In a recent in-service training session, Williamson County Schools’ teachers were presented with a video titled “Cultural Competency Series Module Three.”
“Today we will be discussing privilege,” the unnamed narrator begins; adding:
Our goals for today will be to begin to recognize the construct of privilege and its implications.
I want to emphasize the word ‘begin,’ and encourage you to use this module as a springboard for further reading, discussions and reflection.
Our second goal is for you to have built confidence in your ability to engage in courageous conversations about privilege.
If we as educators do not build our capacity to discuss challenging topics with our colleagues, how can we teach those skills to our students?
Our norms for these modules are, as always, to limit our distractions and to commit to our own personal learning and growth.
As The Tennessee Star reported Tuesday:
The 26-minute in-service training video, the third in a series about cultural competency, profiles several people whom the video describes as “Williamson County Voices.”
The video does not identify anyone, nor does it make clear if these people are school system employees or county residents not formally affiliated with the school system. One man, though, identified himself as a school administrator.
The Tennessee Star obtained the video on Tuesday through an open records request submitted to the Williamson County School System that was submitted on February 19.
“Pursuant to Tennessee’s Public Records Act, [we are] writing to request a video shown to teachers Monday, Feb. 18, 2019, during an In-Service Day at Thompson’s Station Elementary School,” The Star wrote in an email to the Williamson County School Systems.
The Williamson County School System complied with that request by providing The Star with a CD copy of the video on Tuesday. The Star is in the process of making the full video available for its readers in YouTube format, which we expect to accomplish before the end of this week.
Watch the full video:
The woman at 3 minutes speaks of privilege. But, she says she is more fortunate than others… So they turn this into WHITE privilege, why? I’m white and I was homeless 9 years ago. Lived in Chicago and I was segregated against. This is just another video from the Obama era of education trying to make our kids RACIST, when they are naturally NOT!!!
No wonder the kids graduating from public schools are so stupid – this is what is filling their heads instead of actual knowledge.
It is criminal what these liberal schools are doing to this nation – instead of an educated workforce, you have victims of some perceived problem, dividing people and creating hatred towards others.
Our schools are intentionally turning out idiots that MUST rely on the government for everything because they have no skills to be productive. Don’t believe me? How many kids are working minimum wage jobs because the European Art Appreciation masters degree is worthless – but they didn’t have the skill set to get a real degree because their time in high school wasn’t filled with scary things like math but someone telling them they can’t get a head because someone else has a magical privilege.
God help our country.
[…] The video is available to watch here. […]
[…] The Star secured a copy of Module 3 of this series last Tuesday, a 26 minute video which can be seen in its entirety here. […]
It is clear that the 2 teachers who lost their jobs were just doing the job they were asked to do. Ironically, the video calls for being ‘courageous’ when calling out ‘privilege’. Yet, when the little skit proved unpopular, the school superintendent sacrificed the teachers instead of taking any blame for the problem. That is pretty typical for him.
Thank you for showing the above video from Williamson County School System. Since I saw nothing offensive about the video, I don’t see what the fuss is all about. I have attended similar workshop audio-visual and live-sensitivity workshops on race, gender, class, ethnic, sexual orientation, and other prejudices and I saw nothing that would offend anybody. So, why the fuss?
In all fairness, everyone indoctrinates. Families, churches, and even schools indoctrinate. However, public schools have been turned into government schools taking communities and their families out of deciding how their children will be educated — another intentional move on the part of humanist elites who consider themselves worthy of saving the masses from themselves. The quicker the sleeping general public awakens, the sooner we can return to the honest practice of education which involves grammar (reading, writing, arithmetic), logic (exploring the questions “why” and “how” through various proven disciplines of academia), and rhetoric (the art of articulating findings through proven disciplines of research and discovery). In true educational rubrics, exercises/illustrations highlighted in this article would be considered illegitimate to the point of having no foundation upon which conclusions can be drawn. There is a reason logic is rarely taught in public schools anymore. The thinking student would then be able to recognize this sort of societal, although baseless, indoctrination. They would recognize all of the fallacies… from the actual instruction for participants to react to how they feel rather than what they know, to the erroneous presentation of the word privilege as something that is given rather than earned. The narrator actually purports “feeling uncomfortable can pave the way for critical thinking”. What a disservice to all of our students… privileged or not!
Great comment. You are on a whole different level expecting logical fallacies to be taught and recognized by students of the government schools. That would be akin to teaching students entrepreneurial skills. We teach kids how to work for Sam Walton, not how to become the next Sam Walton. All you have to do is look at the corporate welfare that is doled out and those industries are the same ones that public secondary education is steered toward. Same as public schooling was in its inception over 100 years ago with Carnegie and Ford – we only need competent assembly line workers – but get the rest of the public to pay for their training.