Everyone knows that CRT, aka, Critical Race Theory, is a law school or graduate level subject that is not taught in American K-12 classrooms. More precisely, and I quote Wikipedia, “Critical race theory (CRT) is a body of legal scholarship and an academic movement of civil-rights scholars and activists who seek to examine the intersection of race and law in the United States and to challenge mainstream American liberal approaches to racial justice.”
Everyone also knows that when Right Wing Goons, Contaminants, and Bloody Insurrectionists talk about CRT they are not actually talking about the law school class. They are using CRT to refer to things that are actually being taught in KL-12 schools, that they don’t want taught there.
This is not to say that the goons and miscreants who are running for school board to stop CRT really have much of a clue of what they are doing. They don’t. If they wanted to change standards of curriculum, the LAST THING THEY WOULD DO is to run for the School Board, because in most places, school board members are allowed NOWHERE NEAR STANDARDS. So, yes, they are anti-education morons.
But still, there are things that they know(ish) are being taught in our schools that they don’t want taught. I believe that by examining those things, we can gain an understanding of where the anti-CRT activists are coming from, what it is they don’t want our children to be exposed to.
The following items are culled from the next gen Minnesota Social Studies Standards, not yet finished, not yet adopted, but reflective of the cutting edge of Social Studies curriculum.
- Connections between choices and consequences in the past and today
- Explain democratic values and principles that guide governments, societies, and communities, and analyze the tensions within the
United States constitutional government. - Evaluate the unique status, relationships and governing structures of Indigenous nations and the United States.
- Analyze how scarcity and artificial shortages force individuals, organizations, communities and governments to make choices and incur
opportunity costs, and how their decisions affect economic equity and efficiency. - Describe places and regions, explaining how they are influenced by power structures.
- Explain sense of place through ways of knowing (culture) and ways of being (identity) from different perspectives, centering Indigenous
voices. - Evaluate dominant and non-dominant narratives about change and continuity over time, taking into account historical context, i.e., a)
how and why individuals and communities created those narratives; and b) why some narratives have been marginalized while others
have not. - Evaluate dominant and non-dominant narratives about change and continuity over time, taking into account historical context, i.e., a)
how and why individuals and communities created those narratives; and b) why some narratives have been marginalized while others
have not. - Investigate a variety of historical sources and evidence by: a) identifying primary and secondary sources; b) considering what
perspectives and narratives are absent from the available sources; and c) interpreting the historical context, intended audience,
purpose, or author’s point of view of these sources. - Integrate evidence from multiple historical sources and interpretations into a reasoned argument and/or compelling narrative about the
past. - Use historical methods and sources, inclusive of ethnic and Indigenous studies methods and sources, to understand and reflect upon the
roots of contemporary social systems and environmental systems of oppressions and apply lessons from the past to eliminate injustice
and work toward an equitable future. - Develop an understanding of the ways power and language construct the social identities of race, geography, ethnicity, gender etc.
Apply these understandings to one’s own social identities other groups living in Minnesota, especially those whose stories and histories
have been marginalized, erased or ignored. - Describe how individuals and communities have fought for freedom and liberation against systemic and coordinated exercises of power
locally and globally; identify strategies or times that have resulted in lasting change; and organize with others to engage in activities that
could further the human rights and dignity of all.
Those are the topics the anti-CRT people don’t want our children to know about or explore.
Those are the topics that would cause in the next generation a more widespread rejection of white supremacy.
The anti-CRT candidates and their supporters, being white supremacists, don’t want these things brought up in our system of education. They have different ideas of how we should bring up our youth.
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Wow – SS sure has changed from when I was in high school nearly 6 decades ago here in the great white north (and for Rick A’s benefit white here means snow). Basically it consisted of British history and parliamentary procedures type stuff. A lot of rote learning and not much requirement to think things through.
Newswise is an aggregator of press releases, and I subcribe to get the heads up on science articles for the podcast that Greg and I do (ikonokast.) But, they also have a fact check service. I can’t vouch for their impartiality, but scanning through the list it seems that reality has a well-known liberal bias.
There is one article that caught my eye in regards to the Virginia Governor’s Race just concluded. Youngkin’s claim that he will end CRT in VA schools. It was rated as “mostly false:”
https://www.newswise.com/factcheck/critical-race-theory-crt-is-not-being-taught-in-k-12-schools-but-that-didn-t-stop-virginia-governor-elect-glenn-youngkin-from-vowing-to-ban-it/?article_id=760245&sc=sphn
These look like pretty good standards, Greg. Do you know anyone who is on the committee that sets them? Are standards still revisited every five years or so? I think we first met around the time that Minnesota was rewriting science and history standards, and for some odd reasons the public meetings combined the subjects. I went to one of the public meetings at St. Paul Central and the public comments were a mix of creationism and from history buffs who wanted to “return to the basics.” You know, white history. Not snow, in this case, Doug. I mean the history written by the victors.
Got it Michael 🙂
“Everyone knows that CRT, aka, Critical Race Theory, is a law school or graduate level subject that is not taught in American K-12 classrooms.”
Jerry Coyne, Andrew Sullivan, and multiple others would disagree with you. From WEIT, November 6 – worth a read: [https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/11/06/andrew-sullivan-on-the-election-and-crt/]:
“And when the Democrats and the mainstream media insist that CRT is not being taught in high schools, they’re being way too cute. Of course K-12 kids in Virginia’s public schools are not explicitly reading the collected works of Derrick Bell or Richard Delgado — no more than Catholic school kids in third grade are studying critiques of Aquinas. But they are being taught in a school system now thoroughly committed to the ideology and worldview of CRT, by teachers who have been marinated in it, and whose unions have championed it.
