When I was in high school they put stickers on my biology textbook telling me that evolution was just a theory. Teachers often chose to skip teaching evolution because either they didn't believe in it or wanted to avoid being political. This was still true a few years later when I returned to teach in that same district.
When I was in high school, 9/11 happened. The school took every measure that day to pretend that it didn't happen. The front office turned off the TV and internet to the whole building. They cut off outside phone lines. For a brief time they even stopped parents from picking their kids up, but backed down after the line of parents got pretty big. In the pre-smartphone era, we students didn't know much at all about what was happening that day. And on subsequent days nobody discussed the terrorist attacks *in class*. Teachers were forging ahead with their curricula but in the spaces and times between classes and after school, kids talked and came to their own conclusions.
What we're concerned about here is schools using their power to present one specific view of the world as fact. While this is largely unobjectionable in a math or a science class where the systems of thought are meant to rigorously contest and evaluate knowledge, classes about history or literature have to deal with much more latitude. There's not a single correct way to read a book. Historical events, though they may be concrete facts in the abstract sense, take on different meanings depending on how you look at them. (I'd make a side note that sometimes we don't present math and science as anything other than a collection of facts, which is also a disservice to students!)
Matt covers this idea in his post when he discusses how an economic historian might view the Regan era different from a how Delgado and Stefancic viewed it. To me, teaching into these differences is the key to teaching students how to think. It is precisely the disputes and controversies and messy political stuff that makes us come to an understanding of the present moment. This doesn't mean we should force children to accept the ideas of CRT or American Exceptionalism but that we should let them make their own analyses and decisions about what to believe and why. Denying them that chance is every bit as political and, I'd argue, teaches students NOT to think and just to accept what's presented.
I was taught not to think about evolution and learned only later that it is the lynchpin on which all of modern biology turns. I was taught not to ask about current events in school and ended up spending a lot of time believing America was in a war of civilizations with Islam. As I grew up, I learned that I was taught not to ask a lot of questions but to, instead, focus on my work and learn quietly. While that made me a successful student, it did very little to prepare me to encounter people who thought and acted differently from myself. It made me confused, easily offended, offensive, and close-minded. Now, I can't lay this 100% at my school's feet as my family and community often played a large role here, too. But school could have offered a constructive counterpoint to a very different "totalizing vision" and it did not.
Choosing to avoid teaching controversial, political topics is still a political act informed by an ideology of false neutrality. It is a disservice to our students and does not help them learn to think so much as shuts down inquiry and tells them that school has nothing to do with the real world.
"This doesn't mean we should force children to accept the ideas of CRT or American Exceptionalism but that we should let them make their own analyses and decisions about what to believe and why"
I think this is very reasonable, and I would be fine with sending my kids to a school taking this type of approach. However, my understanding is that there are almost no schools that are "teaching the controversy" with respect to social justice/racial issues. To the extent that these topics are covered, they are covered almost exclusively from the perspective of the so-called anti-racist school of thought.
Hand raised - my (private) school does it from this perspective. Mostly because me and a colleague were given carte blanche to redesign a year of the curriculum.
I don't know if this is or is not the case. I am not sure the data exists to support that claim either way. Certainly there are many schools where there's a kind of CRT-induced absolutism. Certainly there are many schools where there is not.
I know that my prior district does not have a particular stance on CRT, anti-racist pedagogy, or BLM and that teachers and schools in that county are largely left to make these decisions for themselves. It's led to some heated exchanges between teachers who disagree about how all this should go down (this is all word of mouth from teachers I still keep in touch with, so keep that in mind as it's all anecdata).
Schools in the US are incredibly heterogenous and are heterogeneous even from classroom to classroom, so even schools that take up CRT-inspired reforms are bound to look very different. As a commenter elsewhere in this section noted, his children's experiences in schools in red states seemed quite normal compared to, say, what I've shared about my experiences and fly in the face of seeming blue-state stereotypes of red state education.
Wish I had more likes for your post! Particular "100" moments were math and science being taught as facts not theories, the importance of teaching kids how to think, and the big one, that being successful in school for you went hand in hand with being close minded. Thanks for sharing!
Nailed it. My 8th grade social studies teacher unironically called it the war of northern aggression. She proudly stated that her family had owned human beings right in our very county.
I remember a field trip to the Atlanta Cyclorama, a large 360 degree painting of the battle of Atlanta. Famously, it was repainted upon arrival in Atlanta to show a Confederate victory, something I only learned much later. They even had old recordings of Confederate veterans narrating their valor and bravery. And that was THE perspective on the Civil War. It was brave but misguided patriots fighting for their way of life against overwhelming odds.
The main thing I remember about reconstruction was that the freed slaves were portrayed as being worse off as sharecroppers who could no longer rely on the beneficence of the former masters for shelter and sustenance. That's it. Nothing about Freedmen's Bureaus, Jim Crow, the 13th, 14th, 15th amendments but lots about new industries and economic rebuilding. I believe the unit was called something like Phoenix Rising.
Nobody ever wanted to talk about the Quarters Road in our town or the nearby large stately home with the tall ionic pillars. It was Coca-Cola, the 1996 Olympics, paper products, the "New South",
Ah. Your Atlanta seems to be not that different from the way it was when I visited my grandparents there around 1970, in spite of all the massive growth and Yankee immigration since then. Though the term then was still "The War Between the States." While there I enjoyed the cultural benefits of a visit to Stone Mountain. My mother is old enough to remember crosses being burnt there.
Lots of this: "In Marietta, returning Confederate soldier James Remley Brumby dreamed of a better future and started making rocking chairs. The chair company grew to become Marietta’s largest employer."
And this from the teacher's guide: "The state suffered a dramatic population change as one out of five Georgians who went to war never came back. This meant the workforce was greatly diminished. The formerly fertile land was devastated and laid waste, leaving minimal space for farming. There were not enough people to work the land, because the slaves were free, but homeless. There was no money, because Confederate money was worthless, and that was all some Southerners had. At the start of Reconstruction, Georgia had lost 75% of its wealth because of the Civil War."
A bit more even than I remember it but still simplistic, even for 8th graders. Could have been updated in the last 20-odd years or it might have been my teacher's spin on things.
Oh man, and we totally went to the The Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History in Kennesaw (a city where every household is required to own a gun). I think we even watched The Great Locomotive Chase Disney movie in class. (I just checked, like Song of the South, the Great Locomotive Chase is not available to stream on Disney+, hmmmm.)
Point is, my education was stilted, to say the least.
This kind of stuff is not limited to the South. I was required to take Kansas history at times; the elementary school version started after the Native Americans magically disappeared, the pioneers were just out there in Indian-free land doing their American thing. Later on we visited the State Capitol in Topeka and were shown the John Steuart Curry murals of John Brown, but not a word about who he was or what he did or about Bleeding Kansas generally. Not appropriate for schoolchildren I guess.
This has happened to anyone who's read Little House on the Prairie, a series of books where the author pretends her family wandered into the uninhabited Midwest and built a house there, when in fact they were settlers in some native guy's backyard.
I mean I don't know if you are trying to be tongue in cheek but my one experience with "woke training" (a one week residential experience training educators to run diversity seminars) reminded me so so much of the evangelical conferences I went to as a teen it was eerie. Woke organizers were explicit: creating "intentional emotional disequilibrium" was the goal. Lots of staring at awful truths of structural injustices, kind of like hearing a sermon about Jesus suffering on the cross.
I tried to talk to people there about it, but as may not be surprising the overlap in communities was not large. Best comment I got was "well but this (woke training) is for a good cause". Hmm. I'm still not sure what to think. Right goal wrong methods?
Evangelicals of any belief system terrify me. Sadly, proselytization has proven to be a very effective meme (in the Richard Dawkins meaning, not the funny internet image sense) transmission vector. Zealots have the greatest incentive to spread their beliefs as loudly as possible.
Ummmm, faith without works is dead also feels like a very Protestant thing to say (in the context of saying that the congregation should be doing things, tbc, not in the context of saying that works create salvation).
I do think we're re-enacting many of the American theological debates of the 19th century with a 21st century twist. Nothing exact coming to mind right now, but felt that way in a DEI training I was in last year.
And an amendment on your comparison of Protestant vs Catholic, different Protestant traditions have very different takes on works vs faith. Several Protestant traditions put lots of emphasis on works, not just faith.
So, so many thoughts on this topic. I will try to keep it brief as I am supposed to, like, work for a living doing other things.
I'm one of the people who started proselytizing about anti-racism last year in my place of work (not a school). My core motivation was that systemic racism was perpetuated by too many white people not caring enough about fixing it, and therefore it was a hearts & minds campaign so that they would choose to support more compassionate policies, which in my mind, were obviously the ones proposed by the Democratic Party. In retrospect, part of the subconscious appeal of this worldview was feeding my prior bias that the only reason someone would support Trump is they were unacceptably racist, and morally inferior. So while I find the businessman-passing-the-homeless-guy story very interesting, it's not out of whack with my prior thinking--I thought, once he sees the homeless person as his equal, he would certainly support effective policies to help the homeless, which are obviously the left-leaning ideas. In retrospect, one of the many flaws in my thinking was that Democratic policies are "obviously" better at addressing structural inequality. I think Dems are genuinely motivated by that goal, yes, but I don't think they're automatically more effective, nor do I think Republican policies are motivated by oppressing people. Anyway, in my mind, if you weren't investing energy in ending racism, you were perpetuating it. And there was only one way to end structural racism: 1. Convince all white people that they are biased against minorities and benefit from everyone else's biases 2. Convince those white people to vote for progressive policies to address structural inequality 3. Wait until enough of the stubborn white people die off and we can have eternal Democratic majorities that turn the country into a multicultural Scandinavian-like paradise for all. 4. Continue to call out white racism wherever we see it to keep stamping out fires, and teach kids early not to be racists.
I had never even heard of CRT until conservative co-workers started sending me Chris Rufo and James Lindsay articles telling me what I was preaching was evil. CR and JL obviously seemed like bigoted white guys to me, but were clearly super upset about something, so these articles just confused me to be honest. The Trump EO was an eye-opener though. Banning racial stereotypes... well shit. I'm not promoting stereotypes, I'm trying to fight them!! My conservative colleagues would say, "but if you suggest all white people are racist, that's a stereotype!" to which I thought quietly, *it's not a stereotype if it's true!* But I had a really hard friggin time explaining to myself why this "truth" was ok to proclaim at work but it was horribly offensive if a colleague brought up "black on black crime rates." The first felt like a necessary step to achieve steps 1-4 above, and the latter felt like it would be perpetuating harmful stereotypes about minorities. It was only when I realized that stereotypes about white people were harmful to the people who hold those stereotypes that I could even entertain the possibility that maybe someone could be racist about white people, and that maybe it was part of the problem.
I now see CRT as something like a powerful microscope used in cancer research. It is a tool, one of many, that can be used to help collect evidence about problems you care about, and possibly highlight which treatments are helping and which are not. The problem is not CRT itself--it's that people have naively assumed that "if everyone could just look through the microscope all the time, we would cure cancer!!" If everyone walked around only using a microscope to see, they'd constantly be confused, obsessed with the little shit, and unable to enjoy life. It is, as they call it, a "lens"- brings some things into focus that were not in focus before. Its power comes from being a complement to other ways of observing. CRT itself rejects the idea of a single objective truth, so why do so many people think that it itself is truth? (Side note, even though I'd never heard of CRT, one of my closest friends teaches in the humanities in a prestigious university system. I asked her, are there any people in your circle who have alternative perspectives on these issues? She said no, 100% of them use CRT. I asked if she thought that was a problem, she said no, we prefer to deal in reality. So, yeah.)
I do think skeptics like Rufo overstate the extent to which CRT is the root of the phenomenon he's opposing. For me, in retrospect, the phenomenon is rooted in the widespread idea that racial disparities are caused/perpetuated by white attitudes, and that if white people could just stop being so racist, things would even out. That stereotypes about white people cause no real harm to society and are even necessary to reduce other harms. That the only reason a white person would be skeptical of the ideas being shared by a person of color is due to the white person's unconscious biases. I am hopeful that others like me who deeply care about addressing racial disparities will come to learn, as I did, hopefully less painfully, that perpetuating biases associated with race does enormous harm to everyone, most especially the people holding those biases.
Final note: I keep trying to get myself to start writing on my own Substack. I will put it out here and if people are interested, maybe that will get me kick-started. postwoke.substack.com
Awesome. Thank you. Your journey parallels my own. Pay attention to the flies in the ointment, wherever we find them. Especially the inconvenient ones!
I always look forward to your comments. I would love to check out your substack, but my Google skills have failed me. I don't know what the etiquette of asking for a link is, is there a title of your substack I can search for?
(Fair warning- there’s nothing there yet. I have a nearly finished draft post about the Atlanta shootings, but haven’t found the time to complete it and the news cycle moved on. I’ll try to get it out this weekend.)
Really interesting comment, and a lot of those questions don't have easy answers, but I think they do have answers. For example:
"My conservative colleagues would say, 'but if you suggest all white people are racist, that's a stereotype!' to which I thought quietly, *it's not a stereotype if it's true!*"
Part of the answer is that everyone is racist (thank you Avenue Q). Second, I don't think we should assume that all stereotypes are bad; the human mind can't function without some use of stereotypes and assumptions. What we want to do is (a) engage more careful thinking, rather than falling back to stereotypes reflexively (thinking about the _Thinking Fast and Slow_ idea hear), second, we want to think about what model of the world is implicit in the stereotype. If the model of the world is, "some groups of people are just naturally better or worse than other groups" we should be fairly skeptical of that model.
If the model is, "everyone absorbs a certain amount of racist and sexist conditioning from the world around us. One element of privilege is being more likely to go through life with one's assumptions unchallenged, and to not be forced to consider the power relations that underlie those assumptions." I think that is a useful model for understanding the world. It isn't flawless, but it does illuminate useful truths.
"But I had a really hard friggin time explaining to myself why this "truth" was ok to proclaim at work but it was horribly offensive if a colleague brought up 'black on black crime rates.'"
It depends on the context in which they bring up "black on black crime rates." Again, what is the implicit model of the world. The most useful that I find is trying to think about ways in which poor communities are often both under and over policed. See, for example this, in which you can see the term "black on black crime" referenced in the headline/URL. https://www.vox.com/2015/9/22/9370549/black-on-black-crime
My point in both of those cases is that (1) it's important to be able to recognize your audience and be able to engage at the level of abstraction appropriate to that interaction. (2) difficult cases are difficult and they may require mulling over for a while and not have a single simple answer. (3) It's rewarding to keep mulling things over and coming back to, "what do I find challenging about this question?" Don't just stop at the first convenient conclusion (4) Difficult questions are rarely settled by empirical evidence (because there's always going to be dispute about how to interpret empirical data) but it's important to be sensitive to the data and to think, "what sorts of data would support or undermine this theory/"
No lie, Avenue Q was a not insignificant formative experience for me.
I totally agree with all you're saying. I think I *thought* I was doing all that, but that I myopically thought that when it came to racism, only white people needed to try harder in this space. And on #3 in particular, I and many white antiracists assumed anything that placed blame on white people was "inconvenient" that we needed to courageously work through, but anything that challenged conventional antiracist thoughts was just racist. And on 4, the ideological conformity in the social sciences has led to a looooot of "junk science" (not maliciously, I think) that serves well for hyperlinks in inflammatory news-pinion pieces but doesn't help bring the clarity needed to prove or disprove one's theory (if one is willing to have their own theory disproved). I hope we can return to some critical thinking in this space.
Has there been any reporting on how the black families in these suburban schools/private schools feel about all of this? I think we’d all benefit from a better understanding of how much of this is a real overreach vs how much is white parents in particular being really uncomfortable when the school talks to their kids about race.
