Is this the beginning of the end for the oppressor-oppressed binary in K-12 education?
Now that it’s being recognized as a form of knowledge poisoning, this question is finally gaining some traction.
This isn’t about minimizing racialized injustices in our history. But over the last several decades, the oppressor-oppressed framework has been centered as the sacred altar of California’s equity pedagogy. It divides humanity into two structurally preprogrammed moral categories, based on each group’s relationship to grievance.
Packaging everything into this closed ideological system is a neat trick. By prohibiting any question or challenge, it instrumentalizes children for the goals of its adult enforcers.
If a child’s actual identity doesn’t fit neatly into one category, too bad. They can either accept the label they’re assigned or be banished as complicit with oppression.
This is a weaponization of children’s biological and psychological needs for belonging.
For at least 150 years, high school has served a key developmental function for teenagers. It’s the one supervised space where adolescents can practice being proto-adults — the place where they can fail with limited consequences and be encouraged to try again; the place where they can learn to navigate complex social hierarchies; the place where they can develop their capacity to make sustained effort over time and benefit from delayed gratification; and the place where they can encounter others unlike themselves and learn how to collaborate with them in a diverse pluralistic democracy — even if they are peers or supervisors they don’t necessarily like.
From a developmental standpoint, the child’s number one goal is to find a sense of belonging in this world, and this psychological truth is baked into the structure and function of public education. For a child, any threat of rejection or expulsion from social systems feels existential. That’s why teenagers are so easily manipulated into imitating what they see on TikTok. It’s also why they view their phones as existential lifelines.
There are two basic pathways for cultivating this sense of belonging among adolescents in schools: the “building” pathway and the “blaming” pathway.
The building pathway is the path of knowledge development — learning to focus on what can be known and discovered about reality. It establishes social cohesion by encouraging students to learn together how to discover for themselves what is true and how to build on it. The building pathway celebrates individual talents and how they can benefit both the individual and the community as a whole.
The blaming pathway is more ancient, more primal. It focuses on activating obedience to an identity-based ideology that can never be questioned. Rather than offering a place for everyone based on their uniqueness, the blaming pathway threatens expulsion for anyone who refuses to fit into it.
Whatever its initial intent, the oppressor-oppressed framework has created a situation in which the legal violations being documented and judged by the state are being caused by the pedagogical framework that the state itself promotes.
The fact that children are biologically and psychologically programmed to experience the threat of rejection as an existential threat is a boon for the oppressor-oppressed system within California education. It’s also why it’s pointless to survey students about how they “feel” about courses that are based on the oppressor-oppressed binary. The system reliably triggers the compliance response every single time, even when it’s anonymous. It has an internal self-policing power.
Whatever its initial intent, the oppressor-oppressed framework has had the effect of systemically contaminating the information ecosystem in education. It has introduced a closed-loop ideology as its premise; then it short-circuits the knowledge infrastructure, and finally, it forbids any analysis or challenge. This is flooding our classrooms with biased, partial, and distorted claims, all wrapped in the language of human rights and inclusion. It’s crazy-making.
It’s also antithetical to actual education. As we are seeing, it corresponds with a rise in violence, dehumanization, and demonization — both inside the classroom and beyond. And yet, it has established itself as the foundation of equity pedagogy in California public schools for decades.
And that’s what makes the current moment’s revelations in California education law both wild and unavoidable.
Based on recent legislative and legal developments — including the fight over AB 715 and the recent Brandeis Center lawsuit against the state of California for systemic antisemitism — it now appears that California has mandated two state-level frameworks that are entirely incompatible with each other.
One is a pedagogical mandate requiring the use of the oppressor-oppressed framework as the only acceptable premise in its courses and pedagogy. And the other is the state’s binding legal framework for protecting civil rights in K-12 education — a framework that defines and prohibits discrimination on the basis of membership in a protected category, including discriminatory hostile environments.
Districts, educators, and administrators are finding themselves caught between these two conflicting impulses, with the nondiscrimination framework increasingly having legal force that the pedagogical framework is crashing into.
So what makes this more than a garden-variety difference of opinion?
As the Brandeis lawsuit shows, this is no longer just a matter of two philosophical approaches being in conflict.
It’s a situation in which the actual legal violations being documented and judged by the state are being caused by the very same pedagogical framework that the state itself promotes.
And the evidence of this mess is the California Department of Education’s own paper trail of legal decisions against its own school districts.
Uh oh, Batman.
The paper trail is both significant and ironic because it is itself the evidence of the incompatibility. Literally.
Each appeal decision shows the CDE judging that classroom implementations of its own policies in over 1,000 school districts are repeatedly resulting in unlawful discrimination, particularly through antisemitic hostile environment claims. The state’s own pedagogical strategies are causing illegal outcomes and harms when implemented in classrooms.
This is a much thornier problem than a mere disagreement over the use of the oppressor-oppressed binary. We’ll have to see how this all plays out.