New purpose for schools

Opponents of schools teaching to Critical Race Theory inchoately and inconsistently, believe in John Dewey's vision for public schooling as an institution meant to mutually assimilate diverse children to each other, and to provide a civic and social touchstone. They want school to give their kids a few critical skills, extracurriculars to support the development of character, to prepare the brightest pupils for college, to give all students a basic familiarity with each other, and to inculcate broad allegiance to a loosely defined American civic creed.

But an allegiance to even a loosely defined American civic creed can only be the product of a broad consensus about the goodness of America itself, the basic terms of the American project of self-government, and the like. Political polarization is dissolving that consensus. Progressives, who have disproportionate representation in the culture-forming institutions of schools and mass media, have abandoned the broad center for their transformative agenda.

But what strikes me about the forms of critical pedagogy that are leaking into publication is that they go so far beyond taking a more critical view of the American founding. The National Education Association, for example, adopted resolutions committing itself to the project of critical race theory and producing a report "that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society."

Christopher Rufo reported on a school district in North Carolina that put its teachers through training in the new forms of anti-racism.

At the first session, "Whiteness in Ed Spaces," school administrators provided two handouts on the "norms of whiteness." These documents claimed that "(white) cultural values" include "denial," "fear," "blame," "control," "punishment," "scarcity," and "one-dimensional thinking." According to notes from the session, the teachers argued that "whiteness perpetuates the system" of injustice and that the district's "whitewashed curriculum" was "doing real harm to our students and educators." The group encouraged white teachers to "challenge the dominant ideology" of whiteness and "disrupt" white culture in the classroom through a series of "transformational interventions."

Public Education: Critical Race Theory as Metaphysics | National Review