N of 1 from this black parent in a very white liberal suburb: I find the emails from the school about the curriculum to be super woke, overbearing, and generally annoying. But when I talk to my 9 and 7 year old daughters about what they talked about it always seems quite age appropriate and inoffensive, but I still hear some white parents complain about it. So at least in my case it really does seem like they just want to shelter their kids and have the school not talk about race at all.
This case was highlighted by "FAIR," a group of folks trying to push back on this trend that includes a board that I think ranges from "thought provoking heterodox liberals" to "Megyn Kelly." Strange bedfellows? https://www.fairforall.org/fundraiser-for-gabrielle-clark/
It is interesting to me to read all of the reactions from parents here and from those who recall what they learned in 4th grade. My kids have recently gone through elementary, middle school and HS curriculum in 2 very red states and I was pleasantly surprised about how much emphasis on race and racism appeared in those curricula. It was age appropriate, of course, but it was at times pretty harsh. Columbus was not portrayed as some genius explorer nor the Pilgrims as poor souls who just wanted to practice religion in their own way and had this great party with the locals after a long winter. What was being presented was much, much better than the education I got as a kid and led to a lot of good questions around the dinner table. I think a lot of folks in bluer states think red states are just teaching from the same textbooks that were around in the 60s and 70s. I'm just pointing out that that is not the experience of this red-state dad. I'm sure it could be better, but be careful you aren't making stick figures on both sides of this debate.
Thanks to all who "hearted" this note. My observation of my kids' public education in elementary and HS is that it is much, much better than what I had growing up. Much! And that is in all subjects. To add to this observation, I've been teaching college for over twenty years. My freshmen have only gotten smarter each year (or I've just gotten dumber). While some of my colleagues complain about a low work ethic among college students, I think profs too often recall their own study habits and, as I remind them, faculty ain't normal. I am quite hopeful for the future of our country...these kids are smarter than we were. Hopefully they can fix the stuff my generation broke. Just my observations. I think today's students are amazing.
I think it is also helpful to compare schools that are similar. An affluent suburban school in a red state probably looks a lot like an affluent suburban school in a blue state. The parents are probably educated professionals, they are likely political moderates, they are also likely to take a keen interest in their students' classes and curriculum. Schools know this and respond in kind. But compare that to a very different kind of school and you might get a very different answer.
Definitely agree James. Matt was discussing legislation coming from the State level to all schools and in my case both states have a state education board that oversees the main curriculum. But, yes, I agree that local communities influence the schools as well, thanks for pointing that out.
I probably won't articulate this very well, but so much of the CRT controversy exists among the Very Online. To a person, the loudest advocates for the boogeyman CRT stuff in classrooms are also the people who are aggressive Twitter users, posting long Kendi-esque anti-racist screeds on facebook, sharing boilerplant defund the police stuff, etc. They're loud, they know how to organize an online mob, and they love a good clapback.
While the Very Online have a loud megaphone, I think it's becoming more obvious that they are still outnumbered politically by the Not Very Online, as evidenced by the convincing Biden primary win, and even Trump gains among hispanics and Blacks in 2020. It jives with the divergence of what Very Online racial justice activists want and what actual people who are Black or other racial groups want.
All of which is to say, delete your social media accounts, and write an email to your school administrators, your school board members, your town councilors. You can't get cancelled if you aren't online *taps forehead meme*
"You can't get cancelled if you aren't online *taps forehead meme*"
That's not true. There are numerous stories of people losing their jobs for activity that was not online. And some of that activity was from years ago.
One hesitation to writing legislators and school administrators is that most if not all of that communication is recorded publicly. While it may not show up on someone's newsfeed, it's still out there, and it's attached to your name, district, etc.
Activists that subscribe to CRT ideology never debate ideas. Does Ibram Kendi ever debate? Does he really believe ? It’s hard to tell when he is charging schools five figures for zoom calls. It’s hard to take said school administrators serious when they have five figures lying around and could donate it to another school in need. Seems to be a get rich ploy for the woke.
The people who support IK and Robin Diangelo would be outraged if schools were paying Ben Shapiro 20k for zoom calls.
Material interests at its finest. I know that county. In recent years, it has been flooded with underprivileged students from surrounding counties, driven out by aggressive ICE policies. When the pandemic shut down schools, it was clear these kids were going to lose big unless the county was very focused on tracking them. I don't hear a word about door-to-door visits as I do for other districts with similar populations. The most they get is a week's worth of packaged food because they're missing their free lunch--and you can believe there was grumbling among pseudo-progressives that the focus should be on getting their own kids back in the classroom. Kendi getting $20K is yet another example of white self-soothing when it comes to facing racial disparities.
This doesn't seem too bad. If I read the contract correctly, he's supposed to talk to 1,500 people, presumably adult school employees. That's about $13.33 per person.
This post sort of weirdly dances around the object level issue, and I kind of don't understand why. It's true that real CRT has a lot of genuine insight to offer. It's also true that conservatives straw-man CRT as "that woke stuff that's happening in our kids schools and on twitter".
However, that doesn't change the fact that there is a thing happening in schools and on Twitter that is extremely toxic and dangerous, even if that thing is only loosely related to genuine academic CRT. While I think any article on this subject should call out the fact that conservatives are getting it wrong, and lots of aspects of CRT are valuable and revelatory, it seems weird to focus on those aspects at the expense of the very harmful ideologies that are permeating elementary schools.
I'd love to see a world where we can all sip lattes and discuss the real ideas of merit underlying intersectionality theory, or the nuances of more consequentialist speech regulation. However, it seems like priority number one pretty clearly ought to be removing the people promoting this bastardized version of CRT from positions of power, especially over the developmental process of young children, as quickly as humanly possible.
I had a fascinating discussion with some friends who work in public education in a ritzy-ish blue state suburb (both nonwhite, a principal and a SPED teacher). We were talking about the school board's decision to hire an executive-level administrator whose job was to improve education for black and brown students. Their general attitude was that
1) They wouldn't hire a POC for the position for unspecified reasons
2) Even if they did, the position was a pointless fig leaf that wouldn't do anything to address racism
I responded that I got where they were coming from, and they might be right about the POC thing. But I generally thought that when you hire a high ranking person whose only job is to make sure that something important happens, that is at minimum, a strong material signal of intent that would create at least a nonzero chance that the relevant thing would in fact happen. After all, wouldn't the board be monitoring this person's progress and evaluating their work?
Shockingly, they basically looked kind of puzzled and then said "Yeah, that's a good idea they should totally think of a way to do that".
Coming from the private sector, the idea that you would hire an executive officer in charge of a major policy change and then not actually measure their effect on the outcomes of that policy completely blew my mind.
You don't understand how central offices in schools tend to work. They focus on the paperwork etc and very rarely add value to actual educational practice in the classrooms. Key issue with measuring the effect of anything in education is that it's so hard to do so. See all the controversy with linking teacher pay to performance. If you can't quantify the impact of one teacher, how are you going to quantity a teacher coach or diversity officer?
I think this is exactly right, and in my mind illustrates well why ideas that center on framing social problems primarily through race and racism is a complete logical and political dead end for liberals.
Regardless of whether you agree that race and racism is the best way to think about social problem X that you want to fix, thinking about any actual problem from a racialized perspective necessarily centers everything on an internalized world that is inherently about hidden motives and drivers that nobody can see or quantify. So it's impossible to build consensus around what actions can make any kind of progress, or what progress even looks like.
In education this can arguably make sense because reasonable people disagree about what a well-educated person looks like. But even as the CRT prism contains a lot of good ideas about understanding society, it's completely unworkable for doing anything practical because it traps everyone in this world where we all agree that racism is intolerable and everywhere, but nobody can agree on what racism actually is or what we need to do about it.
That isn't to say that an effective school administrator couldn't make progress around racial disparity- but it means that they need to mostly focus on the disparity part and be rigorous about that.
The conventional wisdom in education seems to be you can’t measure the effect of anything in education. But why? I mean, is that really true?
If you wanted to improve education for students of color, couldn’t you measure improvement with annual standardized testing? Or graduation rates? Mental health or other health metrics? It just doesn’t seem impossible. Just choose what you consider improvement.
Most jobs can be evaluated in terms of whether you are meeting sone criteria of performance.
Or really, if all of those other measures fail you can just articulate some other measure that you believe would be better and then measure it, like they do in literally every other part of human existence.
I'm not saying it's easy- there are lots of cases where measurement of one thing can get in the way of something else that is important. But when something else becomes important you still need to say what it is, and measure that.
I don't think it's true that you can't measure anything. But it's awfully hard to demonstrate much quantitatively. Standardized testing success shows you evidence that a school can teach to a test well, which is different from learning how to learn. Unions certainly play a factor.
I think a lot of decent teachers at great schools think they are amazing. But the problem then comes in, people born on third think they hit a triple. It's hard to do bad teaching with an excellent student body, and decent teaching looks great.
Performance criteria in education thus tends to be what is mentioned in the article - can you tick all the boxes on a state department of education lesson planning form.
It's really weird to note that the main immediate impact of CRT is a wave of advanced classes getting shut down, then to just skip right over that. That's a really important thing! I probably won't change schools based on CRT per se, but if CRT means that they get rid of AP classes then it's off to catholic school for my little ones.
As a physicist and a Democrat, I probably won't move my kids because of CRT...but the elimination of advanced math made me literally gasp like some Victorian pearl-clutcher. Don't touch the math classes you heathens!
I also want more details on this... I think it depends on what "advanced classes" means. If they're going to no longer teach basic calculus in high school, that's incredibly bad.
Getting rid of the difference between Honors Geometry and Regular Geometry, or something like that, seems like it could be defensible though depending on the results.
i actually think compressing algebra 2 and precalculus is a great idea that should be adopted even in districts that do offer algebra/geometry in middle school.
that's worrying. however it looks like they have options to accelerate in high school (summer school, double-math-courses) so it's still possible for advanced students to get to multivariate calculus by senior year.
This seems a bit beside the point. Even if we change CRT back from these virgin middle class minority grievances to chad materialist critiques either way it’s not a suitable fourth grade curriculum.
Matt says kids are curious and race is a part of their lives. True! School is also a place where kids learn to be quiet and focus on something they are not currently interested in.
How much time in the classroom is being spent on this topics and at what age? That seems much more important to me than what nuance of college and post graduate level thought is being lost in these discussions.
The normal fourth grade curriculum is full of politics, though. At least when I was in school it included things like the pilgrim myth, idealization of Chris Columbus, discussion of MLK and the civil rights movement, etc. All of that is part of education for a specific political reason, some of which is even good! But to say that we shouldn't include any discussion of contemporary racial politics seems silly, since the default curriculum *already has* stuff that is related to racial politics.
All that said, we obviously shouldn't be teaching 9 year olds about Frank Wilderson and Afro-pessimism -- fortunately, no one is actually doing that. They are, however, definitely overstepping and saying lots of dumb things (largely because K-12 education curricula design is not done by the cream of the crop in terms of intellectuals) but we do need to reform the way race is discussed in schools and give students a more realistic understanding of the world they are growing up in.
The Pilgrims and Columbus have nothing to do with contemporary race politics unless you view history through the convoluted lens of the 1619 Project. It is incredibly simple to teach America's founding without teaching about White Fragility, and incredily difficult to do that if you're explicitly teaching coursework on CRT.
I don't think that's entirely right. I don't see how you can teach Columbus and the Pilgrims without discussing the fact that by today's standards what they did was fundamentally wrong. The old narrative says that Columbus and the Pilgrims were heroically in the right, because they were colonising empty lands - i.e. empty of people who matter i.e. Native Americans didn't matter (and doubtless other 'lesser' peoples don't matter. The fact that Columbus and the Pilgrims didn't have complex racial ideas like we have today (or the Confederacy had in 1861) doesn't mean that what they were up to wasn't a fundamentally racist thing.
But you really weren't taught that. You were taught that Columbus discovered America, and that maybe there were other claimants to that title. And you were taught that the Pilgrims left England for religious freedom and they were helped by Indians, celebrated in Thanksgiving. There's more of course but that's the general idea. They are never celebrated for what they did to the Indians, and it's absolutely fine to talk about how the Indians were badly treated (and treated the English badly in return). There's nothing controversial about that, it's happened in every war that man has ever fought on any continent. But that's a far cry from saying the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery, or that studying classical music or reading classic books is racist.
This is what I'm talking about though. The Indians weren't 'mutually badly treated' they were *driven off or exterminated*. There's virtually no Native American presence left on the East Coast. Which was not standard practice in wars in Europe. The difference for that is basically racist - even though that's not what it was called at the time.
Also, you do have a bit more to learn about the Revolutionary War. The fact that King George seemed to be serious about his subjects no longer attacking and exterminating the natives to their West, which he had signed treaties with, was a major beef of the colonists and is alluded to in the Declaration of Independence. As for Black views of the Revolutionary War, they probably had a better view of the pro's and con's for them of the Patriots than we do, and they tended to join the King's forces rather than the rebels.
I think you're hitting on one of the core problems with discussions of CRT, the lexicon.
Using the definition of racist that was common not so long ago, you are saying that Native Americans would have been spared by the Europeans had they had white skin, because conquerors sail from Europe intending to rid the world of non-white people.
Using the CRT definition of racism, calling the near extermination of Native Americans racist is a tautology. The only thing that matters is the outcome.
This whole comment threat strikes me as people talking past each other because they can't agree on the definitions of words, let alone what CRT, i.e., what Matt said.
More advanced civilizations driving out less advanced ones isn’t “racist” and had been happening since the dawn of time. If you look around the world, pretty much no country is populated with its indigenous people. That includes Europe. The French, English, Dutch, Italians, Spaniards, etc., all descend from German tribes. The indigenous people like the Picts in Britain are gone. Hell, the native Americans that were here in colonial times themselves supplanted and pushed out precious waves of people who came over the Bearing Strait.
That process is hard to reconcile with modern standard, but it’s how pretty much everyone (not just Americans, but Japanese, Indians, most Europeans, etc.) got to where they are. Framing that ancient process in terms of “racism” is a very peculiar CRT approach.
Are we forgetting the powerful role and agency of the Haudenosanee (the Iroquois Confederacy) for centuries leading up to the Revolution? War between the Iroquois and the Europeans grew to be exterminatory on both sides. It was a joint historical process. Before that, the Iroquois wiped out many other tribes such as the Huron, adopting some members, but killing or enslaving most. Europeans feared and respected them for good reason in this time. They were not passive victims.
Look, Ted, the Founding Fathers were amazing people. They set up the most amazing and successful country on earth. Sure, they had slaves, but they were really nice to them and in their wisdom understood that eventually slavery would end because it was incommensurable with view that all men were created equal. They were just brave enough to let it end naturally and made inspired compromises to form our amazing country. Would you rather they didn't create America? Huh? /s
I find that people who carry on about the 1619 project, like the obtuse Tom Cotton, barely got past the introduction. It's a shame. In my opinion the essays by Stevenson and Muhammad are really important, and for those of us who enjoy popular culture, Wesley Morris is always great. If the alternative is the historian-less 1776 report I know which one I would teach in the K-12 classroom.
The objection to the 1619 project is not the material (which is drawn from great historical work that has been done over many decades by scholars both white and black) but in its ambition to trash and replace (rather than enrich) the American narrative. It is objectionable because it is propaganda, not history. Or so I read it.
Put them both in front of students with a bunch of primary sources and let them evaluate the claims made by each group. Then they're really doing history.
