[bosswipe]

The bigger concern is that professional educators are being overruled by politicians about what is in the curriculum. Such as the recent wave of anti-Critical Race Theories laws being handed down because of a panic created by right-wing media.

[akomtu]

Educators, i.e. teachers, are being coerced into imposing CRT onto students by school boards and since teachers have little leverage, they have to comply. The CRT's tenets are identical to those in Stalin's USSR and Mao's China. Just read the wiki pages about the two regimes and see the striking similarities. I think the reason CRT has started getting so much flak is that it's reached the phase when it needs to impose its key technique known as "self criticism" (in USSR) and "struggle sessions" (in China). Americans have noticed that something is off and got agitated.

[temp8964]

No. The panic is not created by the media. I don't want my kids to be taught how White people are racists, or "people of color" are oppressed. Even I am not a White.

[humaniania]

Yes, it is.

"As Media Matters has previously noted, Fox News’ current obsession with “critical race theory” has been a year in making. What once was a slow trickle of monthly mentions has developed into a full blown assault. Since February, month over month mentions of the theory have more than doubled on Fox News as the network has begun to spin an illusion of what it is and where it’s being taught (in reality, critical race theory is not generally taught in K-12). Coverage of the theory sharply increased in March, with 107 mentions on the network according to data from Kinetiq media monitoring service. The following month, network figures and guests mentioned it 226 times, and by May, the number had increased to 537 mentions. Not even halfway through June, there’s already been 408 mentions on the network.

Just last week, Fox mentioned “critical race theory” a record 244 times -- an increase from the previous record high of 170 mentions the week before."

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-has-mentioned-crit...

[temp8964]

Your logic is very very strange. Because Fox mentioned it, it must be created by Fox?

[tolbish]

Fox is known for the "People are saying" propaganda that makes something seem like it's everywhere to build consensus.

[temp8964]

But it's truly "everywhere". There are too many photos of those crazy presentations come out almost every week. Maybe you think it's not widely spread. But those crazy nuts are being adopted by many places. Parents are rightfully concerned.

[tolbish]

It must be everywhere. Everyone is talking about it. It's all you hear about. We must be right.

https://www.theonion.com/conservative-man-tearfully-informs-...

[pacerwpg]

Where did you hear that kids are being taught those things?

[temp8964]

This kind of training on teachers is everywhere. Which is also wrong. Shall I wait on it? Or are you saying it is ok for those things to be taught in teacher training, but only wrong when it is taught to kids?

[pacerwpg]

I'm saying that children aren't being taught the things you say they're being taught.

[MarkLowenstein]

You casting doubt on the poster's assertions makes me incredibly angry. You clearly don't know anything about what's going on in public schools yet you pretend to be wiser than the poster about it.

I have a kid in a public high school. He has shared pictures, video, links, and schedules. Also I have visited local high schools and seen the messaging being delivered on the walls. These schools have one mission right now, above anything else: crank out social-justice warriors; get some reliable street troops on the ground for leftist causes.

Do NOT dare to tell me it is not like I describe.

1. Special presentations carved out from academic class time every day for black history month, with presentations about white privilege and other fodder to cultivate racial grievance.

2. A week devoted to BLM during that month, with similar time carved out each day from many classes for a presentation that included justifications for hate against white people and exhortations about how you should become an "Ally". Including a black poet that read that she was justified in calling white people "the devil" and lumped all white people who didn't jump to BLM action into the category of aggressors that deserve the violence of BLM protests.

3. "Open" class discussions after such presentations where everyone is called on to share their thoughts, but of course only certain thoughts are permissible and discipline is doled out to those who disagree.

4. A school-wide presentation by the "equity association" that re-enacted all the horrible things white people do to black people, such as saying they like fried chicken and watermelon, to demonstrate just how bad white people are all the time.

5. Gay pride month where they devoted more class time to special presentations and discussions, like Bill Nye saying that in addition to that little "sex" thing, there's also all these other more important dimensions like "gender" that need to be dwelled on.

6. Time off granted if you join a walk-out for preferred causes like global warming activism.

7. Posters around school lauding the actions of "world-changing" demonstrators. All leftist demonstrators of course.

8. Lots and lots of "No human is illegal" signs all over.

9. In my kid's school, at least one classroom decorated from top to bottom with Black Panther publicity and aggressive black-defiance messages.

10. In my spouse's teacher training, 100% of the time has been spent on "anti-bias" and "equity" training. Where no problem existed in the least.

11. School district hiring 6-figure "diversity consultants" by the dozen, all of whom will do nothing except arrange presentations such as I cited above. And then they claim to need a new tax levy to hire enough teachers or pay them decently.

So whatever you've seen in terms of CRT quizzes and stereotype pyramids, what you don't understand is that it's way worse than that. It's not just obnoxiously flooding kids with racial stereotypes. It's not just that that is a topic that is 100% unrelated to education. It's that they are cultivating racial grievance. And they are pitting student against student to get it done as completely as possible.

I'm a mild-mannered guy. And I've never been so pissed off in my life.

[reducesuffering]

> 6. Time off granted if you join a walk-out for preferred causes like global warming activism.

