Critical race theory

There’s been a lot of professed outrage lately over woke school boards. According to Republican candidates for office, they're infiltrating children’s curricula with critical race theory, recruiting drag queens to read at story hour for pre-schoolers, and engaging in other forms of — shall we say — “incompetence.” But the real heroes pushing back against left-wing ideologies in government schools are the parents, when it ought to be lawmakers. Outspoken parents in New Jersey made headlines when they protested their school district removing holiday names from the school calendar. Voters in San Francisco — yes! — recalled school board members who thought renaming schools “with a connection to colonialism” was more important than educating kids.

Monsters, of course, come in a variety of shapes and forms, but they have some deep commonalities. Among these are a voracious appetite, an affinity for darkness, and a talent for evasion. They are hard to kill and very dangerous, especially to the innocent and the naive. Often they inspire a perverse kind of worship. I have been thinking about monsters as I contemplate the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion mandates that have swept through the nation’s schools, colleges, and businesses, and nearly every other institution of note. The National Archives has a “Diversity and Inclusion Program.” So does Major League Baseball. So does the American Public Gardens Association. One is hard put to find a significant public body that is not committed to DEI.

GOP Senate candidate Pat McCrory once appointed a state school board member who would become instrumental in adding Critical Race Theory to the curriculum in North Carolina public schools. McCrory, the former North Carolina governor, was tasked in December 2014 with replacing an outgoing member of the state school board with his own appointee. McCrory chose Eric Davis. "Eric Davis has a strong background in education oversight, having previously served as chair of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education and on the CMS Superintendent's Standards Review Committee," McCrory said in a statement at the time. "We look forward to his work on the Board and the valuable insights he has gleaned from one of the state's largest school systems.

While pundits bicker about whether bills targeting critical race theory in schools are ethical or constitutional, an equally important question is whether they’re effective. While such legislation is a workable stopgap to loathsome practices like affinity groups, it can only work as a temporary measure. CRT is manifested not primarily as a set of explicit ideas to be taught like the freezing point of water or the causes of World War Two. Rather, it’s a philosophy that informs the instruction, curriculum, and policies of various districts. We cannot outright ban CRT from our schools anymore than we can ban the influence of philosopher John Dewey. When the culprit is a belief system, bans are the wrong tool.

Public schools have had a rough few years. Since the start of the pandemic, parents have pulled more than one and a half million kids out of the public education system and turned elsewhere. Anecdotally, Catholic and other private schools in our area have wait-lists miles long now, filled with public school refugees. By some estimates, too, homeschooling rates doubled between spring and fall of 2020, and haven’t dropped significantly since. We were part of the public-school-to-homeschool exodus in early 2020 — and in our opinion, a lot of the public commentary attempting to explain the phenomenon misses the mark. Most theories focus almost exclusively on Covid lockdowns. There’s certainly a lot there to be angry about.

Once upon a time, at a little Indiana community college, I was on my way to becoming a high-school teacher — or so I thought. What I didn’t know was that our training was a form of brainwashing intended to enlist my fellow teachers and me for a political program. Our key text was a political operation masquerading as a trade publication: Education Week. At teaching college we were pushed to subscribe to EdWeek. Its headlines seemed tame and innocuous. For every story on Obama’s wonderful education policy, there were ten fluff pieces about blue-ribbon teachers, or profiles of decidedly overpriced new tech that could be requisitioned and tossed aside in just a few years.

Freezing rain the other night turned our snowy road to ice and sent our car sliding backwards into a ditch. That was better than the cliff on the other side. This being rural Vermont, my cell phone’s only service was its flashlight and it was a dark and slippery hike to the nearest house. Three hours later, roadside assistance had us back on four wheels. I surely lost some points in the rugged individualism rankings, but my wife and I were only a little chilled by the adventure. Things could be — and indeed they are — much worse elsewhere. At least we didn’t have a former Baywatch actress throwing punches at us for traveling sans mask.

“Republicans can and must become the party of parents.” So said Congressman Jim Banks of Indiana, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, in an Election Day missive as CNN and MSNBC propagandists hurled racial vitriol at Virginia voters. Banks is right. But the Republican Party already is the de facto party of parents. Democrats, through the machinations of their radical-woke apparatchiks, have made themselves the Anti-Parent Party. GOP lawmakers are welcome, albeit late to the fight. The RSC’s dispatch recalls Joseph Stalin’s declaration of war on Japan after America A-bombed Hiroshima. Alas, there is no mistaking the Red Army pincer movement in Manchuria with the RSC’s memo, which observed, “There is real energy from parents that we need to understand.

Most Americans want schools to promote knowledge and champion principles of human decency. They want schools to be safe. They do not want children race-shamed, or exposed to the anomic and depraved. A fourteen-year-old boy wandering around campus — any campus — wearing a floor-length dress doesn’t sound wholesome to them. What’s going on in “our” schools, some ask, and not in a sunny way. Too many know from experience, at least in metro and blue-liberal districts, that any parent who avows the Ten Commandments or praises the Boy Scout Law might get the fish-eye from the principal. If dad objects to critical race theory or transgender bathrooms, heads explode. A frosty diversity lecture might not suffice. Should we call security or 911?