As things have become more polarized about what should and shouldn't be in student's curriculum and who should get to decide, I think that there's an important aspect that people are missing.
I'll cover critical race theory; but, for the moment, I think it's worth talking about the teaching of religion in public schools.
My friends from Israel can correct me if I'm wrong; but, I've been told that they have Bible classes in the government schools. The key difference is that they're teaching about the Bible. They're not teaching it like a church service. The quizzes are about what's in the Bible rather than having any intent to frame religious ideology as truth.
I think that this distinction is a major blind spot in our school systems. People are rightly concerned about the separation of church and state and preventing the state from becoming a mouthpiece for a religion. We shouldn't be teaching intelligent design in science classes.
I still maintain that we should teach the Bible in schools. We shouldn't teach it as a book that teaches us how we should live our lives, that's for church. We should teach it in schools the same way we teach any book by any influential author. You can teach Shakespeare to people with no knowledge of the Bible; but, you can't teach it well. You can teach about the Bible to students without marking them down if they don't buy the values just like we can teach Harrison Bergeron without preaching about the evils of equity or having questions like "Equity is bad. Answer true or false."
Get the difference there?
The reality is that we can't have any effective form of education that doesn't at least teach in a certain system of values or avoids teaching about a certain system of values. It's seldom a good idea for a school, especially a government school, to teach a system of values as something that isn't debatable. Even if a school is teaching in a value system that punishes cheating, as it should, I think it's a better, more interesting way to get kids to think about why it's wrong to cheat or even if it is wrong to cheat.
As for critical race theory in public K-12 education, I think that Andrew Sullivan is right that we're not really teaching CRT so much as we're teaching in CRT. It's needs to be repeated that the claims that CRT is about teaching the God's honest truth about history is a lie. CRT is a religion that started with a conclusion and worked it's way back.
The thing is, the people who look down upon those among us who are concerned about this fail to address any of the distinctions in regard to what the word "teach" can mean. They point to the syllabus and note that Kimberly Crenshaw isn't on it and tell us that that means that CRT isn't being taught. The thing is, I wouldn't have any problem with them assigning reading by Crenshaw anymore than I would object assignments that involve writings by Marx or Kant or Bentham so long as their taught in the way that I talked about above in regard to the Bible. People should know what Hitler thought and why he thought that way; but, we shouldn't be telling kids that he was right.
I don't think there are good arguments for withholding facts from kids. There's a valid argument that we should be doing what a math teacher did in California who -
-...asked all students to create an “identity map,” listing their race, class, gender, religion, family structure, and other characteristics. The teacher explained that the students live in a “dominant culture” of “white, middle class, cisgender, educated, able-bodied, Christian, English speaker[s],” who, according to the lesson, “created and maintained” this culture in order “to hold power and stay in power.”-
This is a math class. This also isn't teaching CRT so much as it's teaching in CRT. Students are being taught in a math class, which is supposed to be teaching the use of logic and processes to arrive at correct answers, a series of values that are packaged as facts.
This is what reasonable people are and should be worried about. We should be just as worried about this as we would be if our government schools didn't just start teaching about radical Islam but started teaching that it's a matter of nature that Jews are oppressors and always will be.
Now, don't get me wrong, I do think that there are moral facts. But, suggesting that teaching the normative statements and the values of CRT as fact in a math class is extremely dangerous, especially in a public school. Also, specially in a school system that so poorly and incorrectly teaches the differences between facts and opinions and the nuance. It's also worth noting that kids are being taught within the value system of CRT while most of them don't know the difference between normative and positive statements.
The reason why the defeat of Terry McAuliffe, despite the multiple imperfections of his competitor, is a victory for all of us is because his entire philosophy behind schooling is to teach values from the moment that kids can talk from a central authority, remove parents' options to move their kids away from the central authority, and finally to shut parents up if they're concerned about what their kids are being taught all day.
Finally, some reasonable people decided to vote against a guy who thinks that 1984 is a how-to book. I hope California and New York do the same soon.