I agree... The NYT team really put their foot in their mouth out of the gate by claiming 1619 was the "true" foundation of America and gave folks like Cotton the strawman they needed. But all of that hoopla overshadowed what was, to me, a truly thought-provoking look at American history through a fresh lens. To view 1619 as "the truth," or that it's all one needs to know about American history, would be silly; it is, however, a fresh perspective on history, and only by looking at events from multiple perspectives we can get something closer to "truth."
The history part of the 1619 project did not strike me as all that groundbreaking, probably because I am a history buff and I already knew most of what was factual about it (there were a lot of dubious claims, but also some good material). For instance, see the Cotton Kingdom and The Warmth of Other Suns, themselves generated by a couple of generations of scholars black and white, who have worked to reveal these essential truths about our past, that are integral to our whole history as a people.
The problematical aspect is to frame all these stories within a histrionic political narrative of black innocence and white oppression, and to build upon it the claim that this is the true, whole, and central story of America. It was unnecessary to do this to serve truth. There is no attempt to witness, persuade or enlighten. There is no desire there to engage. It is purely a provocation. The racial animosity comes off it like heat from a stove.
I myself took deep offense at this, much to my surprise, as I don’t think of myself as a particularly patriotic person. I can only imagine what conservatives think, and how much bitterness this must have aroused against black perspectives throughout the country. In this time of our history, this is a very bad outcome.
The Pilgrims are a tiny portion of the immigrant population to America, who established a small colony that only existed for about 50 years before being absorbed into a much larger colony. They weren't the first settlers in America (as anyone educated in Virginia will tell you!) and nothing happened while the colony existed that would warrant inclusion in a survey course of American history except for storytelling flavor or mythmaking purposes. Which is fine, but inherently political, and no more obviously valid than a 1619-centered curriculum.
"no more obviously valid than a 1619-centered curriculum."
except the 1619 project was factually incorrect. And it's conclusion that America was some big conspiracy against black people unsupported by the evidence.
It was absorbed by a Pilgrim-lite colony aka the Puritans, and spawned other Pilgrim-esque colonies throughout New England. The Jamestown colony was flimsy and inconsequential, whereas the New England colonies drove the development of America.
The Puritans were Pilgrim Max. Tens of thousands of them came in the 1630's in an organized immigration, and as you note they are incredibly important in the history of America. A 1619-centered curriculum is not remotely a replacement.
Pilgrim segment may be a terrible idea, I dunno. But I’m pretty sure it mostly serves as a vehicle for reading, writing, memorizing little details and reciting them at the appropriate time. Maybe it’s a bad vehicle for that. I’m partial to ancient Egypt for 4th graders bc that was the placeholder topic I was taught at that age.
Saying that CRT/race isn't appropriate fourth grade curriculum sounds a lot like the fundies who try to argue that there is no way to teach age-appropriate sex education, or that bringing up the topic of homosexuality is inherently inappropriate around children. You don't need to dive deep into the mechanics of sex to be able to be able to explain to fourth graders that they have private places that no one is allowed to touch. You can read Heather Has Two Mommies to a fourth grader and it is a completely valid and age-appropriate introduction of situations they may already have questions about.
Similarly, you can begin to introduce discussions around race and CRT in an age-appropriate way (there is a concept called "race", while it is often based on certain visible biological features it is not a specific biological feature itself, race has had a major impact in the way some people have been treated better or worse, and while it still has an impact today it is possible for us to change that).
And honestly, if my experience growing up going to mostly-white suburban public schools is any indication, if you don't actually have a curriculum that addresses race for 4th graders, there's a good chance some teachers will end up bringing out their own takes when the kids start asking questions. Those takes are likely to be a lot worse than anything in a CRT curriculum.
The parts of it that are meant to challenge classical liberal ideas and stuff like that make a lot more sense in a college classroom. You can't really challenge ideas with a 4th grader who hasn't even been exposed to the original ideas.
On the other hand, the material analysis is certainly worth teaching. That foreign policy concerns played a role during civil rights is worth teaching to kids
This is why I said what’s important is what’s being taught at what level and how much time is devoted to it. I’m trying to not be like the fundies. I don’t want to say ‘this concept can’t be spoken of in front of fourth graders’ but at the same time it IS important for schools at that age to be very focused on basic skills.
People don’t think there’s no way to have age appropriate sex education. No “fundie” is teaching their kids it’s okay for people to touch their private parts. They just don’t trust secular liberal school boards to do that education.
Yeah, I think there's a difference between teaching the role of race in American life and teaching something akin to CRT. There is lots of evidence that race has played a role in American history and life but a lot of current talk about race in educated progressive circles is theory presented as proven fact. Discrimination, both structural and individual, on the basis of identity is important to understand. CRT and wokeness bring perspectives on that but not definitive answers
I thought his point about forbidding schools from teaching that white people have any sort of privilege was a good one. That’s tantamount to forbidding schools from teaching that racism is a pervasive problem.
a common pattern is that there are these nuanced, interesting ideas about race. but then consultants take them, squash them into bullet points and slide decks, and by the time they reach schools and institutions they no longer make any sense.
Consider that stupid Smithsonian "white culture" chart. There's a reasonable discussion about WASP values in America, how this culture promotes some virtues, suppresses other virtues, also pretends that some arbitrary aesthetic preferences are virtues, and gets more credit than it should for positive characteristics that show up across many cultures.
That could be an interesting essay, but by the time the ideas are boiled down to bullet points listing "facts about whiteness" and sold as a product to an educational institution, it's become quite offensive.
I think this kind of thing must be happening a lot and would explain some of the more bizarre and garbled attempts to address racism in the classroom.
It's all far more of an indictment of the consulting-industrial complex than any of the ideas themselves. I think I line up with Matt here in finding the ideas to be worthy of consideration and capable of expanding one's ability to think, and refusing to engage with an idea or school of thought is nearly always a sign of intellectual weakness. And I frankly don't care if there are public school teachers with radical ideas - that's always been true and always will be.
I get *awfully* bummed out at seeing ideas developed through thousands of pages distilled into two slides full of bullet points, in a deck authored to be monetized whenever tragedy strikes.
Yes! Basically the same thing happened to the common core math curriculum ideas as well. The initial idea is great (there are lots of different ways to solve a problem, you should be able to explain your particular solution). By the time the consultants put it together and teachers teach it it becomes horrible (here is the new way of solving it and now you have to provide exactly this explanation as well).
I think CRT is a menace and it is ripping our overwhelmingly white town apart as the woke whites attack the non woke whites as racist. But this anti-CRT legislation and Matt's reaction to it brings up a broader point, and that is the role of politics in public education. I went to school a long time ago, but it was absolutely not done to talk about any policy topic. Foreign policy, social policy, economics, none of it was discussed. The focus instead was on history, which stopped at the last uncontroversial war, WWII, and civics. Matt's criticism of these anti CRT bills seems to be that a lot of CRT is good and we should just not teach the bad stuff. I disagree and think it's almost all bad but more importantly under no circumstances should stuff like that be taught in a public school to young kids. They will get indoctrinated with CRT in college and in their working careers, when they are at least old enough to reflect on it, and it won't be on the taxpayers' dime. Public school should teach kids how to think about things, not what to think about them.
Was the Civil War about states rights or about slavery? Gotta go pretty far back to find a "non controversial war".
Life is political, so school curriculum should be curriculum. It should not be partisan. A non political curriculum would be dead, lifeless, and irrelevant.
Also, ever year, World War II was longer and longer ago. I'm fairly young -- when I was in school, it was 50 years ago. It won't be all that long before it began 100 years ago.
Life shouldn't be political and grading kids on their wokeness is the opposite of what we should be doing in school. There is so much to be crammed into a kid's brain on so many different subjects. Politics in general, and CRT in particular, just isn't that, not even close. As for more recent wars, I was just reflecting my old education, I don't think the Vietnam War is controversial any more. But I wouldn't use it as a platform to decry American colonialism, either. It's a war that we entered to fight communism, and we lost it and now we are friends with Vietnam. That's pretty much it.
Human life is inherently social. Anything social is inherently political.
Maybe life shouldn't be about partisan politics, but it absolutely is essentially full of politics, and trying to pretend that you can avoid that is not a good way to solving the problems of the bad politics that it often involves.
I don't really get what you're trying to do here but there were lots more of them than there were of us, plus China and the Soviet Union. All these questions sprinkled by my woke critics all get at the same thing and make the same mistake. High School is extremely broad and extremely shallow. You and your brethren have much more knowledge of these topics, and interest in arcane policy matters, than 99% of high schoolers. They are learning all their math, science and foreign language and big chunks of their social studies and literature learning in four 180 day years. The entirety of world history is breezed through in a year. I'm sure teachers would rather talk about BLM than the Code of Hammurabi and 1066 but there just isn't time to go through the why of everything. That's what college is for.
There is a lot you could do with Pearl Harbor without miring yourself in politics. You could talk about the tension between the countries leading up to the war, the attack itself, the panic and anger and unity it created in the country. The basic facts (with dates) could be covered in 10 minutes, and then you could have a discussion which could include exploring the aspects of the Japanese internment, or any other topic. None of this seems to require getting into debate on "the truth" of why it happened.
How can you say that? I'd say that most of the challenges we are struggling with today go back to the intense conflict and final humiliation of Vietnam and the curdled nationalism and social mistrust it produced. This is a great case of "the past is not dead, it is not even past"
The Civil War was about both, and about a lot of other things as well. It is a great subject for truly introducing an understanding of the breadth and complexity of our history (all of our history). Call that political, if you will, I think of it as the essence of education. I feel that the introduction of raw conflicting ideologies in the classroom, or the replacement of one slanted cartoon narrative with another (e.g. the 1619 project) is inimical to that goal.
Well in practice history ends in in 1945. I understand the desire to not teach current events as history but that the last 80 years of history is basically not covered is wild to me. like we don't teach the civil rights era we don't teach the 70s inflation issues. We don't cover the beginning the middle or the end of the cold war. And we don't teach the war on terror from 20 years ago.
There's something weird about how everything from 1945 on is assumed to be "the present moment". You see this in everything from "contemporary art" (which often means 1950s) to AP history to the vision of zoning codes and auto-oriented suburbanism.
I feel like the past five years or so have been turning a page that suggests we might finally be leaving that same era, due to various social, political, technological, and global changes, and it'll be interesting to see how we reconceive "the present moment".
The very concept of civics implies a certain unanimity of values, which has been and is being blown apart. How do you introduce into a civics class those concepts that are designed to critique and destroy the very foundation of civics itself?
Sorry, but this is absurd. Unanimity of values? A *huge* part of our government’s formation was determined by the country’s deep, irreconcilable division on values: most obviously slavery but also whether the country should be urban or rural, industrial or agricultural. Major parts of the Constitution—the Great Compromise that gave us the House and Senate, checks and balances, the struggle over amendments—are due to the founders’ disagreements with each other and their desire to limit the amount of power any faction could amass. And these disputes still inform American politics today! So no, I don’t believe we can teach civics—the form of politics—without teaching any content.
With respect, I disagree with what you're saying here. Civics is not History. All of what you're talking about is History, not Civics. Civics is about how we come together to conduct ourselves as citizens. It has as its basis that we are all equal citizens in the republic, and we each need to understand our role in sustaining it and maintaining it. This requires a certain unanimity of opinion as to what "the republic" actually is. For example, basic civics has taught that that change of government in our country is effected by voting and not by violence. As we know this has been politically challenged recently, and is questioned by a non-negligible number of people. So are we going to emphasize this division in Civics, are we going to debate whether a fair vote can nevertheless be illegitimate? Better not to have Civics at all than to reduce it to that.
Civics classes, including the standardized AP U.S. Government curriculum, usually emphasize e.g. constitutional provisions, which really, really can't be taught (and aren't taught in law school) without tons of history. History-free civics would be something like political philosophy, but you disagree with teaching disagreement, wouldn't that just be propaganda?
I'm not saying that Civics should be free of historical facts, I'm just saying that the base methodology is totally different from History. You certainly need history to understand and discuss what the Constitutional Convention thought it was doing when it created the Senate.This is learning historical things but it's not doing history.
Maybe this is a terminology problem. When I learned Civics, that included learning how the government makes and enforces laws, which included lessons about how our system came into being. Which necessarily involves history, which necessarily involves politics! "We're all equal citizens, and our state is legitimized by the popular will" covers like the first week of class, right? At some point you have to roll up your sleeves and get into the nitty gritty.
I do seek to make a distinction in terminology. My Civics education (in a conservative Midwestern state) took the system as a static, finished thing. Our schoolwork involved the articles of the Constitution and a memorable mock election, enlivened by a speaker from the anti-abortion movement who showed us slides of bloody fetuses. That's politics, I guess. I didn't consider it a positive thing.
At its most basic level, civics does involve some unanimity or consensus around basic points, the kind of non-negotiable shared principles that a democracy of diverse citizens can't function without - for example, if your side loses an election, you try again next time but you don't storm the Capitol, etc. There's a lot to debate but some premises need to be pretty much beyond debate.
Sure, but while I am skeptical of and even alarmed by some of what I hear from the education world around these issues, I don't think they mean the abandonment of democracy as a value we teach in our schools. If that's what we're worried about we should design these policies more narrowly.
Civics is just the study of how the government works, how a bill becomes a law, balance of powers, division of responsibility among local/state/federal, etc.
Sorry I'm reading above you're having the same discussion. Civics was traditionally taught to prepare young people to participate in democracy. How it came about wasn't relevant, it's how the system works that matters. Of course history, including the Revolution, Constitutional Convention etc is taught separately. You obviously believe that has to be enmeshed in politics, but really the entire point of my first comment was to say that's wrong. So it's clear we'll have to agree to disagree.
Well, I can't speak to what counts as traditional, but I studied civics in school in the 90s, in 8th and 11th grades, and both times they certainly covered the Great Compromise and the respective roles of the House and Senate relative to different visions for the country. (And not in some Berkeleyfied "dead white slave-owners" way, but matter-of-factly.) To me it seems bizarre to go over our system without getting into the whys of it, but perhaps that's how some places do it, and if you say that's what you prefer than I agree we can agree to disagree.
My guess is that what you're referring to as civics was actually covered in American History, maybe as a separate module. I say that only because what you're calling civics is certainly covered in history, and because US history is taught in 8th and 11th grades. I believe a separate civics course isn't taught any more.
Well there's a big gap between 'young kids' and 'college'; can they really not be taught anything about anything that has happened since the middle of the 20th century?
I semi replied to this in the above reply, but yes, they can be taught all the wars if you want, without using them as a platform to attack the politics behind them. But more importantly, in the grand plan of cranking out functional teenagers, math, science, reading, history, foreign languages, all of these topics are huge and for those not going to college this is the one and only exposure they'll have to them. They should take up almost all of the high school experience. Political positions are much easier to understand than trigonometry.
There are ways of teaching things that are not 'platforms to attack politics'; for instance, in your first post, you asserted why the US joined the war in Vietnam. But the circumstances around the beginning of this war are in fact highly disputed, and it wouldn't make sense to fail to address the dispute if you were teaching students about the war. To address it, you need to teach the different sides of the argument.
In your first post, you said that 'Public school should teach kids how to think about things, not what to think about them'; well, one important skill in life is learning to approach official explanations with some skepticism, because sometimes they are not the whole truth. Is the Gulf of Tonkin incident the perfect way to teach somebody this? Maybe, maybe not, but 'teaching . . . how to think' is going to involve some critical thinking about real topics, not just bland assertions of conventional wisdom as if it's carved on stone.
I live in Evanston, Illinois and have experienced this curriculum via my 4th grade son. It includes a mix of worthwhile and over the top content. It's notable, however, that the curriculum is provoking a backlash from parents in a town that is implementing reparations. It's the proportion of content that I find most problematic. Somehow school has shifted to framing the world entirely through the lens of victimhood. Two weeks ago a teacher described the weekly "intent," which was to be an ally. Being an ally was defined solely as helping others who have been victimized.