And in Virginia, this is very much the case. The state’s Department of Education embraced CRT in 2015, arguing for the need to “re-engineer attitudes and belief systems” in education. In 2019, the department sent out a memo that explicitly endorsed critical race and queer theory as essential tools for teaching high school. Check out the VA DOE’s “Road Map to Equity,” where it argues that “courageous conversation” on “social justice, systemic inequity, disparate student outcomes and racism in our school communities is our responsibility and professional obligation. Now is the time to double down on equity strategies.”
Road map to Equity: https://www.doe.virginia.gov/edequityva/navigating-equity-book.pdf
Virginia school memo: https://christopherrufo.com/mcaullifes-crt-lie/
This is already having consequences in our elections – just look at the recent Virginia gubernatorial race. The Coyne article quotes some polling data:
“A new Harris poll asked, “Do you think the schools should promote the idea that people are victims and oppressors based on their race or should they teach children to ignore race in all decisions to judge people by their character?” Americans favored the latter 63-37.”
He also quotes the right-wing polling group the Manhattan Institute, whose poll is opaque but – who knows? – might be instructive:
“A big survey from the Manhattan Institute of the 20 biggest metropolitan areas found that the public, 54-29, wants to remove CRT concepts such as “white privilege” or “systemic racism” from K-12 education. That includes black parents by a margin of 54-38. And that’s in big cities.”
And DOE under Biden has officially but forth a formal proposal to teach CRT in elementary and secondary schools, actually quoting Kendi in the proposal:
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2021-04-19/pdf/2021-08068.pdf
So, we have a roadmap here of how to elect more Republicans. Just deny that CRT and cancel culture is from the left ( as several commenters here have already done), deny that it is moving its way into K-12 education, deny it is going to have electoral repercussions, deny that it appears to be incredibly unpopular even among Democrats. And accuse anyone who disagrees with you as being a white supremacist.
Not smart.
Based on the poll, the way the Democrats hold power is to become conservatives, it looks like. Teach that all is well when it comes to race, that Jim Crow never was a set of oppressive laws, and that blacks who aren’t as successful as whites are just lazy. Teach them that insurrectionists are just patriots who were trying to protect their beloved country from a fraudulent election. Never, ever, challenge kids to look introspectively at the way they have been affected by race, either positively or negatively, that that Japanese had to be interred during World War II just to make sure they didn’t join their Asian cousins in war against the US. Teach the kids that the interstates were built on the shortest, most efficient routes, and ignore that they were routed to disrupt the wealth building of black neighborhoods, teach them that redlining was just good credit scoring practice, that suburban school districts were happy to take any black kids, but don’t teach them that there were enforceable covenants on propery in white neighborhoods to keep those neighborhoods white.
When I read the emphasis that Coyne is placing on the “wokeness” of the left by taking his cues from the right side columnists like Sullivan and McWhorter, I have to roll my eyes. Wokeness is a huge bogeyman on the right, and like “political correctness” it is used to deflect blame from many faults of the right; including when Aaron Rodgers claims that criticism of his lying about being vaccinated is coming from the wokies on the left. METOO was called a wokey thing, too, when men were trynig to brush off their harassment charges.
It’s just too convenient to claim that it’s only from the left, and supposed liberals like Coyne who relay all of the cancellations from the left are playing into the propaganda hands of the right. Ask Jerry how he would react to teaching evolution based on the polling, because evolution and science are also seen as propaganda from the right. Do we teach what the polls say we should teach about climate?
If it would help elect more Democrats do you want our schools to each creationsim?
I watched the acceptance speech the new governor in VA. After running a campaign based on “watch out the criminal blacks are gonna get you” his acceptance was worse. I’m sure it sounded awesome in the original German.
“It’s just too convenient to claim that it’s only from the left,”
And who, pray tell, did that ?
If I may hark back to Common Core, which met increasing opposition in 2014 when the Tea Party began calling it “Obamacore,” the controversy that blossomed then looks a whole lot like the one we see today with CRT.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/14/09/what-happened-common-core
Writing in September 2015, David Whitman points out that, like “Obamacare” (aka the ACA), Common Core had its roots in conservative think-tanks.
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Surprising-Conservative-Roots-of-the-Common-Core_FINAL.pdf
The question afoot is not whether the right has stupidly taken issue or been activist about things reasonable people would support. The question is about cancel culture and who is behind most of it.
When we are talking about who is deplatforming speakers, removing titles, removing statues; demanding the expulsion, firing, demotion of teachers, writers, speakers on a hair-trigger judgment – it is mostly by the woke authoritarian left.
And Dr. Laden is an example on the topic- he JUST said if you are against the teaching of CRT in schools, you ARE a white supremacist. This is militarized binary thinking and it is emblematic of the woke left. This should be recognized not only as shallow reasoning, but this narrative is how Republicans are going to win elections they have no right winning.
“it is mostly by the woke authoritarian left.”
You keep repeating that bullshit: I assume you know people who believe it, which means you must be associating with people who are as much in denial of reality as you.
“…of the woke left. ”
Nothing identifies people who don’t have a bit of support for their position faster than using terms like “cancel culture” (as though there is such a thing) and “woke” (implying that opposing threats coming from the right and supporting the rights of people who have historically been marginalized are bad things).