SCENE: A group of parents are gathered at a school board meeting in “Anytown, USA” – a medium-sized city in a swing-ish state. The city voted for Trump in 2016, elected a Democrat cityi council in 2018, and was nearly statistically tied in 2020.
While these meetings are normally somnolent affairs dealing with abstruse board policies and contracts, this is the exception. The district’s contract with a curriculum consultant who’s been training the staff on “inclusive teaching” is under discussion.
The audience is orderly, but the tension is palpable as school board president, Doctor Karen Gossleiten-Prigg, addresses the audience.
GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG: Questions? OK – you, over at the microphone to my left.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Why is the district teaching Critical Race Theory?
GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG: We’re not teaching “Critical Race Theory”. Indeed, the entire term “CRT” is a creation of (clears throat) conservative media.
You, over on my left…
AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: But Ms. Gossleitein-Prigg…
GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG: …That’s Doctor Gossleiten-Prigg.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: (Over snickers in the audience) …Doctor Gossleiten-Prigg, I brought a series of CRT press clippings to show the audience:
GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG:
AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: You’re telling me there isn’t a certrain…tone to the discourse when it comes to this subject?
GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG: Right, but that’s not Critical Race theory. You ,over on my left…
(Audience members 2,4,6 and 8, standing at the mic on GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG’s right, start to rustle a bit. )
AUDIENCE MEMBER 5: So you’re saying that the district doesn’t teach critical race theory?
GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG: That’s correct. You on my left…
(Audience members 2,4,6 and 8, start to audibly complain )
AUDIENCE MEMBER 7: So if you’re’ not teaching Critical Race Theory, what are you teaching them?
GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG: Glad you asked. What we are proposing is a set of standards, a framework if you will , for teaching the history of this country. You, on the left…
AUDIENCE MEMBERS 2,4,6 and 8 (Agitated) Hey! What about us?
GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG: You’re on the right. You on the left…
AUDIENCE MEMBER 9: So you’re not teaching Criticial Race Theory?
GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG: Of course not. CRT doesn’t exist. Again – we’re creating a framework for teaching history.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 9: So where are kids being taught that “whiteness” is a deterministic unavoidable state that makes one uncontrollably racist, and that every group of “white’ people is in and of themselves a “structure” that just can’t avoid hating other races?
GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG: Oh. That’s not CRT.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 9: So where does it come from?
GOSSLEITEN-PRIGG: History!
And SCENE
The idea of creating neutral, non-political education is absurd because real education aims to develop critical thinking.
Critical thinking is about understanding power, relations of power, and the link that should always exist between the private individual, on the one hand, and the public spaces and laws of the society said individual lives in.
In America we have broken this vital link between the private and the public, and it is not healthy. It means the death of civics. It means the depolitization of the citizen who then grows up naive, fragile, and uninformed.
When we separate the personal and the private from the public and the social, we’re reducing citizens to consumers.
We then blame people personally for their problems, even when those problems are the direct result of structural flaws in the society at large, we’re making that person apolitical. That is the opposite of critical thinking.
The result is that when people think they’re talking “politics”, they remain unaware that politics involves first and foremost
matters of power: who has it, who doesn’t, and why.
Solipsistic grievance is not politics.
So, real education is by nature political. To cleanse it from politics produces people devoid of civic knowledge and the responsibility that comes with that.
Not surprising that you have to make-up a boogey-man against which to fight rather than have evidence.
You complain about teaching, yet where is your complaint about teaching civics no longer, about teaching the President isn’t above the law, for example?
On a day when it was made clear the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was so concerned about Trump’s unhinged, delusional, even deranged behavior, you need to fictionalize things as what? A distraction? Note that no one has said Milly didn’t make the conclusion he made (that Trump’s train had decidedly left the rails, that the President’s thoughts had departed controlled-flight), but instead Trump (and you through your silent complicity) instead insult Milly, and worse, attempt to conflate some made-up claptrap with the truth, so that you don’t have to address the 800lbs gorilla that is the truth that Trump very much looked at options to retain power, that he hewed to his worst nature when Giuliani (now disbarred) and others (like Sydney Powell) told him to simply declare victory (when he hadn’t won) and claim fraud (w/o proof) but you want to worry about “whiteness.”
Yeah, that’s important, go with that, you’re not delusional at all when you make up scripts that are neither clever nor real, and ignore the real facts, and real insults, to heros like Milly, made by chicken-hawk quadrupple deferment slugs like former President Donald J Trump – and the damage he (and you) do to the durability of our democracy when you lie/perpetrate fraud by claiming he won an election he so clearly lost (so clearly that he is 1-60 in court battles where he was tasked with presenting evidence).
Great post… so really on point.. really.
In a July 13th story The Duluth News Tribune offers this explanation:
“Critical race theory is a framework developed by legal scholars in the 1970s as a response to persisting evidence of racism in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. It examines the enduring legacies of racism in the U.S.”
sounds innocuous don’t it?
here’s the link https://www.duluthnewstribune.com/news/education/7110461-Protesters-gather-at-critical-race-theory-presentation-on-Park-Point
Or for Christ Sakes, schools don’t even teach kids how to balance their checkbook, reconcile their credit card bill or learn about this thing called “interest” is.
And you claim they should be teaching “relations of power”?
And teachers are the LAST people to purport to be teaching thinking skills – as witnessed by the policies, procedures, budget and performance of every major school district.
That is like saying, “I was injured in a car accident and it wasn’t my fault, so I want the other guy to do my physical therapy for me so I can walk again.”
