The Education Wars

 Among the many horrific social cleavages that have rent our country, the current war over what is being taught in schools is becoming especially fraught. The basic argument - that I see in my local Facebook nightmare - is that parents have a right to dictate their children's education. That is not true. The secondary arguments surround mythical ideas about what is being taught in school. Most notably the insane idea that a law school theory - Critical Race Theory - is being taught to second graders after their juice and cookie break.

What has parents upset, apparently, is the idea that an accurate picture of America's past might be taught to their children. For instance, Christopher Columbus has a trash-fire of a human being. That's not revisionist history, that's the opinion of Columbus's contemporaries. However, for certain segments of the population, especially Italian Americans, giving a true portrait of Columbus undermines a mythic idea that those parents grew up with. It's an assault on their preferred vision of America. The fact that it's true is irrelevant. 

Parental anger over an accurate teaching of America's racial, social and economic past is being stoked by Rightist media. This is precisely where Fox News and OANN create the greatest fissures on America. Their ability to create controversy where none previously existed is on display in this CRT bullshit. 

Back when America tried to reckon with its racist legacy in the '50s and '60s, conservatives responded by founding "private" schools surreptitiously funded by tax dollars. We will likely see a similar effort now, either with the hostile takeover of school boards or the creation of MAGA Academies. In our town, students voted to remove the "Indian" mascot. Mind you, this was the students, not the teachers. There are currently people running for the school board to force the Indian mascot back into the school, which will cost the district ALL their state funding. (You can keep a racist mascot, but you can't reinstate one.)

The irony is that teachers need a college education, and college educated people hold very different understandings of the world than non-college educated people. The pandemic has led many teachers - along with so many other underpaid professions - to consider quitting. If you read that linked story, you will see a lot of the same complaints: sure, we've never been paid enough, but our community mostly respected us; that's no longer true. Going to a private school won't really solve that.

As parents - gripped by the Fox-fueled fever dreams about the state of education - increasingly become agent provocateurs in their own school systems, it will be a race to see if we can break the fever before we break the hearts and souls of educators.