TUSD class divides educators/community
Tom Horne came to tell reporters he thinks the ethnic studies program has racial undertones. At times during his own press conference, the superintendent of Arizona schools could barely finish a sentence.
“This is the rudeness they’re taught in ethnic studies. They didn’t learn that at home from their parents, they learned it from their ethnic studies teachers to be rude in that way,” he says.
“They teach them that they are oppressed. Instead of teaching them as their parents and grandparents believe we came to this country because it’s the land of opportunity,” he says.
Between interruptions from supporters of the program, he read from class textbooks.
“They teach the kids they live in occupied Mexico, they quote as a role model a guy who says ‘kill the gringos,” Horne says.Horne: Let me start out by talking philosophy for a second. My philosophy and I believe the American philosophy is what is important about people is their individuality – what people can do, what their knowledge is — their ability to appreciate beauty, their character – and not what racial group they happen to have been born into. I believe it is wrong to divide students up by their ethnicity and teach them separately according to ethnicity.
…Raza means race in Spanish and on the TUSD Web site they say their primary textbook is the Pedagogy of Oppression.
…they should be taught that if they work hard they can achieve their goals, and not that they are oppressed… One of the textbooks is Occupied America and Occupied American holds out as a role model somebody named Jose Gutierrez — they describe as …indispensable. In one of his speeches he said we are fed up, we are going to move to do away with the injustices to the Chicano and if the Gringo doesn’t get out of our way we will stampeded over him. He called on them to kill the Gringo…
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