Oh wow some things just do not change. 20 years ago, South Park did an episode on the Iraq War. The teacher told the students, "in class today we'll be doing 2 hours of math problems, OR you can join the walk out protesting the war." Obviously the kids run out of school celebrating.[0]

[0]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0705933/

[temp8964]

Thanks. My oldest kid is at the second grade now, so I don't see those stuff directly. But I am very very concerned.

[akomtu]

The next logical step, at least per how it happened in USSR/China, will be asking students to fill out questionnaires about their attitude to BLM/CRT, recording the list of intellectual dissenters and talking to parents and their employers about the problematic behavior of their children. If we get that far, the step after that will be encouraging students to report their friends who've been noticed in insufficient support of the regime.

[temp8964]

Where did I say they're being taught?

[pacerwpg]

It was sort of implied as part of the conversation, but I see where I misread that.

[jollybean]

I actually do share the concern that fairly far-right wing people are politicizing education.

But - CRT in it's applied form ultimately turns into 'propaganda' and there should be some legislative parameters around it.

The basic CRT premise of 'Minorities who live in Majority Culture are suppressed in systematic ways, and that we should be more sensitive to that and it's historical impact' ... is definitely fair.

So there's a legit grounding in aspects of CRT.

If that were it, then then this would be a good thing.

But the rhetorical application of CRT gets pretty vicious, pretty quickly, and it turns to the language of 'race war' almost instantly.

In particular, using terminology such as 'White Supremacy' which is normally associated with 'Men in White Pointy Hats' as purposefully toxic language, the tactic of castigating anyone who doesn't support their cause as 'upholding White Supremacy' and therefore racism etc. are common.

Controversial foundational elements such as rejecting liberal and enlightenment values (literally objective truth) in favour of one's own 'realized or expressed truth' in addition to issues such as rejecting the foundation of the written word etc..

There's been a few debates here on HN, but there is documentation from school boards on 'how the teaching of Math upholds White Supremacy' because it ostensibly implies 'linear thinking', 'predicate knowledge' and other artifacts of supposed 'White Supremacy'. The response to this particularly bad form of CRT on HN usually comes in the form of discounting classical teaching pedagogy as being possibly too 'stifled' - but that has absolutely nothing to do with race and there is no evidence whatsoever to back it up. In reality - certain groups (Hispanics, Blacks) do poorly, and other groups - including minorities/people of colour (Whites, Asians) do just fine under the same pedagogy and what's more likely is that kids who show up for class, who have good parents, who want to learn etc. (i.e. the obvious things) do just fine. CRT 'in practice' in this situation is unsubstantiated, anti-scientific, anti-progressive ideological rubbish in making excuses for kids who don't do well in math. It's 'good intentions run ideologically wild'.

Last week a New Jersey school board opted to remove the names of all holidays from their calendar and replace them with just 'Holiday'. This one is actually a pretty good example of the intersection of CRT and the effete values of school administrators: July 4, Easter, Memorial Day are just 'too controversial' for our kids to be exposed to, therefore, we'll just mark them as 'Holiday'.

That to me represents a kind of ideological 'crossing of the line': if our educators are interested in making sure kids hear about slavery and segregation, that seems reasonable. Important, actually. But erasing civic holidays because of concerns of CRT is I think 'radical', and there are people in every school board in America who would like to follow suit and CRT gives them basically the impetus to 'Be on the right side of history' (in their view) despite the 'Ugly, angry, overtly traditional parents' (again view of the teachers).

There's a little bit of a postmodern aspect to CRT - it's a 'turning inside out' kind of ideology, allowing adherents to basically refute anything and everything part of he 'conventional narrative' and replace it with ... well whatever they want. This is what makes it scary.

CRT has some valid intellectual underpinnings, but it ends up being like ugly Red Hat Trumpism for the Left. I actually support some aspects of it but I have no trust in the education system to use it responsibly.

Unfortunately, I think the 'sides' are talking past each other I don't see any consensus developing just yet.

[temp8964]

I agree with most of what you said, but I don't think CRT has anything value intellectually. Reasonable thinking on race issues is very difficult, I don't think CRT positively contribute to any of that. CRT is in itself radical, if you remove radical thoughts from CRT, then it is no longer CRT.

[esyir]

>It's 'good intentions run ideologically wild'.

I would characterize it differently. The core issue with CRT is that it's an attempt to frame everything in an oppressor-oppressed framework. Perhaps it might have more nuanced takes, but whenever I see it, whether in the wild, the media, or (thankfully rarely) in person, it takes that oppresor-oppressed binary and explains any negative impact on such.

As you've mentioned, Asians do well, as do Indians. Both cultures value education highly, resulting in a heavy, often overwhelming approach to their children (Neither is a monolithic bloc, but the trends are pretty well characterized here). It does happen that the environment they're in is amenable to this, with academic achievements conferring access to a bevy of advantages. CRT could argue this that the academic focus is in a domain selected to disadvantage (insert selected group).

However, even if an academic focus is actually objectively (or in it's weaker form, generally) advantageous to the individual or society, CRT would continue to see it as an issue, as long as it disadvantages said group.

Of course, then the question is what cultural end metric you consider "good", but that's a whole different ball game.