We Need an Honest Conversation About Teaching Social Justice in Public Schools
Another day, another controversy over supposed “left-wing indoctrination” in public schools and its right-wing backlash.
Virginia’s new Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin last week issued an executive order banning “divisive concepts,” including “critical race theory,” from the state’s public schools. Mississippi, too, joined the growing roster of states passing de facto anti-CRT legislation, following a walkout by Black members of the state Senate. And there were reports on initiatives in at least a dozen states to require schools to post all teaching materials online, sometimes with an option for parents to withdraw children from certain classes.
These GOP-led efforts, which include moves to banish undesirable books on race and gender from school libraries and reading lists, are widely-decried as an assault on intellectual freedom and a thinly veiled racist backlash. Critics on the left say the anti-CRT panic is absurd—critical race theory, which analyzes the way racism is embedded in social structures, is taught mostly in higher education, especially in law schools—and also a cynical strategy to target all discussion of racism in K-12 education.