The Black Lives Matter-fueled social justice and diversity mob came for major academic publisher Pearson, which acquiesced to their demands of reforming their publishing guidelines.
Inside Higher Ed reported that the company, based in London, United Kingdom, is making an effort to “promote diversity and avoid propagating harmful stereotypes.” The new guidelines said that these steps will “address systemic racism in education.”
Pearson claimed that its guidelines will help authors, reviewers and editors “create meaningful representations of minorities and challenge racial stereotypes” in all of Pearson’s education content. Pearson noted that these changes will likely affect its “courseware, digital materials, services, qualifications and assessments.” Pearson is a major teaching credentialing service in the U.S., which means that potential teachers in the U.S. must take a Pearson-administered test at a Pearson testing center to become a certified teacher.
In short, these changes will affect the content that U.S. teachers will have to study for their certification exams. It begs the question of whether Pearson’s changes will usher in a new brand of left-wing dogmatic indoctrination.
The guidelines focused on five “main challenges” of “underrepresentation of minorities, exaggerated negative associations, limited positive associations, missing stories, and the idea that disadvantages are personal, rather than systemic.” Nowhere in Pearson’s announcement did it define systemic racism, which is a left-wing buzzword used to promote social justice and diversity efforts in corporations, higher education, and now, K-12 education.
Education has long been a hub of left-wing indoctrination, but Pearson’s announced changes could enshrine them for generations to come.