The world is full of victims. We should help them. Some of this evolution in the curriculum is an important step to making this happen. But life is also filled with striving and achieving. I can be an ally to friends by helping them do something ambitious. Self worth can come both from individual achievement and helping others. I wish my school would help my son see both.
Well said and I agree with all of it. Really the only upside to the obsession with victimhood in high school is that it is certainly a college obsession so it might help the students prepare for and get accepted to college.
I agree 100% with your final sentence. That should be the focus of ALL education. But does that mean then that you avoid controversy? Or that you don't teach controversial facts? No! Brown's history department has a great program called "Choices" that tackle controversial issues and at the end students make a choice about what they think the right move is. Eg there's a unit on climate I'm about to teach for the first time and one of the choices is "focus on economic development". But one of the choices is not "climate change is fake". Applied to CRT, you would have to definitely teach about structural racism. But you would make clear that individual response and responsibility for this is a much different matter, and there are a wide variety of ways to react to the history of racial injustice.
To be clear, do you think the revolutionary war, civil war, and WWI were / are not controversial? (And at the time, WWII was also controversial but leave that for another time).
Also, you didn't learn about the civil rights movement?
"And at the time, WWII was also controversial but leave that for another time)"
My understanding and I've read a bit about it, is that after Pearl Harbor WWII in the US wasn't controversial at all. Obviously before Pearl Harbor it was extremely controversial.
Here’s an idea: we should have philosophy classes in middle and high school education.
We need to educate kids on ethics, politics, and a variety of other controversial ideas somehow. When I was in school, this was done through English and History classes (moreso English, since there were many more hours of English than History, and the class material leaves more room for exploration). But English and History classes are ill equipped for these topics. Most English and History teachers aren’t well versed in the broad range of thought on these things, and rigorous theoretical exploration just isn’t the point of English and History classes.
I know a philosophy class for kids would be controversial! But I actually think it would prove less controversial than critical theory-lite shoehorned into English class. A philosophy teacher has the time (and hopefully training) to present a range of ideas without explicitly endorsing one. Ie, no one will be brainwashed into supporting Marxism, but they should know who Marx was and what ideas he presented.
And a solution to lots of other problems too! Want to get better at teaching kids to think critically and synthesize knowledge across subjects? Want kids to better understand how their natural interests connect to their other classes? Need to show kids there's more to math than regurgitating the quadratic equation? Want kids to better understand the nuances of political thought and moral disagreement? Need something more valuable for all the philosophy majors to do? Philosophy class addresses all of these!
Competitive debate classes include heavy components of philosophy. Very successfully imo, for many students high school debate is the most impactful class they ever take.
There's actually been a lot of concern among debate teachers/coaches about the "divisive concepts" curriculum because it may exclude Afropessimism, and Frank Wilderson's work is very popular among high school and college debaters.
The trouble with philosophy in general is that teaching it is very specialized, at least right now, and very few teachers have the qualifications or background needed to do it well. There's a well-established debate ecosystem but even in it there's a constant shortage of people willing to teach it full-time because so many prefer to work mostly in law, academia, etc. and dabble in teaching debate on the side.
My kid did parliamentary debate, but at his school policy debate was much more popular, and Wilderson was very influential on the policy debate kids. It was funny to my husband who had been in a few graduate school classes with Wilderson who was kind of a character even then. But I found something a little distasteful about a bunch of mostly very privileged young people (more white than not, but not all white) who had to have enough family money to fly all over the country competing in debate tournaments to qualify for the national competitions who were making these super woke arguments about how every earnest policy solution had to be rejected because it somehow did not address racism full on as their competitive sport of choice and their way into super elite colleges. And I wonder how many of the modern day hall monitors of the left were active in high school debate and learned to look at everything through that lens. I am by no means in favor of banning teaching Afropessimism or CRT either, but I am dubious as to what the empirical effects of the kritik style of policy debate is on shaping young people who go on to make the world a better place.
My understanding is that white debaters reading Wilderson has become pretty disfavored, though Frank Wilderson himself is fine with it. You're definitely right on the irony, on the high school LD circuit Harvard-Westlake, which is like the richest private school in LA, are big Wilderson devotees. I think K debate has its place as one part of a wider conversation but I'm skeptical of programs that teach kids nothing but Ks.
I could not really get past the unpleasantness of listening to spreading -- they only let parents judge policy at low stakes competitions, but I found it pretty unbearable to try and pay undivided attention for that long when these heady concepts are being machine gunned at me without any emphasis or differentiation -- I really liked the kids and I found it a scene that I would have enjoyed as a young person, but as a lawyer and someone who does policy work the style of presentation was so off putting and exhausting that it made me want to run.
Yeah, I think you really need to be introduced to spreading at a youngish age for it to seem normal to you. There are parents who did policy in HS/college who can jump back in with few problems--e.g. the appellate lawyer Jonathan Massey was a big-time debater for Harvard and started judging again when his kids got involved--but I'm not aware of any parents without exposure as competitors who really judge at a high level.
Yeah I can definitely see a shortage of qualified teachers being a problem. That being said, I wouldn't expect a high school philosophy teacher to have super in-depth knowledge of all branches of philosophy any more than I'd expect a high school physics teacher to be up to date on the latest developments in string theory.
I’m definitely imagining the “values” of a philosophy class being different than those of a debate club though – i.e., you’re not learning an argument to win, you’re exploring multiple possibilities without the need to settle on one.
In high school, we had to take what was functionally an epistemology class. One of my crank beliefs is that this should be more common.
(Another of my crank beliefs is that math classes should have a much stronger focus on statistics and probability, with much less emphasis on geometry.)
> I would sincerely suggest that if something is bugging you enough about your kid’s school to tell a journalist about it, that you ought to share this concern with your local elected officials. Politicians are not perfect, but they are pretty responsive to constituent complaints.
School officials are naming-and-shaming the parents who complain in Facebook groups. One county had teachers maintaining lists of racist parents, including based on inference from "neutral" statements. It's a war out there, Matt.
Yep. And most communications with elected officials is considered public information and would be available (with your name and district attached to it) to anyone who may decide to come looking one day. Journalists at least keep confidentiality (most of the time). The real public opinions will show up in vote counts, and anything CRT-based is going to get voted down. But unless/until there's a vote, this sh*t will continue to be shoved down our throats.
You can find these stories going through Rufo's Twitter feed. I've been on the Internet long enough to know that dropping the links here will start a flamewar, because people will react to the domain name and not the content. While regrettable, this dynamic is what we'd expect from total culture war.
I would argue that SB has been something of a safe harbor for that sort of thing. If you caveat the links, some may question the veracity of sources but getting overwrought about the domains violates the use/mention distinct discussed a few weeks ago.
Was anyone else a little confused by what Matt's bottom line is? Here's what I got out of the article: (1) There''s stuff that is pernicious in CRT but also some that is not and is actively worth teaching (2) For the most part the school laws ban only objectionable things (some of which are not core parts of CRT) although some there are a few places where a couple of easily removed words step over the line. I'm not a huge fan of legislating curriculum, and I agree that there are parts of CRT worth thinking about, but given the profound danger to civil society that the worst parts of CRT pose I finished the article more sympathetic to this legislation that I started.
As a lawyer, I was struck by how sweeping the statutory language is. It could encompass almost anything, and would potentially have a broad chilling effect on curricula. Let's be clear where we're starting from. A lot of American history is taught through a pretty old-fashioned lens, which is heavily influenced by the Texas State Board of Education, as well as the principle of teaching to the test. So, I'd rather not stifle innovation just yet on a host issues, including race. I'd rather try other routes first to see if we can incorporate good ways to talk about race and other important issues, while discarding the bad. I thought a poster above came up with a pretty good starting point for teaching race, even for younger students:
There is a concept called "race", while it is often based on certain visible biological features it is not a specific biological feature itself, race has had a major impact in the way some people have been treated better or worse, and while it still has an impact today it is possible for us to change that.
Thank you for your thoughtful replay. Your approach – asking where the overbreadth and chilling effects might be-- seems more helpful than asking whether the statute is or isn’t reflective of CRT. Let’s start with one provision, prohibiting teaching that “ (1) one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex;”. Where are the potential issues with this (not a rhetorical question, I’m genuinely asking)?
That's probably not the specific provision I would've used to show the proposed statute, which I would read as a whole, is overbroad. But let's look at that language you cited. The first thing to realize, IMHO, is what's made illegal there is already illegal under Title VII and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, as well as the U.S. Constitution. Although, I'm not sure what the state of the laws are in the specific jurisdictions cited, in my state, Michigan, there are already state laws tracking the federal civil rights law. So this language, at best, is the legal version of junk DNA (which may not be junk after all, but that's a different topic). Having laws with no real-world purpose is either useless, or risk unintended consequences.
In this case, it's fairly obvious the language you highlight is in the statute either as (a) a rhetorical counterpoint to the rest of the text, or (b) to frame the rest of the text in a way that helps it survive legal challenges based on the state or federal laws I mentioned above. In other words, someone someday might sue based on the rest of the language in the statute, and the state would say, "Look, we explicitly said the races or sexes are inherently equal, so how can this law violate federal laws that demand equality?" I suppose there's a third possibility: that the proponents of the language believe teachers will start teaching that white people and men are inferior to women and non-whites. I find this a bit paranoid, and, once again, that would already be illegal under federal, and probably state law.
My response would be, if you're in a jurisdiction that you feel is violating the law as it exists, don't write another law, enforce the one that exists.
I mean, sometimes things don't have to have a bottom line or a strong conclusion. Sometimes you've just got to spend some time examining the facts on the ground and do some processing. Really, just having more of a primer on CRT and a list of additional readings to learn more is helpful as we enter an era of CRT becoming a new culture war boogeyman for the Right. It's also helpful to see that there are divisions and debate within CRT so that you can recognize that the parts that people find dangerous to civil society are not absolute doctrine accepted by all CRT thinkers or the fundamental core of the theory.
I agree with what you say but there seemed to be two pieces awkwardly spliced together. The first, which you describe, is that we ought to find the interesting ideas in CRT and that process will take time and thought. No simple bottom line needed there. The second seemed to be a piece on the legislation, and there is some urgency there. If these laws are a dangerous suppression of valuable ideas, like intelligent design legislation, we need to oppose them vigorously. If they simply affirm core values, then they aren't problematic and one might even support them. That's where we need to fish or cut bait soon, and felt that the analysis was confused because interwoven with the first argument. Now that I've read the text of one of the laws I'm not strongly opposed and maybe even supportive in theory, with a bit of redlining.
I respectfully disagree about the notion that only one part is urgent. My kids' middle school has started teaching kids (in health class !?!) about the evils of "white supremacy culture" as defined by Tema Okun. The high schoolers are required to join affinity groups defined by race and religion. First graders (!) are being taught that "cultural appropriation" is wrong. More generally the kids are being taught to heighten their focus on racial differences and see race as pervading everything, including math and science. The school's "Antiracism resources" are all on one side of the controversy -- Kendi and DiAngelo and 1619 Project, with nothing suggesting a more complex picture of a society that is flawed but not has redeeming features. (And as Matt notes, none of it seems supported by any empirical evidence that this heightened race-consciousness in a school environment will improve things instead of backfiring.). Where I live, in New York, this isn't unusual - lots of schools going this direction. If this is happening in your own kids' school, it's pretty urgent!
I think his main point was the subtitle: "Less weird curriculum stuff and more focus on material issues would be nice." Social justice advocates are blowing their moral capital on ideological lectures instead of focusing on significant structural improvements, and are drawing unnecessary ire from the right for it.
Critical Race Theory as a strawman is just the latest in a long line of dogwhistle attacks on diversity and honesty in the education system. It joins ebonics, common core curriculum, and whole language learning as something for Very Angry People to get worked up about and do Tucker Carlson segments on no matter how innocuously or beneficially it is being introduced into the actual classroom as opposed the Maoist re-education camps being imagined.
I will give CRT advocates their due in that these drummed up outrages almost always have a racist, nationalistic, or xenophobic core to them even if lots of people deny it or are blind to it. That said, they do make it easy for their theories to be nut-picked and exaggerated.
My one take-away from AP American History which I never even got in college level courses is that theories about history are just as important as the historical facts themselves. The distance from Manifest Destiny to CRT is not all that far, just a matter of perspective. We do need to keep re-examining how we are interpreting the past to better understand our current circumstances.
There's a good case for going further than that: theories about history are *all* that matter. The stories we tell ourselves about the past are about us, not them.
Long dead figures like Jefferson or Washington are totally irrelevant to anyone alive today except to the extent we keep talking about them. And in truth, nobody alive today knows them well to have an informed opinion about whether they were, at heart, good or bad people - that's not just irrelevant today, it's actually unknowable, lost to time.
It's a bad thing for a country to get so wrapped up in pointless arguments about it's past that it stops focusing on the future - which unlike the past, is up to us to make the world we want.
>>The distance from Manifest Destiny to CRT is not all that far, just a matter of perspective. We do need to keep re-examining how we are interpreting the past to better understand our current circumstances.
When I was in high school they put stickers on my biology textbook telling me that evolution was just a theory. Teachers often chose to skip teaching evolution because either they didn't believe in it or wanted to avoid being political. This was still true a few years later when I returned to teach in that same district.
When I was in high school, 9/11 happened. The school took every measure that day to pretend that it didn't happen. The front office turned off the TV and internet to the whole building. They cut off outside phone lines. For a brief time they even stopped parents from picking their kids up, but backed down after the line of parents got pretty big. In the pre-smartphone era, we students didn't know much at all about what was happening that day. And on subsequent days nobody discussed the terrorist attacks *in class*. Teachers were forging ahead with their curricula but in the spaces and times between classes and after school, kids talked and came to their own conclusions.
What we're concerned about here is schools using their power to present one specific view of the world as fact. While this is largely unobjectionable in a math or a science class where the systems of thought are meant to rigorously contest and evaluate knowledge, classes about history or literature have to deal with much more latitude. There's not a single correct way to read a book. Historical events, though they may be concrete facts in the abstract sense, take on different meanings depending on how you look at them. (I'd make a side note that sometimes we don't present math and science as anything other than a collection of facts, which is also a disservice to students!)
Matt covers this idea in his post when he discusses how an economic historian might view the Regan era different from a how Delgado and Stefancic viewed it. To me, teaching into these differences is the key to teaching students how to think. It is precisely the disputes and controversies and messy political stuff that makes us come to an understanding of the present moment. This doesn't mean we should force children to accept the ideas of CRT or American Exceptionalism but that we should let them make their own analyses and decisions about what to believe and why. Denying them that chance is every bit as political and, I'd argue, teaches students NOT to think and just to accept what's presented.
I was taught not to think about evolution and learned only later that it is the lynchpin on which all of modern biology turns. I was taught not to ask about current events in school and ended up spending a lot of time believing America was in a war of civilizations with Islam. As I grew up, I learned that I was taught not to ask a lot of questions but to, instead, focus on my work and learn quietly. While that made me a successful student, it did very little to prepare me to encounter people who thought and acted differently from myself. It made me confused, easily offended, offensive, and close-minded. Now, I can't lay this 100% at my school's feet as my family and community often played a large role here, too. But school could have offered a constructive counterpoint to a very different "totalizing vision" and it did not.
Choosing to avoid teaching controversial, political topics is still a political act informed by an ideology of false neutrality. It is a disservice to our students and does not help them learn to think so much as shuts down inquiry and tells them that school has nothing to do with the real world.
