Schooling

Some things in this world go so beyond the pale that it becomes absurd to weigh and measure them upon the cool, dispassionate scales of reason. Critical race theory (CRT) is one. There are different definitions of CRT, most of which contain cute elisions. Sharif El-Mekki, CEO at the Center for Black Educator Development, offers a typical one. ‘Critical race theory is a legal framework,’ he says. ‘It’s a lens for people to be able to apply to law and see how racial injustice and how racism has been baked in many laws in the history of America’. That is partly true about some of CRT’s applications. But the political activist Susan Sontag, not known for mincing words, provided a fuller picture.

Last November, voters in California, one of the most reliably Democratic states in the Union, defeated a ballot initiative that would have restored the state’s ability to use race as a factor in government hiring and employment. Affirmative action, a supposedly positive form of discrimination, could not win over the public even in a deep blue majority-minority state. Over 57 percent of California’s voters opposed it. So it’s little surprise that ‘critical race theory’ and other forms of racial indoctrination promoted within businesses, universities and primary schools have engendered revulsion among Americans nationwide. Children are being taught to sort and rank one another by color and ethnicity.

Cockburn doesn’t have any school-aged children — that he’s aware of, anyway. But a number of his close associates do — and they’ve been complaining a lot recently about schooling. Here’s a brief note from a New York-based mother Cockburn often gets cocktails with, who has a grievance she’d like to air… The ‘closing of the American mind’ is a lament usually reserved for the indoctrination of college students, but it’s now starting far younger. By the time our American students arrive on campus, much of the damage has already been done. K-12 education has been infected with critical race theory, tenets of the 1619 Project, Black Lives Matter doctrine and other debunked, destructive ‘religious’ ideologies.