The students who sit under English teacher Marta Shaffer at Oroville High School in California would expect to learn upper-level writing skills and reminders about grammar rules. According to Shaffer’s own TikTok video, the white teacher is attempting to address “white supremacy and misogyny and colonization” in her class by ignoring basic English grammar and syntax.
“These are all made-up rules,” she says, giving the example of a classroom assignment that requires students to create a thesis and cite essay sources. “They were created by Westerners in power.”
Those rules are “arbitrary,” she goes on to say.
Horace Cooper, of Project 21, says the students in Shaffer’s classroom are depending on her to succeed in life.
“A young person sitting in that classroom,” he tells AFN, “is getting the information and knowledge they are going to need, when they finish school, to be independent citizens.”
Instead, he warns, as long as Schaffer is teaching, those students are being failed by a woke social-justice warrior dreaming of a brave new world that is free of patriarchy and racism.
Others have tried to create that utopia in the past, Cooper points out, and society suffered from it.
“You can try to overwhelm the system so that hard work no longer applies. You can try to overwhelm the system so that sacrifice isn't rewarded,” he says. “But what you end up with is Latin America or South America.”
According to a Fox News story about Shaffer, she sympathized with minority students who struggle with unfair expectations to speak properly in a white-dominated culture. So she dedicated a classroom unit to discussing “how we talk rather than teaching students how to write properly.”
According to Cooper, who has endured hardships for his right-leaning views, he is not backing down from a culture that disapproves of his personal beliefs.
“There appears to be an ongoing effort, to create the impression,” he says, “that all you have to do is look at someone’s skin color and you already know what their particular ideological or political leanings are.”