"This doesn't mean we should force children to accept the ideas of CRT or American Exceptionalism but that we should let them make their own analyses and decisions about what to believe and why"
I think this is very reasonable, and I would be fine with sending my kids to a school taking this type of approach. However, my understanding is that there are almost no schools that are "teaching the controversy" with respect to social justice/racial issues. To the extent that these topics are covered, they are covered almost exclusively from the perspective of the so-called anti-racist school of thought.
Hand raised - my (private) school does it from this perspective. Mostly because me and a colleague were given carte blanche to redesign a year of the curriculum.
I don't know if this is or is not the case. I am not sure the data exists to support that claim either way. Certainly there are many schools where there's a kind of CRT-induced absolutism. Certainly there are many schools where there is not.
I know that my prior district does not have a particular stance on CRT, anti-racist pedagogy, or BLM and that teachers and schools in that county are largely left to make these decisions for themselves. It's led to some heated exchanges between teachers who disagree about how all this should go down (this is all word of mouth from teachers I still keep in touch with, so keep that in mind as it's all anecdata).
Schools in the US are incredibly heterogenous and are heterogeneous even from classroom to classroom, so even schools that take up CRT-inspired reforms are bound to look very different. As a commenter elsewhere in this section noted, his children's experiences in schools in red states seemed quite normal compared to, say, what I've shared about my experiences and fly in the face of seeming blue-state stereotypes of red state education.
*heterogeneous - phone spelling bad
Wish I had more likes for your post! Particular "100" moments were math and science being taught as facts not theories, the importance of teaching kids how to think, and the big one, that being successful in school for you went hand in hand with being close minded. Thanks for sharing!
Don't get me started about my 8th grade "Georgia Stories" curriculum.
Let me guess. It was all about States' Rights and Lost Causes.
Nailed it. My 8th grade social studies teacher unironically called it the war of northern aggression. She proudly stated that her family had owned human beings right in our very county.
I remember a field trip to the Atlanta Cyclorama, a large 360 degree painting of the battle of Atlanta. Famously, it was repainted upon arrival in Atlanta to show a Confederate victory, something I only learned much later. They even had old recordings of Confederate veterans narrating their valor and bravery. And that was THE perspective on the Civil War. It was brave but misguided patriots fighting for their way of life against overwhelming odds.
The main thing I remember about reconstruction was that the freed slaves were portrayed as being worse off as sharecroppers who could no longer rely on the beneficence of the former masters for shelter and sustenance. That's it. Nothing about Freedmen's Bureaus, Jim Crow, the 13th, 14th, 15th amendments but lots about new industries and economic rebuilding. I believe the unit was called something like Phoenix Rising.
Nobody ever wanted to talk about the Quarters Road in our town or the nearby large stately home with the tall ionic pillars. It was Coca-Cola, the 1996 Olympics, paper products, the "New South",
Ah. Your Atlanta seems to be not that different from the way it was when I visited my grandparents there around 1970, in spite of all the massive growth and Yankee immigration since then. Though the term then was still "The War Between the States." While there I enjoyed the cultural benefits of a visit to Stone Mountain. My mother is old enough to remember crosses being burnt there.
Ha, so it was!
https://www.gpb.org/georgiastories/timeline/phoenix-rising
Lots of this: "In Marietta, returning Confederate soldier James Remley Brumby dreamed of a better future and started making rocking chairs. The chair company grew to become Marietta’s largest employer."
And this from the teacher's guide: "The state suffered a dramatic population change as one out of five Georgians who went to war never came back. This meant the workforce was greatly diminished. The formerly fertile land was devastated and laid waste, leaving minimal space for farming. There were not enough people to work the land, because the slaves were free, but homeless. There was no money, because Confederate money was worthless, and that was all some Southerners had. At the start of Reconstruction, Georgia had lost 75% of its wealth because of the Civil War."
A bit more even than I remember it but still simplistic, even for 8th graders. Could have been updated in the last 20-odd years or it might have been my teacher's spin on things.
Oh man, and we totally went to the The Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History in Kennesaw (a city where every household is required to own a gun). I think we even watched The Great Locomotive Chase Disney movie in class. (I just checked, like Song of the South, the Great Locomotive Chase is not available to stream on Disney+, hmmmm.)
Point is, my education was stilted, to say the least.
This kind of stuff is not limited to the South. I was required to take Kansas history at times; the elementary school version started after the Native Americans magically disappeared, the pioneers were just out there in Indian-free land doing their American thing. Later on we visited the State Capitol in Topeka and were shown the John Steuart Curry murals of John Brown, but not a word about who he was or what he did or about Bleeding Kansas generally. Not appropriate for schoolchildren I guess.
This has happened to anyone who's read Little House on the Prairie, a series of books where the author pretends her family wandered into the uninhabited Midwest and built a house there, when in fact they were settlers in some native guy's backyard.
Do it!
"but that we should let them make their own analyses and decisions about what to believe and why."
Yes eventually. But I would argue that's not till at least high school. Especially on difficult topics like this.
Moreover, most of this isn't being taught like here's one way to look at this. But instead like it's fact, and if you disagree you are a racist
The problem is not teaching CRT. The problem is teaching that CRT is true. And the bans only ban the second case.
A different summation of today's post:
Matt argues that the Great Awokening should be less Protestant and more Catholic.
Less emphasis on faith, purity of heart and public declarations of sinfulness; more emphasis on good works, "for faith without works is dead."
I mean I don't know if you are trying to be tongue in cheek but my one experience with "woke training" (a one week residential experience training educators to run diversity seminars) reminded me so so much of the evangelical conferences I went to as a teen it was eerie. Woke organizers were explicit: creating "intentional emotional disequilibrium" was the goal. Lots of staring at awful truths of structural injustices, kind of like hearing a sermon about Jesus suffering on the cross.
I tried to talk to people there about it, but as may not be surprising the overlap in communities was not large. Best comment I got was "well but this (woke training) is for a good cause". Hmm. I'm still not sure what to think. Right goal wrong methods?
"well but this (woke training) is for a good cause".
Didn't they tell you that when you are advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, you are doing the opus DEI?
Oh my. I so rarely laugh out loud on this blog. Thank you!!!
> "well but this (woke training) is for a good cause".
This is also how smart people put up with bad churches.
Evangelicals of any belief system terrify me. Sadly, proselytization has proven to be a very effective meme (in the Richard Dawkins meaning, not the funny internet image sense) transmission vector. Zealots have the greatest incentive to spread their beliefs as loudly as possible.
I like the idea of proselytizing for one's favorite funny internet images...
Flying spaghetti monster ftw
Ummmm, faith without works is dead also feels like a very Protestant thing to say (in the context of saying that the congregation should be doing things, tbc, not in the context of saying that works create salvation).
I do think we're re-enacting many of the American theological debates of the 19th century with a 21st century twist. Nothing exact coming to mind right now, but felt that way in a DEI training I was in last year.
And an amendment on your comparison of Protestant vs Catholic, different Protestant traditions have very different takes on works vs faith. Several Protestant traditions put lots of emphasis on works, not just faith.
So, so many thoughts on this topic. I will try to keep it brief as I am supposed to, like, work for a living doing other things.
I'm one of the people who started proselytizing about anti-racism last year in my place of work (not a school). My core motivation was that systemic racism was perpetuated by too many white people not caring enough about fixing it, and therefore it was a hearts & minds campaign so that they would choose to support more compassionate policies, which in my mind, were obviously the ones proposed by the Democratic Party. In retrospect, part of the subconscious appeal of this worldview was feeding my prior bias that the only reason someone would support Trump is they were unacceptably racist, and morally inferior. So while I find the businessman-passing-the-homeless-guy story very interesting, it's not out of whack with my prior thinking--I thought, once he sees the homeless person as his equal, he would certainly support effective policies to help the homeless, which are obviously the left-leaning ideas. In retrospect, one of the many flaws in my thinking was that Democratic policies are "obviously" better at addressing structural inequality. I think Dems are genuinely motivated by that goal, yes, but I don't think they're automatically more effective, nor do I think Republican policies are motivated by oppressing people. Anyway, in my mind, if you weren't investing energy in ending racism, you were perpetuating it. And there was only one way to end structural racism: 1. Convince all white people that they are biased against minorities and benefit from everyone else's biases 2. Convince those white people to vote for progressive policies to address structural inequality 3. Wait until enough of the stubborn white people die off and we can have eternal Democratic majorities that turn the country into a multicultural Scandinavian-like paradise for all. 4. Continue to call out white racism wherever we see it to keep stamping out fires, and teach kids early not to be racists.
I had never even heard of CRT until conservative co-workers started sending me Chris Rufo and James Lindsay articles telling me what I was preaching was evil. CR and JL obviously seemed like bigoted white guys to me, but were clearly super upset about something, so these articles just confused me to be honest. The Trump EO was an eye-opener though. Banning racial stereotypes... well shit. I'm not promoting stereotypes, I'm trying to fight them!! My conservative colleagues would say, "but if you suggest all white people are racist, that's a stereotype!" to which I thought quietly, *it's not a stereotype if it's true!* But I had a really hard friggin time explaining to myself why this "truth" was ok to proclaim at work but it was horribly offensive if a colleague brought up "black on black crime rates." The first felt like a necessary step to achieve steps 1-4 above, and the latter felt like it would be perpetuating harmful stereotypes about minorities. It was only when I realized that stereotypes about white people were harmful to the people who hold those stereotypes that I could even entertain the possibility that maybe someone could be racist about white people, and that maybe it was part of the problem.
I now see CRT as something like a powerful microscope used in cancer research. It is a tool, one of many, that can be used to help collect evidence about problems you care about, and possibly highlight which treatments are helping and which are not. The problem is not CRT itself--it's that people have naively assumed that "if everyone could just look through the microscope all the time, we would cure cancer!!" If everyone walked around only using a microscope to see, they'd constantly be confused, obsessed with the little shit, and unable to enjoy life. It is, as they call it, a "lens"- brings some things into focus that were not in focus before. Its power comes from being a complement to other ways of observing. CRT itself rejects the idea of a single objective truth, so why do so many people think that it itself is truth? (Side note, even though I'd never heard of CRT, one of my closest friends teaches in the humanities in a prestigious university system. I asked her, are there any people in your circle who have alternative perspectives on these issues? She said no, 100% of them use CRT. I asked if she thought that was a problem, she said no, we prefer to deal in reality. So, yeah.)
I do think skeptics like Rufo overstate the extent to which CRT is the root of the phenomenon he's opposing. For me, in retrospect, the phenomenon is rooted in the widespread idea that racial disparities are caused/perpetuated by white attitudes, and that if white people could just stop being so racist, things would even out. That stereotypes about white people cause no real harm to society and are even necessary to reduce other harms. That the only reason a white person would be skeptical of the ideas being shared by a person of color is due to the white person's unconscious biases. I am hopeful that others like me who deeply care about addressing racial disparities will come to learn, as I did, hopefully less painfully, that perpetuating biases associated with race does enormous harm to everyone, most especially the people holding those biases.
Final note: I keep trying to get myself to start writing on my own Substack. I will put it out here and if people are interested, maybe that will get me kick-started. postwoke.substack.com
Awesome. Thank you. Your journey parallels my own. Pay attention to the flies in the ointment, wherever we find them. Especially the inconvenient ones!
Thanks for this! Love the microscope analogy. Please don't stop commenting here as well as your substack! I'll try to do both...
I definitely don’t plan to desert Slow Boring!
I always look forward to your comments. I would love to check out your substack, but my Google skills have failed me. I don't know what the etiquette of asking for a link is, is there a title of your substack I can search for?
If you go to http://postwoke.substack.com/ , it will let you enter your email address. Thanks! :)
(Fair warning- there’s nothing there yet. I have a nearly finished draft post about the Atlanta shootings, but haven’t found the time to complete it and the news cycle moved on. I’ll try to get it out this weekend.)
I'm getting in on the ground floor!
Really interesting comment, and a lot of those questions don't have easy answers, but I think they do have answers. For example:
"My conservative colleagues would say, 'but if you suggest all white people are racist, that's a stereotype!' to which I thought quietly, *it's not a stereotype if it's true!*"
Part of the answer is that everyone is racist (thank you Avenue Q). Second, I don't think we should assume that all stereotypes are bad; the human mind can't function without some use of stereotypes and assumptions. What we want to do is (a) engage more careful thinking, rather than falling back to stereotypes reflexively (thinking about the _Thinking Fast and Slow_ idea hear), second, we want to think about what model of the world is implicit in the stereotype. If the model of the world is, "some groups of people are just naturally better or worse than other groups" we should be fairly skeptical of that model.
If the model is, "everyone absorbs a certain amount of racist and sexist conditioning from the world around us. One element of privilege is being more likely to go through life with one's assumptions unchallenged, and to not be forced to consider the power relations that underlie those assumptions." I think that is a useful model for understanding the world. It isn't flawless, but it does illuminate useful truths.
"But I had a really hard friggin time explaining to myself why this "truth" was ok to proclaim at work but it was horribly offensive if a colleague brought up 'black on black crime rates.'"
It depends on the context in which they bring up "black on black crime rates." Again, what is the implicit model of the world. The most useful that I find is trying to think about ways in which poor communities are often both under and over policed. See, for example this, in which you can see the term "black on black crime" referenced in the headline/URL. https://www.vox.com/2015/9/22/9370549/black-on-black-crime
My point in both of those cases is that (1) it's important to be able to recognize your audience and be able to engage at the level of abstraction appropriate to that interaction. (2) difficult cases are difficult and they may require mulling over for a while and not have a single simple answer. (3) It's rewarding to keep mulling things over and coming back to, "what do I find challenging about this question?" Don't just stop at the first convenient conclusion (4) Difficult questions are rarely settled by empirical evidence (because there's always going to be dispute about how to interpret empirical data) but it's important to be sensitive to the data and to think, "what sorts of data would support or undermine this theory/"
No lie, Avenue Q was a not insignificant formative experience for me.
I totally agree with all you're saying. I think I *thought* I was doing all that, but that I myopically thought that when it came to racism, only white people needed to try harder in this space. And on #3 in particular, I and many white antiracists assumed anything that placed blame on white people was "inconvenient" that we needed to courageously work through, but anything that challenged conventional antiracist thoughts was just racist. And on 4, the ideological conformity in the social sciences has led to a looooot of "junk science" (not maliciously, I think) that serves well for hyperlinks in inflammatory news-pinion pieces but doesn't help bring the clarity needed to prove or disprove one's theory (if one is willing to have their own theory disproved). I hope we can return to some critical thinking in this space.
Has there been any reporting on how the black families in these suburban schools/private schools feel about all of this? I think we’d all benefit from a better understanding of how much of this is a real overreach vs how much is white parents in particular being really uncomfortable when the school talks to their kids about race.
N of 1 from this black parent in a very white liberal suburb: I find the emails from the school about the curriculum to be super woke, overbearing, and generally annoying. But when I talk to my 9 and 7 year old daughters about what they talked about it always seems quite age appropriate and inoffensive, but I still hear some white parents complain about it. So at least in my case it really does seem like they just want to shelter their kids and have the school not talk about race at all.
This case was highlighted by "FAIR," a group of folks trying to push back on this trend that includes a board that I think ranges from "thought provoking heterodox liberals" to "Megyn Kelly." Strange bedfellows? https://www.fairforall.org/fundraiser-for-gabrielle-clark/
It is interesting to me to read all of the reactions from parents here and from those who recall what they learned in 4th grade. My kids have recently gone through elementary, middle school and HS curriculum in 2 very red states and I was pleasantly surprised about how much emphasis on race and racism appeared in those curricula. It was age appropriate, of course, but it was at times pretty harsh. Columbus was not portrayed as some genius explorer nor the Pilgrims as poor souls who just wanted to practice religion in their own way and had this great party with the locals after a long winter. What was being presented was much, much better than the education I got as a kid and led to a lot of good questions around the dinner table. I think a lot of folks in bluer states think red states are just teaching from the same textbooks that were around in the 60s and 70s. I'm just pointing out that that is not the experience of this red-state dad. I'm sure it could be better, but be careful you aren't making stick figures on both sides of this debate.
