As may be expected, Bessinger’s post attracted attention and reader comments. One mother responded: “None of this content has anything to do with ELA ...unbelievable... the public education system is circling the drain.” Another commented: “20 years ago public schools started having more teacher development/service days. I questioned it at the time. Now it all adds up. It takes time to get where we are today.”

Tennessee parents file suit

Parents in Tennessee confirm there is much more to Wit and Wisdom than Bessinger’s informative post conveys. In July 2022, the pro-parent advocacy group Parents Choice Tennessee filed suit against the Williamson County School District for adopting the curriculum, alleging, among other things, that the district’s action thwarts state law.

A press release announcing the lawsuit stated: “The curriculum was adopted through a process in violation of state law, and over the objections of several parents and educators who raised serious concerns about the graphic, racist, and age-inappropriate nature of much of its content.”

The group charges that Wit and Wisdom:

• Uses Social Emotional Learning to masquerade as a sort of “feel good” approach that steers young elementary-age children to horrific discussions of the savagery of slavery, war, misery, sexual aggression, and death. Wit and Wisdom is conditioning our children to view the world through the eyes of a critical theorist which is destructive and divisive. It’s very clear that this failed curriculum focuses more on political literacy instead of literacy. Not only has Williamson County failed to protect our children from this harmful material, they have also failed to protect our teachers by instructing them to teach this questionable and destructive material with fidelity or else.

An article in the The Daily Wire further described the curriculum as containing “reoccurring emotionally-charged themes which include: suicide ideation, cannibalism, oppressed people of color, oppressive white people, extreme emotion, graphic death, dark imagery, anti-family, anti-American, and anti-church and religion.” The lawsuit charges that Wit and Wisdom “has age-inappropriate topics which include: murder, graphic mating, gender fluidity, anti-authority, torture, rape, adultery, scalping/skinning of humans, stillbirth, excessive gore, excessive violence, drunkenness, and promiscuity.”

The lawsuit seeks a motion for a temporary injunction against the Commissioner of Education and the Williamson County Board of Education to prevent further approval of the curriculum, including “implementation, training, classroom use or instruction of children using curricular materials published by Great Minds and known as Wit and Wisdom pending the further orders of this Court.”

In support of the motion, the plaintiffs submitted several affidavits, including one from James Lindsay, which describes in detail how Wit and Wisdom is based on the Marxist pedagogy of Paulo Freire, and demonstrates how the curriculum of each subject is specifically tailored to do so using a “generative concepts” approach to the lessons. He explains that this approach “is being utilized any time the general curriculum is being skewed to present a ‘hidden’ (usually very thinly veiled) political lesson as either the secondary or de facto primary purpose of the lesson.”

Tennessee is one of 18 states that currently bans the teaching of Critical Race Theory, but as many parents and educators realize, it often continues to be taught stealthily, such as by incorporation into other lessons. The Parents Choice Tennessee lawsuit charges that the curriculum violates state law banning CRT and Common Core Standards, with which Wit and Wisdom is aligned.

Education Reporter spoke with Larry Crain, Esq., attorney for the parent group, about the current status of the lawsuit. He explained that the case was argued before the Chancery Court for the Twenty-First Judicial District of Tennessee two months ago. “We have no idea when a decision will be handed down,” he concedes, “but the case is still very much alive.”

When asked if the Wit and Wisdom curriculum has been removed, Crain confirmed that it is still being taught in Tennessee schools. “The question,” he said, “is whether or not it will be renewed for next year,” but acknowledged that a ruling in the legal action would likely have an impact on the decision to renew. “It is a horrible curriculum,” he added.

Wit and Wisdom from coast-to-coast

Besides Tennessee and Bessinger’s home state of Rhode Island, the Wit and Wisdom curriculum appears to be taught in various states across the country, among them California, Colorado, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Virginia. Great Minds® bills itself as a group of “K-12 advocates with a passion for knowledge [that] has grown quickly into teams of hundreds of teacher-writers on a mission to elevate education in every classroom.”

The website further claims that “it’s all about building knowledge — not just skills. Building deep, lasting understanding rather than just memorizing.” Some observers might conclude that having kids memorize historical, mathematical, and other educational facts is exactly what Progressive/Paulo Freire educators don’t want them to do. It’s much easier to torment and intimidate children with “knowledge in the context of the real world rather than hypothetical scenarios.”

An October 2022 blog post by writer Keith Callis shed additional light on the Wit and Wisdom curriculum after he obtained materials from Williamson County, Tennessee Moms for Liberty leader Robin Steenman. Callis described Wit and Wisdom as “neither witty nor wise,” and instead called it “cunning”:

• It pits adult sophistication against the susceptibilities and limitations of children. It has been created by people well-trained in effective teaching methods and in an assumption among educationists most often labeled Constructivism, the idea, when coupled with Marxist assumptions, that all values are merely imagined and sustained by powerful social groups. Believed en masse, such values or beliefs become “truth.”

Among his examples, Callis highlighted “a suicidal ideation in a first-grade book titled Brave Irene.” The teacher’s manual asks students to act out the scene of the main character, who gets buried over her head in a snowdrift. The story reads: “Even if [Irene] could call for help no one would hear her. Her body shook. Her teeth chattered. Why not freeze to death, she thought, and let all these troubles end. Why not? She was already buried.” What? This is a story directed at first graders. [Emphasis added.]

According to Callis, another potential suicide appears in the 3rd grade and yet another in 4th grade. In the 3rd-grade text, titled Amos and Boris, a mouse “began to wonder what it would be 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?”

In the 4th-grade selection, “a small child sees his mother’s infidelity. She is kissing a man who is not his father. It devastates him: ‘He wanted to die.... He had gone up on the ridge and taken the hatchet and tried to end it by cutting himself.’

“Madness. A hissing madness that took his brain. There had been nothing for him then and he tried to become nothing but the cutting had been hard to do, impossible to do, and he had at last fallen to his side, wishing for death, wishing for an end, and slept only didn’t sleep.”

It is this type of horror that young children are being exposed to in Wit and Wisdom lessons and texts. Then there are the unrelenting references to racial discrimination and inequality. While Callis concedes that some of the information and images presented in the history lessons contain historical truth, “nothing in this curriculum completes the picture to correct the impressions left on children’s imaginations and emotions. And things have changed. Adults need only to look around to see that violence and racism are simply not omnipresent. But for children it is different. They are impressionable.

“This curriculum is an example of intellectual dishonesty of a very sophisticated but low and debased kind.”

Education Reporter applauds the efforts of whistleblowers like Bessinger and Steenman, and we await the ruling in the Tennessee case against the Williamson County School District for its adoption of Wit and Wisdom.

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