Thanks to all who "hearted" this note. My observation of my kids' public education in elementary and HS is that it is much, much better than what I had growing up. Much! And that is in all subjects. To add to this observation, I've been teaching college for over twenty years. My freshmen have only gotten smarter each year (or I've just gotten dumber). While some of my colleagues complain about a low work ethic among college students, I think profs too often recall their own study habits and, as I remind them, faculty ain't normal. I am quite hopeful for the future of our country...these kids are smarter than we were. Hopefully they can fix the stuff my generation broke. Just my observations. I think today's students are amazing.
I think it is also helpful to compare schools that are similar. An affluent suburban school in a red state probably looks a lot like an affluent suburban school in a blue state. The parents are probably educated professionals, they are likely political moderates, they are also likely to take a keen interest in their students' classes and curriculum. Schools know this and respond in kind. But compare that to a very different kind of school and you might get a very different answer.
Exactly. I pay a premium to live in a supposedly "great" school district in the south. Very progressive! And it's even a public school, obviously.
Definitely agree James. Matt was discussing legislation coming from the State level to all schools and in my case both states have a state education board that oversees the main curriculum. But, yes, I agree that local communities influence the schools as well, thanks for pointing that out.
I probably won't articulate this very well, but so much of the CRT controversy exists among the Very Online. To a person, the loudest advocates for the boogeyman CRT stuff in classrooms are also the people who are aggressive Twitter users, posting long Kendi-esque anti-racist screeds on facebook, sharing boilerplant defund the police stuff, etc. They're loud, they know how to organize an online mob, and they love a good clapback.
While the Very Online have a loud megaphone, I think it's becoming more obvious that they are still outnumbered politically by the Not Very Online, as evidenced by the convincing Biden primary win, and even Trump gains among hispanics and Blacks in 2020. It jives with the divergence of what Very Online racial justice activists want and what actual people who are Black or other racial groups want.
All of which is to say, delete your social media accounts, and write an email to your school administrators, your school board members, your town councilors. You can't get cancelled if you aren't online *taps forehead meme*
"You can't get cancelled if you aren't online *taps forehead meme*"
That's not true. There are numerous stories of people losing their jobs for activity that was not online. And some of that activity was from years ago.
One hesitation to writing legislators and school administrators is that most if not all of that communication is recorded publicly. While it may not show up on someone's newsfeed, it's still out there, and it's attached to your name, district, etc.
Activists that subscribe to CRT ideology never debate ideas. Does Ibram Kendi ever debate? Does he really believe ? It’s hard to tell when he is charging schools five figures for zoom calls. It’s hard to take said school administrators serious when they have five figures lying around and could donate it to another school in need. Seems to be a get rich ploy for the woke.
The people who support IK and Robin Diangelo would be outraged if schools were paying Ben Shapiro 20k for zoom calls.
I don't think you're wrong but I would love a citation for the IK $$$.
https://www.fox5dc.com/news/fairfax-county-schools-defending-20k-presentation-from-anti-racism-scholar
This source could be total trash but I did see this on Twitter (hmm, not helping on the possibility it’s trash...) https://therepublicanstandard.com/fairfax-public-schools-pay-20000-to-ibram-x-kendi-for-one-hour-talk/
cool, yeah I do think it's pretty bad for a school district to pay 20k to anyone for one hour of talking.
Material interests at its finest. I know that county. In recent years, it has been flooded with underprivileged students from surrounding counties, driven out by aggressive ICE policies. When the pandemic shut down schools, it was clear these kids were going to lose big unless the county was very focused on tracking them. I don't hear a word about door-to-door visits as I do for other districts with similar populations. The most they get is a week's worth of packaged food because they're missing their free lunch--and you can believe there was grumbling among pseudo-progressives that the focus should be on getting their own kids back in the classroom. Kendi getting $20K is yet another example of white self-soothing when it comes to facing racial disparities.
This doesn't seem too bad. If I read the contract correctly, he's supposed to talk to 1,500 people, presumably adult school employees. That's about $13.33 per person.
That is neither here nor there when giving a Zoom lecture as the amount of time and labor does not vary.
This post sort of weirdly dances around the object level issue, and I kind of don't understand why. It's true that real CRT has a lot of genuine insight to offer. It's also true that conservatives straw-man CRT as "that woke stuff that's happening in our kids schools and on twitter".
However, that doesn't change the fact that there is a thing happening in schools and on Twitter that is extremely toxic and dangerous, even if that thing is only loosely related to genuine academic CRT. While I think any article on this subject should call out the fact that conservatives are getting it wrong, and lots of aspects of CRT are valuable and revelatory, it seems weird to focus on those aspects at the expense of the very harmful ideologies that are permeating elementary schools.
I'd love to see a world where we can all sip lattes and discuss the real ideas of merit underlying intersectionality theory, or the nuances of more consequentialist speech regulation. However, it seems like priority number one pretty clearly ought to be removing the people promoting this bastardized version of CRT from positions of power, especially over the developmental process of young children, as quickly as humanly possible.
I had a fascinating discussion with some friends who work in public education in a ritzy-ish blue state suburb (both nonwhite, a principal and a SPED teacher). We were talking about the school board's decision to hire an executive-level administrator whose job was to improve education for black and brown students. Their general attitude was that
1) They wouldn't hire a POC for the position for unspecified reasons
2) Even if they did, the position was a pointless fig leaf that wouldn't do anything to address racism
I responded that I got where they were coming from, and they might be right about the POC thing. But I generally thought that when you hire a high ranking person whose only job is to make sure that something important happens, that is at minimum, a strong material signal of intent that would create at least a nonzero chance that the relevant thing would in fact happen. After all, wouldn't the board be monitoring this person's progress and evaluating their work?
Shockingly, they basically looked kind of puzzled and then said "Yeah, that's a good idea they should totally think of a way to do that".
Coming from the private sector, the idea that you would hire an executive officer in charge of a major policy change and then not actually measure their effect on the outcomes of that policy completely blew my mind.
You don't understand how central offices in schools tend to work. They focus on the paperwork etc and very rarely add value to actual educational practice in the classrooms. Key issue with measuring the effect of anything in education is that it's so hard to do so. See all the controversy with linking teacher pay to performance. If you can't quantify the impact of one teacher, how are you going to quantity a teacher coach or diversity officer?
I think this is exactly right, and in my mind illustrates well why ideas that center on framing social problems primarily through race and racism is a complete logical and political dead end for liberals.
Regardless of whether you agree that race and racism is the best way to think about social problem X that you want to fix, thinking about any actual problem from a racialized perspective necessarily centers everything on an internalized world that is inherently about hidden motives and drivers that nobody can see or quantify. So it's impossible to build consensus around what actions can make any kind of progress, or what progress even looks like.
In education this can arguably make sense because reasonable people disagree about what a well-educated person looks like. But even as the CRT prism contains a lot of good ideas about understanding society, it's completely unworkable for doing anything practical because it traps everyone in this world where we all agree that racism is intolerable and everywhere, but nobody can agree on what racism actually is or what we need to do about it.
That isn't to say that an effective school administrator couldn't make progress around racial disparity- but it means that they need to mostly focus on the disparity part and be rigorous about that.
The conventional wisdom in education seems to be you can’t measure the effect of anything in education. But why? I mean, is that really true?
If you wanted to improve education for students of color, couldn’t you measure improvement with annual standardized testing? Or graduation rates? Mental health or other health metrics? It just doesn’t seem impossible. Just choose what you consider improvement.
Most jobs can be evaluated in terms of whether you are meeting sone criteria of performance.
Or really, if all of those other measures fail you can just articulate some other measure that you believe would be better and then measure it, like they do in literally every other part of human existence.
I'm not saying it's easy- there are lots of cases where measurement of one thing can get in the way of something else that is important. But when something else becomes important you still need to say what it is, and measure that.
I don't think it's true that you can't measure anything. But it's awfully hard to demonstrate much quantitatively. Standardized testing success shows you evidence that a school can teach to a test well, which is different from learning how to learn. Unions certainly play a factor.
I think a lot of decent teachers at great schools think they are amazing. But the problem then comes in, people born on third think they hit a triple. It's hard to do bad teaching with an excellent student body, and decent teaching looks great.
Performance criteria in education thus tends to be what is mentioned in the article - can you tick all the boxes on a state department of education lesson planning form.
It's really weird to note that the main immediate impact of CRT is a wave of advanced classes getting shut down, then to just skip right over that. That's a really important thing! I probably won't change schools based on CRT per se, but if CRT means that they get rid of AP classes then it's off to catholic school for my little ones.
As a physicist and a Democrat, I probably won't move my kids because of CRT...but the elimination of advanced math made me literally gasp like some Victorian pearl-clutcher. Don't touch the math classes you heathens!
I also want more details on this... I think it depends on what "advanced classes" means. If they're going to no longer teach basic calculus in high school, that's incredibly bad.
Getting rid of the difference between Honors Geometry and Regular Geometry, or something like that, seems like it could be defensible though depending on the results.
Really depends on the district. In San Francisco they famously got rid of middle school algebra entirely.
i actually think compressing algebra 2 and precalculus is a great idea that should be adopted even in districts that do offer algebra/geometry in middle school.
that's worrying. however it looks like they have options to accelerate in high school (summer school, double-math-courses) so it's still possible for advanced students to get to multivariate calculus by senior year.
https://www.sfusdmath.org/high-school-pathways.html
This seems a bit beside the point. Even if we change CRT back from these virgin middle class minority grievances to chad materialist critiques either way it’s not a suitable fourth grade curriculum.
Matt says kids are curious and race is a part of their lives. True! School is also a place where kids learn to be quiet and focus on something they are not currently interested in.
How much time in the classroom is being spent on this topics and at what age? That seems much more important to me than what nuance of college and post graduate level thought is being lost in these discussions.
The normal fourth grade curriculum is full of politics, though. At least when I was in school it included things like the pilgrim myth, idealization of Chris Columbus, discussion of MLK and the civil rights movement, etc. All of that is part of education for a specific political reason, some of which is even good! But to say that we shouldn't include any discussion of contemporary racial politics seems silly, since the default curriculum *already has* stuff that is related to racial politics.
All that said, we obviously shouldn't be teaching 9 year olds about Frank Wilderson and Afro-pessimism -- fortunately, no one is actually doing that. They are, however, definitely overstepping and saying lots of dumb things (largely because K-12 education curricula design is not done by the cream of the crop in terms of intellectuals) but we do need to reform the way race is discussed in schools and give students a more realistic understanding of the world they are growing up in.
The Pilgrims and Columbus have nothing to do with contemporary race politics unless you view history through the convoluted lens of the 1619 Project. It is incredibly simple to teach America's founding without teaching about White Fragility, and incredily difficult to do that if you're explicitly teaching coursework on CRT.
I don't think that's entirely right. I don't see how you can teach Columbus and the Pilgrims without discussing the fact that by today's standards what they did was fundamentally wrong. The old narrative says that Columbus and the Pilgrims were heroically in the right, because they were colonising empty lands - i.e. empty of people who matter i.e. Native Americans didn't matter (and doubtless other 'lesser' peoples don't matter. The fact that Columbus and the Pilgrims didn't have complex racial ideas like we have today (or the Confederacy had in 1861) doesn't mean that what they were up to wasn't a fundamentally racist thing.
But you really weren't taught that. You were taught that Columbus discovered America, and that maybe there were other claimants to that title. And you were taught that the Pilgrims left England for religious freedom and they were helped by Indians, celebrated in Thanksgiving. There's more of course but that's the general idea. They are never celebrated for what they did to the Indians, and it's absolutely fine to talk about how the Indians were badly treated (and treated the English badly in return). There's nothing controversial about that, it's happened in every war that man has ever fought on any continent. But that's a far cry from saying the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery, or that studying classical music or reading classic books is racist.
This is what I'm talking about though. The Indians weren't 'mutually badly treated' they were *driven off or exterminated*. There's virtually no Native American presence left on the East Coast. Which was not standard practice in wars in Europe. The difference for that is basically racist - even though that's not what it was called at the time.
Also, you do have a bit more to learn about the Revolutionary War. The fact that King George seemed to be serious about his subjects no longer attacking and exterminating the natives to their West, which he had signed treaties with, was a major beef of the colonists and is alluded to in the Declaration of Independence. As for Black views of the Revolutionary War, they probably had a better view of the pro's and con's for them of the Patriots than we do, and they tended to join the King's forces rather than the rebels.
I think you're hitting on one of the core problems with discussions of CRT, the lexicon.
Using the definition of racist that was common not so long ago, you are saying that Native Americans would have been spared by the Europeans had they had white skin, because conquerors sail from Europe intending to rid the world of non-white people.
Using the CRT definition of racism, calling the near extermination of Native Americans racist is a tautology. The only thing that matters is the outcome.
This whole comment threat strikes me as people talking past each other because they can't agree on the definitions of words, let alone what CRT, i.e., what Matt said.
More advanced civilizations driving out less advanced ones isn’t “racist” and had been happening since the dawn of time. If you look around the world, pretty much no country is populated with its indigenous people. That includes Europe. The French, English, Dutch, Italians, Spaniards, etc., all descend from German tribes. The indigenous people like the Picts in Britain are gone. Hell, the native Americans that were here in colonial times themselves supplanted and pushed out precious waves of people who came over the Bearing Strait.
That process is hard to reconcile with modern standard, but it’s how pretty much everyone (not just Americans, but Japanese, Indians, most Europeans, etc.) got to where they are. Framing that ancient process in terms of “racism” is a very peculiar CRT approach.
Are we forgetting the powerful role and agency of the Haudenosanee (the Iroquois Confederacy) for centuries leading up to the Revolution? War between the Iroquois and the Europeans grew to be exterminatory on both sides. It was a joint historical process. Before that, the Iroquois wiped out many other tribes such as the Huron, adopting some members, but killing or enslaving most. Europeans feared and respected them for good reason in this time. They were not passive victims.
Much of the native peoples deaths were from disease, in particular small pox.
The Revolutionary War most likely *did* extend slavery and was therefore bad!
On what basis is this considered to be true?
Canada is doing just fine, so I'm with you!
Or at least ambivalent.
"doesn't mean that what they were up to wasn't a fundamentally racist thing. "
Taking other people's lands is something done throughout human history. It's not usually racist. More just people taking what they can get
“Nothing to do with contemporary race politics”? That’s a bit of an overstatement.
Look, Ted, the Founding Fathers were amazing people. They set up the most amazing and successful country on earth. Sure, they had slaves, but they were really nice to them and in their wisdom understood that eventually slavery would end because it was incommensurable with view that all men were created equal. They were just brave enough to let it end naturally and made inspired compromises to form our amazing country. Would you rather they didn't create America? Huh? /s
I have to agree that slavery did eventually end.
Thank goodness the process was quick and painless. It would have been a shame if hundreds of thousands of people had gotten killed over it.
I find that people who carry on about the 1619 project, like the obtuse Tom Cotton, barely got past the introduction. It's a shame. In my opinion the essays by Stevenson and Muhammad are really important, and for those of us who enjoy popular culture, Wesley Morris is always great. If the alternative is the historian-less 1776 report I know which one I would teach in the K-12 classroom.
The objection to the 1619 project is not the material (which is drawn from great historical work that has been done over many decades by scholars both white and black) but in its ambition to trash and replace (rather than enrich) the American narrative. It is objectionable because it is propaganda, not history. Or so I read it.
"The" American narrative? Which American narrative? So we enter the territory of myth, which is not a subfield of history.
I meant it to be taken as an abstract concept. It means "whatever American narrative (or narratives) that there might be."
Put them both in front of students with a bunch of primary sources and let them evaluate the claims made by each group. Then they're really doing history.
I agree... The NYT team really put their foot in their mouth out of the gate by claiming 1619 was the "true" foundation of America and gave folks like Cotton the strawman they needed. But all of that hoopla overshadowed what was, to me, a truly thought-provoking look at American history through a fresh lens. To view 1619 as "the truth," or that it's all one needs to know about American history, would be silly; it is, however, a fresh perspective on history, and only by looking at events from multiple perspectives we can get something closer to "truth."
The history part of the 1619 project did not strike me as all that groundbreaking, probably because I am a history buff and I already knew most of what was factual about it (there were a lot of dubious claims, but also some good material). For instance, see the Cotton Kingdom and The Warmth of Other Suns, themselves generated by a couple of generations of scholars black and white, who have worked to reveal these essential truths about our past, that are integral to our whole history as a people.
The problematical aspect is to frame all these stories within a histrionic political narrative of black innocence and white oppression, and to build upon it the claim that this is the true, whole, and central story of America. It was unnecessary to do this to serve truth. There is no attempt to witness, persuade or enlighten. There is no desire there to engage. It is purely a provocation. The racial animosity comes off it like heat from a stove.
I myself took deep offense at this, much to my surprise, as I don’t think of myself as a particularly patriotic person. I can only imagine what conservatives think, and how much bitterness this must have aroused against black perspectives throughout the country. In this time of our history, this is a very bad outcome.
The Pilgrims are a tiny portion of the immigrant population to America, who established a small colony that only existed for about 50 years before being absorbed into a much larger colony. They weren't the first settlers in America (as anyone educated in Virginia will tell you!) and nothing happened while the colony existed that would warrant inclusion in a survey course of American history except for storytelling flavor or mythmaking purposes. Which is fine, but inherently political, and no more obviously valid than a 1619-centered curriculum.
"no more obviously valid than a 1619-centered curriculum."
except the 1619 project was factually incorrect. And it's conclusion that America was some big conspiracy against black people unsupported by the evidence.
It was absorbed by a Pilgrim-lite colony aka the Puritans, and spawned other Pilgrim-esque colonies throughout New England. The Jamestown colony was flimsy and inconsequential, whereas the New England colonies drove the development of America.
The Puritans were Pilgrim Max. Tens of thousands of them came in the 1630's in an organized immigration, and as you note they are incredibly important in the history of America. A 1619-centered curriculum is not remotely a replacement.
Pilgrim segment may be a terrible idea, I dunno. But I’m pretty sure it mostly serves as a vehicle for reading, writing, memorizing little details and reciting them at the appropriate time. Maybe it’s a bad vehicle for that. I’m partial to ancient Egypt for 4th graders bc that was the placeholder topic I was taught at that age.
Saying that CRT/race isn't appropriate fourth grade curriculum sounds a lot like the fundies who try to argue that there is no way to teach age-appropriate sex education, or that bringing up the topic of homosexuality is inherently inappropriate around children. You don't need to dive deep into the mechanics of sex to be able to be able to explain to fourth graders that they have private places that no one is allowed to touch. You can read Heather Has Two Mommies to a fourth grader and it is a completely valid and age-appropriate introduction of situations they may already have questions about.
Similarly, you can begin to introduce discussions around race and CRT in an age-appropriate way (there is a concept called "race", while it is often based on certain visible biological features it is not a specific biological feature itself, race has had a major impact in the way some people have been treated better or worse, and while it still has an impact today it is possible for us to change that).
And honestly, if my experience growing up going to mostly-white suburban public schools is any indication, if you don't actually have a curriculum that addresses race for 4th graders, there's a good chance some teachers will end up bringing out their own takes when the kids start asking questions. Those takes are likely to be a lot worse than anything in a CRT curriculum.
The parts of it that are meant to challenge classical liberal ideas and stuff like that make a lot more sense in a college classroom. You can't really challenge ideas with a 4th grader who hasn't even been exposed to the original ideas.
On the other hand, the material analysis is certainly worth teaching. That foreign policy concerns played a role during civil rights is worth teaching to kids
This is why I said what’s important is what’s being taught at what level and how much time is devoted to it. I’m trying to not be like the fundies. I don’t want to say ‘this concept can’t be spoken of in front of fourth graders’ but at the same time it IS important for schools at that age to be very focused on basic skills.
People don’t think there’s no way to have age appropriate sex education. No “fundie” is teaching their kids it’s okay for people to touch their private parts. They just don’t trust secular liberal school boards to do that education.
Yeah, I think there's a difference between teaching the role of race in American life and teaching something akin to CRT. There is lots of evidence that race has played a role in American history and life but a lot of current talk about race in educated progressive circles is theory presented as proven fact. Discrimination, both structural and individual, on the basis of identity is important to understand. CRT and wokeness bring perspectives on that but not definitive answers
The problem is when “we’re not going to teach CRT” is a Trojan horse for “we’re not going to be teaching the role of race.”
I thought his point about forbidding schools from teaching that white people have any sort of privilege was a good one. That’s tantamount to forbidding schools from teaching that racism is a pervasive problem.
a common pattern is that there are these nuanced, interesting ideas about race. but then consultants take them, squash them into bullet points and slide decks, and by the time they reach schools and institutions they no longer make any sense.
Consider that stupid Smithsonian "white culture" chart. There's a reasonable discussion about WASP values in America, how this culture promotes some virtues, suppresses other virtues, also pretends that some arbitrary aesthetic preferences are virtues, and gets more credit than it should for positive characteristics that show up across many cultures.
That could be an interesting essay, but by the time the ideas are boiled down to bullet points listing "facts about whiteness" and sold as a product to an educational institution, it's become quite offensive.
I think this kind of thing must be happening a lot and would explain some of the more bizarre and garbled attempts to address racism in the classroom.
It's all far more of an indictment of the consulting-industrial complex than any of the ideas themselves. I think I line up with Matt here in finding the ideas to be worthy of consideration and capable of expanding one's ability to think, and refusing to engage with an idea or school of thought is nearly always a sign of intellectual weakness. And I frankly don't care if there are public school teachers with radical ideas - that's always been true and always will be.
I get *awfully* bummed out at seeing ideas developed through thousands of pages distilled into two slides full of bullet points, in a deck authored to be monetized whenever tragedy strikes.
Yes! Basically the same thing happened to the common core math curriculum ideas as well. The initial idea is great (there are lots of different ways to solve a problem, you should be able to explain your particular solution). By the time the consultants put it together and teachers teach it it becomes horrible (here is the new way of solving it and now you have to provide exactly this explanation as well).
I think CRT is a menace and it is ripping our overwhelmingly white town apart as the woke whites attack the non woke whites as racist. But this anti-CRT legislation and Matt's reaction to it brings up a broader point, and that is the role of politics in public education. I went to school a long time ago, but it was absolutely not done to talk about any policy topic. Foreign policy, social policy, economics, none of it was discussed. The focus instead was on history, which stopped at the last uncontroversial war, WWII, and civics. Matt's criticism of these anti CRT bills seems to be that a lot of CRT is good and we should just not teach the bad stuff. I disagree and think it's almost all bad but more importantly under no circumstances should stuff like that be taught in a public school to young kids. They will get indoctrinated with CRT in college and in their working careers, when they are at least old enough to reflect on it, and it won't be on the taxpayers' dime. Public school should teach kids how to think about things, not what to think about them.
Was the Civil War about states rights or about slavery? Gotta go pretty far back to find a "non controversial war".
Life is political, so school curriculum should be curriculum. It should not be partisan. A non political curriculum would be dead, lifeless, and irrelevant.
Also, ever year, World War II was longer and longer ago. I'm fairly young -- when I was in school, it was 50 years ago. It won't be all that long before it began 100 years ago.
Life shouldn't be political and grading kids on their wokeness is the opposite of what we should be doing in school. There is so much to be crammed into a kid's brain on so many different subjects. Politics in general, and CRT in particular, just isn't that, not even close. As for more recent wars, I was just reflecting my old education, I don't think the Vietnam War is controversial any more. But I wouldn't use it as a platform to decry American colonialism, either. It's a war that we entered to fight communism, and we lost it and now we are friends with Vietnam. That's pretty much it.
'Life shouldn't be political . . .'
Yet life seems to keep finding ways of frustrating that hope, doesn't it.
yes, but that certainly argues for keeping politics out of school if we have any hope of depoliticizing.
Human life is inherently social. Anything social is inherently political.
Maybe life shouldn't be about partisan politics, but it absolutely is essentially full of politics, and trying to pretend that you can avoid that is not a good way to solving the problems of the bad politics that it often involves.
raises hand - Mr. Arrow, why did we lose in Vietnam?
I don't really see how you can teach kids how to think without going beyond what happened to the why it happened.
I don't really get what you're trying to do here but there were lots more of them than there were of us, plus China and the Soviet Union. All these questions sprinkled by my woke critics all get at the same thing and make the same mistake. High School is extremely broad and extremely shallow. You and your brethren have much more knowledge of these topics, and interest in arcane policy matters, than 99% of high schoolers. They are learning all their math, science and foreign language and big chunks of their social studies and literature learning in four 180 day years. The entirety of world history is breezed through in a year. I'm sure teachers would rather talk about BLM than the Code of Hammurabi and 1066 but there just isn't time to go through the why of everything. That's what college is for.
You’d have a point if you just want to teach the facts. Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor 12/7/41 etc.
But you said “ Public school should teach kids how to think about things, not what to think about them.”
I don’t see how you can do that without getting deeper than a recitation or people dates and times.
There is a lot you could do with Pearl Harbor without miring yourself in politics. You could talk about the tension between the countries leading up to the war, the attack itself, the panic and anger and unity it created in the country. The basic facts (with dates) could be covered in 10 minutes, and then you could have a discussion which could include exploring the aspects of the Japanese internment, or any other topic. None of this seems to require getting into debate on "the truth" of why it happened.
How can you say that? I'd say that most of the challenges we are struggling with today go back to the intense conflict and final humiliation of Vietnam and the curdled nationalism and social mistrust it produced. This is a great case of "the past is not dead, it is not even past"
Popular Senator Benard Sanders once compared the Vietnam war to the Holocaust. So I think your summation of the conflict is indeed controversial.
That says more about Bernie Sanders than it does about the Vietnam War
The Civil War was about both, and about a lot of other things as well. It is a great subject for truly introducing an understanding of the breadth and complexity of our history (all of our history). Call that political, if you will, I think of it as the essence of education. I feel that the introduction of raw conflicting ideologies in the classroom, or the replacement of one slanted cartoon narrative with another (e.g. the 1619 project) is inimical to that goal.
How can we teach civics without teaching politics?
Well in practice history ends in in 1945. I understand the desire to not teach current events as history but that the last 80 years of history is basically not covered is wild to me. like we don't teach the civil rights era we don't teach the 70s inflation issues. We don't cover the beginning the middle or the end of the cold war. And we don't teach the war on terror from 20 years ago.
There's something weird about how everything from 1945 on is assumed to be "the present moment". You see this in everything from "contemporary art" (which often means 1950s) to AP history to the vision of zoning codes and auto-oriented suburbanism.
I feel like the past five years or so have been turning a page that suggests we might finally be leaving that same era, due to various social, political, technological, and global changes, and it'll be interesting to see how we reconceive "the present moment".
I think this is a natural consequence of how large each generation is.
It's not on the test.
When I coached my son for the History achievement test before college, one of the questions was on Monica Lewinsky.
Hope he didn't blow it. (I'm here all week, tip your servers)
I kept imagining what her granddaughters would think (though I think she doesn't have children).
The very concept of civics implies a certain unanimity of values, which has been and is being blown apart. How do you introduce into a civics class those concepts that are designed to critique and destroy the very foundation of civics itself?
Sorry, but this is absurd. Unanimity of values? A *huge* part of our government’s formation was determined by the country’s deep, irreconcilable division on values: most obviously slavery but also whether the country should be urban or rural, industrial or agricultural. Major parts of the Constitution—the Great Compromise that gave us the House and Senate, checks and balances, the struggle over amendments—are due to the founders’ disagreements with each other and their desire to limit the amount of power any faction could amass. And these disputes still inform American politics today! So no, I don’t believe we can teach civics—the form of politics—without teaching any content.
With respect, I disagree with what you're saying here. Civics is not History. All of what you're talking about is History, not Civics. Civics is about how we come together to conduct ourselves as citizens. It has as its basis that we are all equal citizens in the republic, and we each need to understand our role in sustaining it and maintaining it. This requires a certain unanimity of opinion as to what "the republic" actually is. For example, basic civics has taught that that change of government in our country is effected by voting and not by violence. As we know this has been politically challenged recently, and is questioned by a non-negligible number of people. So are we going to emphasize this division in Civics, are we going to debate whether a fair vote can nevertheless be illegitimate? Better not to have Civics at all than to reduce it to that.
Civics classes, including the standardized AP U.S. Government curriculum, usually emphasize e.g. constitutional provisions, which really, really can't be taught (and aren't taught in law school) without tons of history. History-free civics would be something like political philosophy, but you disagree with teaching disagreement, wouldn't that just be propaganda?
I'm not saying that Civics should be free of historical facts, I'm just saying that the base methodology is totally different from History. You certainly need history to understand and discuss what the Constitutional Convention thought it was doing when it created the Senate.This is learning historical things but it's not doing history.
Maybe this is a terminology problem. When I learned Civics, that included learning how the government makes and enforces laws, which included lessons about how our system came into being. Which necessarily involves history, which necessarily involves politics! "We're all equal citizens, and our state is legitimized by the popular will" covers like the first week of class, right? At some point you have to roll up your sleeves and get into the nitty gritty.
I do seek to make a distinction in terminology. My Civics education (in a conservative Midwestern state) took the system as a static, finished thing. Our schoolwork involved the articles of the Constitution and a memorable mock election, enlivened by a speaker from the anti-abortion movement who showed us slides of bloody fetuses. That's politics, I guess. I didn't consider it a positive thing.
At its most basic level, civics does involve some unanimity or consensus around basic points, the kind of non-negotiable shared principles that a democracy of diverse citizens can't function without - for example, if your side loses an election, you try again next time but you don't storm the Capitol, etc. There's a lot to debate but some premises need to be pretty much beyond debate.
Sure, but while I am skeptical of and even alarmed by some of what I hear from the education world around these issues, I don't think they mean the abandonment of democracy as a value we teach in our schools. If that's what we're worried about we should design these policies more narrowly.
if not celebrating the pilgrims is going to destroy the foundations of civics, we are in serious trouble.
I have no problem throwing the Pilgrims overboard. I like the Puritans more anyway.
Civics is just the study of how the government works, how a bill becomes a law, balance of powers, division of responsibility among local/state/federal, etc.
And that should be done without any discussion of how all of that came into being?
Sorry I'm reading above you're having the same discussion. Civics was traditionally taught to prepare young people to participate in democracy. How it came about wasn't relevant, it's how the system works that matters. Of course history, including the Revolution, Constitutional Convention etc is taught separately. You obviously believe that has to be enmeshed in politics, but really the entire point of my first comment was to say that's wrong. So it's clear we'll have to agree to disagree.
Well, I can't speak to what counts as traditional, but I studied civics in school in the 90s, in 8th and 11th grades, and both times they certainly covered the Great Compromise and the respective roles of the House and Senate relative to different visions for the country. (And not in some Berkeleyfied "dead white slave-owners" way, but matter-of-factly.) To me it seems bizarre to go over our system without getting into the whys of it, but perhaps that's how some places do it, and if you say that's what you prefer than I agree we can agree to disagree.
My guess is that what you're referring to as civics was actually covered in American History, maybe as a separate module. I say that only because what you're calling civics is certainly covered in history, and because US history is taught in 8th and 11th grades. I believe a separate civics course isn't taught any more.
Well there's a big gap between 'young kids' and 'college'; can they really not be taught anything about anything that has happened since the middle of the 20th century?
I semi replied to this in the above reply, but yes, they can be taught all the wars if you want, without using them as a platform to attack the politics behind them. But more importantly, in the grand plan of cranking out functional teenagers, math, science, reading, history, foreign languages, all of these topics are huge and for those not going to college this is the one and only exposure they'll have to them. They should take up almost all of the high school experience. Political positions are much easier to understand than trigonometry.
There are ways of teaching things that are not 'platforms to attack politics'; for instance, in your first post, you asserted why the US joined the war in Vietnam. But the circumstances around the beginning of this war are in fact highly disputed, and it wouldn't make sense to fail to address the dispute if you were teaching students about the war. To address it, you need to teach the different sides of the argument.
In your first post, you said that 'Public school should teach kids how to think about things, not what to think about them'; well, one important skill in life is learning to approach official explanations with some skepticism, because sometimes they are not the whole truth. Is the Gulf of Tonkin incident the perfect way to teach somebody this? Maybe, maybe not, but 'teaching . . . how to think' is going to involve some critical thinking about real topics, not just bland assertions of conventional wisdom as if it's carved on stone.
I live in Evanston, Illinois and have experienced this curriculum via my 4th grade son. It includes a mix of worthwhile and over the top content. It's notable, however, that the curriculum is provoking a backlash from parents in a town that is implementing reparations. It's the proportion of content that I find most problematic. Somehow school has shifted to framing the world entirely through the lens of victimhood. Two weeks ago a teacher described the weekly "intent," which was to be an ally. Being an ally was defined solely as helping others who have been victimized.
The world is full of victims. We should help them. Some of this evolution in the curriculum is an important step to making this happen. But life is also filled with striving and achieving. I can be an ally to friends by helping them do something ambitious. Self worth can come both from individual achievement and helping others. I wish my school would help my son see both.
Well said and I agree with all of it. Really the only upside to the obsession with victimhood in high school is that it is certainly a college obsession so it might help the students prepare for and get accepted to college.
"I think CRT is a menace and it is ripping our overwhelmingly white town apart..."
I have to confess that when I read this part of me still thinks, "what's so bad about cathode ray tubes?" Must try harder to keep up!
Hahaha, definitely thought I was the only one.
I agree 100% with your final sentence. That should be the focus of ALL education. But does that mean then that you avoid controversy? Or that you don't teach controversial facts? No! Brown's history department has a great program called "Choices" that tackle controversial issues and at the end students make a choice about what they think the right move is. Eg there's a unit on climate I'm about to teach for the first time and one of the choices is "focus on economic development". But one of the choices is not "climate change is fake". Applied to CRT, you would have to definitely teach about structural racism. But you would make clear that individual response and responsibility for this is a much different matter, and there are a wide variety of ways to react to the history of racial injustice.
To be clear, do you think the revolutionary war, civil war, and WWI were / are not controversial? (And at the time, WWII was also controversial but leave that for another time).
Also, you didn't learn about the civil rights movement?
"And at the time, WWII was also controversial but leave that for another time)"
My understanding and I've read a bit about it, is that after Pearl Harbor WWII in the US wasn't controversial at all. Obviously before Pearl Harbor it was extremely controversial.
Here’s an idea: we should have philosophy classes in middle and high school education.
We need to educate kids on ethics, politics, and a variety of other controversial ideas somehow. When I was in school, this was done through English and History classes (moreso English, since there were many more hours of English than History, and the class material leaves more room for exploration). But English and History classes are ill equipped for these topics. Most English and History teachers aren’t well versed in the broad range of thought on these things, and rigorous theoretical exploration just isn’t the point of English and History classes.
I know a philosophy class for kids would be controversial! But I actually think it would prove less controversial than critical theory-lite shoehorned into English class. A philosophy teacher has the time (and hopefully training) to present a range of ideas without explicitly endorsing one. Ie, no one will be brainwashed into supporting Marxism, but they should know who Marx was and what ideas he presented.
I believe this is the actually correct resolution to the problem.. I therefore expect it to be ignored with extreme enthusiasm.
And a solution to lots of other problems too! Want to get better at teaching kids to think critically and synthesize knowledge across subjects? Want kids to better understand how their natural interests connect to their other classes? Need to show kids there's more to math than regurgitating the quadratic equation? Want kids to better understand the nuances of political thought and moral disagreement? Need something more valuable for all the philosophy majors to do? Philosophy class addresses all of these!
Competitive debate classes include heavy components of philosophy. Very successfully imo, for many students high school debate is the most impactful class they ever take.
There's actually been a lot of concern among debate teachers/coaches about the "divisive concepts" curriculum because it may exclude Afropessimism, and Frank Wilderson's work is very popular among high school and college debaters.
The trouble with philosophy in general is that teaching it is very specialized, at least right now, and very few teachers have the qualifications or background needed to do it well. There's a well-established debate ecosystem but even in it there's a constant shortage of people willing to teach it full-time because so many prefer to work mostly in law, academia, etc. and dabble in teaching debate on the side.
My kid did parliamentary debate, but at his school policy debate was much more popular, and Wilderson was very influential on the policy debate kids. It was funny to my husband who had been in a few graduate school classes with Wilderson who was kind of a character even then. But I found something a little distasteful about a bunch of mostly very privileged young people (more white than not, but not all white) who had to have enough family money to fly all over the country competing in debate tournaments to qualify for the national competitions who were making these super woke arguments about how every earnest policy solution had to be rejected because it somehow did not address racism full on as their competitive sport of choice and their way into super elite colleges. And I wonder how many of the modern day hall monitors of the left were active in high school debate and learned to look at everything through that lens. I am by no means in favor of banning teaching Afropessimism or CRT either, but I am dubious as to what the empirical effects of the kritik style of policy debate is on shaping young people who go on to make the world a better place.
My understanding is that white debaters reading Wilderson has become pretty disfavored, though Frank Wilderson himself is fine with it. You're definitely right on the irony, on the high school LD circuit Harvard-Westlake, which is like the richest private school in LA, are big Wilderson devotees. I think K debate has its place as one part of a wider conversation but I'm skeptical of programs that teach kids nothing but Ks.
I could not really get past the unpleasantness of listening to spreading -- they only let parents judge policy at low stakes competitions, but I found it pretty unbearable to try and pay undivided attention for that long when these heady concepts are being machine gunned at me without any emphasis or differentiation -- I really liked the kids and I found it a scene that I would have enjoyed as a young person, but as a lawyer and someone who does policy work the style of presentation was so off putting and exhausting that it made me want to run.
Yeah, I think you really need to be introduced to spreading at a youngish age for it to seem normal to you. There are parents who did policy in HS/college who can jump back in with few problems--e.g. the appellate lawyer Jonathan Massey was a big-time debater for Harvard and started judging again when his kids got involved--but I'm not aware of any parents without exposure as competitors who really judge at a high level.
Yeah I can definitely see a shortage of qualified teachers being a problem. That being said, I wouldn't expect a high school philosophy teacher to have super in-depth knowledge of all branches of philosophy any more than I'd expect a high school physics teacher to be up to date on the latest developments in string theory.
I’m definitely imagining the “values” of a philosophy class being different than those of a debate club though – i.e., you’re not learning an argument to win, you’re exploring multiple possibilities without the need to settle on one.
In high school, we had to take what was functionally an epistemology class. One of my crank beliefs is that this should be more common.
(Another of my crank beliefs is that math classes should have a much stronger focus on statistics and probability, with much less emphasis on geometry.)
Yes the problem comes when teachers try and teach CRT as fact
Great post overall. Only quibble is this:
> I would sincerely suggest that if something is bugging you enough about your kid’s school to tell a journalist about it, that you ought to share this concern with your local elected officials. Politicians are not perfect, but they are pretty responsive to constituent complaints.
School officials are naming-and-shaming the parents who complain in Facebook groups. One county had teachers maintaining lists of racist parents, including based on inference from "neutral" statements. It's a war out there, Matt.
Yep. And most communications with elected officials is considered public information and would be available (with your name and district attached to it) to anyone who may decide to come looking one day. Journalists at least keep confidentiality (most of the time). The real public opinions will show up in vote counts, and anything CRT-based is going to get voted down. But unless/until there's a vote, this sh*t will continue to be shoved down our throats.
Links?
You can find these stories going through Rufo's Twitter feed. I've been on the Internet long enough to know that dropping the links here will start a flamewar, because people will react to the domain name and not the content. While regrettable, this dynamic is what we'd expect from total culture war.
I would argue that SB has been something of a safe harbor for that sort of thing. If you caveat the links, some may question the veracity of sources but getting overwrought about the domains violates the use/mention distinct discussed a few weeks ago.
Was anyone else a little confused by what Matt's bottom line is? Here's what I got out of the article: (1) There''s stuff that is pernicious in CRT but also some that is not and is actively worth teaching (2) For the most part the school laws ban only objectionable things (some of which are not core parts of CRT) although some there are a few places where a couple of easily removed words step over the line. I'm not a huge fan of legislating curriculum, and I agree that there are parts of CRT worth thinking about, but given the profound danger to civil society that the worst parts of CRT pose I finished the article more sympathetic to this legislation that I started.
As a lawyer, I was struck by how sweeping the statutory language is. It could encompass almost anything, and would potentially have a broad chilling effect on curricula. Let's be clear where we're starting from. A lot of American history is taught through a pretty old-fashioned lens, which is heavily influenced by the Texas State Board of Education, as well as the principle of teaching to the test. So, I'd rather not stifle innovation just yet on a host issues, including race. I'd rather try other routes first to see if we can incorporate good ways to talk about race and other important issues, while discarding the bad. I thought a poster above came up with a pretty good starting point for teaching race, even for younger students:
There is a concept called "race", while it is often based on certain visible biological features it is not a specific biological feature itself, race has had a major impact in the way some people have been treated better or worse, and while it still has an impact today it is possible for us to change that.
Thank you for your thoughtful replay. Your approach – asking where the overbreadth and chilling effects might be-- seems more helpful than asking whether the statute is or isn’t reflective of CRT. Let’s start with one provision, prohibiting teaching that “ (1) one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex;”. Where are the potential issues with this (not a rhetorical question, I’m genuinely asking)?
That's probably not the specific provision I would've used to show the proposed statute, which I would read as a whole, is overbroad. But let's look at that language you cited. The first thing to realize, IMHO, is what's made illegal there is already illegal under Title VII and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, as well as the U.S. Constitution. Although, I'm not sure what the state of the laws are in the specific jurisdictions cited, in my state, Michigan, there are already state laws tracking the federal civil rights law. So this language, at best, is the legal version of junk DNA (which may not be junk after all, but that's a different topic). Having laws with no real-world purpose is either useless, or risk unintended consequences.
In this case, it's fairly obvious the language you highlight is in the statute either as (a) a rhetorical counterpoint to the rest of the text, or (b) to frame the rest of the text in a way that helps it survive legal challenges based on the state or federal laws I mentioned above. In other words, someone someday might sue based on the rest of the language in the statute, and the state would say, "Look, we explicitly said the races or sexes are inherently equal, so how can this law violate federal laws that demand equality?" I suppose there's a third possibility: that the proponents of the language believe teachers will start teaching that white people and men are inferior to women and non-whites. I find this a bit paranoid, and, once again, that would already be illegal under federal, and probably state law.
You say it's already illegal, but that's what they are teaching anyway. Thus the proposed laws
My response would be, if you're in a jurisdiction that you feel is violating the law as it exists, don't write another law, enforce the one that exists.
I mean, sometimes things don't have to have a bottom line or a strong conclusion. Sometimes you've just got to spend some time examining the facts on the ground and do some processing. Really, just having more of a primer on CRT and a list of additional readings to learn more is helpful as we enter an era of CRT becoming a new culture war boogeyman for the Right. It's also helpful to see that there are divisions and debate within CRT so that you can recognize that the parts that people find dangerous to civil society are not absolute doctrine accepted by all CRT thinkers or the fundamental core of the theory.
(Oh yeah, and also the piece was a chance to get in a jab at the scam that is the majority of corporate diversity trainings.)
I agree with what you say but there seemed to be two pieces awkwardly spliced together. The first, which you describe, is that we ought to find the interesting ideas in CRT and that process will take time and thought. No simple bottom line needed there. The second seemed to be a piece on the legislation, and there is some urgency there. If these laws are a dangerous suppression of valuable ideas, like intelligent design legislation, we need to oppose them vigorously. If they simply affirm core values, then they aren't problematic and one might even support them. That's where we need to fish or cut bait soon, and felt that the analysis was confused because interwoven with the first argument. Now that I've read the text of one of the laws I'm not strongly opposed and maybe even supportive in theory, with a bit of redlining.
I respectfully disagree about the notion that only one part is urgent. My kids' middle school has started teaching kids (in health class !?!) about the evils of "white supremacy culture" as defined by Tema Okun. The high schoolers are required to join affinity groups defined by race and religion. First graders (!) are being taught that "cultural appropriation" is wrong. More generally the kids are being taught to heighten their focus on racial differences and see race as pervading everything, including math and science. The school's "Antiracism resources" are all on one side of the controversy -- Kendi and DiAngelo and 1619 Project, with nothing suggesting a more complex picture of a society that is flawed but not has redeeming features. (And as Matt notes, none of it seems supported by any empirical evidence that this heightened race-consciousness in a school environment will improve things instead of backfiring.). Where I live, in New York, this isn't unusual - lots of schools going this direction. If this is happening in your own kids' school, it's pretty urgent!
I agree, and don't think that is inconsistent with what I said.
I think his main point was the subtitle: "Less weird curriculum stuff and more focus on material issues would be nice." Social justice advocates are blowing their moral capital on ideological lectures instead of focusing on significant structural improvements, and are drawing unnecessary ire from the right for it.
Critical Race Theory as a strawman is just the latest in a long line of dogwhistle attacks on diversity and honesty in the education system. It joins ebonics, common core curriculum, and whole language learning as something for Very Angry People to get worked up about and do Tucker Carlson segments on no matter how innocuously or beneficially it is being introduced into the actual classroom as opposed the Maoist re-education camps being imagined.
I will give CRT advocates their due in that these drummed up outrages almost always have a racist, nationalistic, or xenophobic core to them even if lots of people deny it or are blind to it. That said, they do make it easy for their theories to be nut-picked and exaggerated.
My one take-away from AP American History which I never even got in college level courses is that theories about history are just as important as the historical facts themselves. The distance from Manifest Destiny to CRT is not all that far, just a matter of perspective. We do need to keep re-examining how we are interpreting the past to better understand our current circumstances.
There's a good case for going further than that: theories about history are *all* that matter. The stories we tell ourselves about the past are about us, not them.
Long dead figures like Jefferson or Washington are totally irrelevant to anyone alive today except to the extent we keep talking about them. And in truth, nobody alive today knows them well to have an informed opinion about whether they were, at heart, good or bad people - that's not just irrelevant today, it's actually unknowable, lost to time.
It's a bad thing for a country to get so wrapped up in pointless arguments about it's past that it stops focusing on the future - which unlike the past, is up to us to make the world we want.
>>The distance from Manifest Destiny to CRT is not all that far, just a matter of perspective. We do need to keep re-examining how we are interpreting the past to better understand our current circumstances.
Well said.