But let’s look at the numbers.
For one, according to the census, black families in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s. despite Jim Crow, redlining and employment discriminations were more intact than suburban college educated white folks of today.
The numbers were “In 1960, about 2 in 3 (67 percent) lived with two parents.”
Two, according to crime statistics, the crime rate among minorities was dramatically lower then.
What happened in 1964 was The War On Poverty.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a very prophetic paper titled. The Negro Family: The Case For National Action that warned about what would happen. Family breakup, family and personal dysfunction, crime, generational poverty, declining achievement results.
A rebuttal was written by William Ryan titled “Blaming the Victim” (1970) and we still are revisiting a 60 year old debate.
“Blaming the Victim” probably the most racist thing ever written.
One that steals agency from minorities and gives it to (mostly) white liberals.
How about splitting the difference?
School can teach that minorities suffer the lingering effects of past discrimination but these effects are manifested as dysfunctional current behavior which is self-defeating.
The only way out of this is for people to realize their own agency and engage in self-improvement of the type that pulled the Irish, Jews, Asians and other minorities out of poverty.
The nation has done its part by implementing anti-discrimination laws in housing, employment and access to services, now it is up to the individual.
Geez, critical thinking would never think of that, much less allow it to be thought of or articulated.
It strikes me that CRT is designed much like BLM–lots of leaders,lots of governing theories, many of which actually contradict one another. The thing that cracked me up about BLM here in Rochester is that there were two competing groups in Rochester, where the total black population is about 8000, probably half of which are recent immigrants/refugees, and thus don’t have as natural an affinity for BLM as one might guess.
Hence the way to fight CRT is to to simply object to how it plays out, and whether it’s displacing actual academic work. One thing that strikes me is that when “critical thinking” is “taught”, it’s strongly likely to really be weighted on the “propaganda” option, ironically. The proper academic subject is not called “critical thinking”, but rather “logic.”
When they say “framework” they are using Ed School jargon. What they mean is “narrative.”
CRT Is a narrative. It can’t be proven true or false any more than it can be proven true or false that “all men are created equal.”
All racists have similar ideas.
All of them.
One is the essential difference between your race and the other people. This difference is what makes you one of your people. As a human being, your experience of life is racial. If you are an astronaut, it is more important that you are black or asian or white or whatever than that you are an astronaut. Your race is your destiny. You will never, ever, be raceless. You can only interface with the natural world and your fellow human beings as a member of your race.
Another is that your race is in competition with the people who are not of your race. This is a zero-sum game. Other races only succeed by making you fail, and vice versa. You cannot cooperate or compromise with people of another race, other than tactically. If they get ahead, you fall behind.
The last feature I will mention is the racial grudge. They owe you, there needs to be a reckoning.
All of this you will discover in Hitler’s Mein Kampf and in Ta Nahesi Coates Between the World and Me.
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Comfortably Smug on July 15, 2021 at 12:37 pm said: “The idea of creating neutral, non-political education is absurd because real education aims to develop critical thinking.
Critical thinking is about understanding power….”
Strib comment section:
Hayduke
July16
“The idea of creating neutral, non-political education is absurd because real education aims to develop critical thinking.
Critical thinking is about understanding power…”
https://m.startribune.com/what-critical-race-theory-looks-like-in-my-social-studies-classroom/600078812/
Heh.
The ignorant slob known here as “Emery” runs all over the damn internet cutting and pasting plagiarism, rolling snot into balls and snacking on them at his lake front estate, while reading the sincere responses from the equally ignorant slobs he sucks in.
lmao
Y’all know he’s a lying asshole that cant put two words together coherently on his own, but ya can’t stop yourselves from trying to prove how stupid he is by responding to him. It’s a form of Stockholm syndrome, I think.
Well boys, you carry on.
I’m going back to today’s CRT lesson, watching the only first world country sub-Saharan Africa has ever known, or will ever see, get set back to the stone age because (checks notes) White supremacy.
👆Hey — look the SiTD White Nationalist is back🤡
We know you’re “back”, “Hayduke”.
We just wish you’d leave more often.
Right — hate to see you leave but love to watch you go..
The problem with Tom’s thesis is that Smug’s comment was on the 15th and Hayduke’s was on the 16th. Something tells me you have it ass—backwards.
Say Tom — speaking of ass backwards, it’s Pride Week up here in Mpls! Strap on those assless chaps and bring the Ass Bandit chapter of the South Carolina Proud Boyz up here. Don’t be shy. 🌈🌈
No, actually, because you contribute so little to the conversation.
CRT is hot garbage because it is entirely unsupportable, politically driven theory that everyone must accept and not thinking too “critical”-ly about. That “Comfortably Smug”/”Hayduke”/”Emery*” thinks that has anything to do with “real education” makes me think less of him as a thinking human being. *shrug*
“Hayduke”, maybe….try an argument instead of an ad hominem fallacy? Thanks!
Really, I think Swiftee did indeed determine that you’ve once again plagiarized. Maybe either cite your sources, or use your own words for the concept? And apologize for your plagiarism?
Regarding CRT, with due respect to what I mentioned above–it’s really a “hydra” of a movement with many leaders and for that matter even many governing theories–it is worth noting that in some regards, it is true that South Africa has implemented these theories more than any other semi-developed (or more) country, and the place is spiraling into chaos, really just like many U.S. cities that have adopted the same thought patterns.
I would argue that these sad cases are evidence that the best response to historic discrimination against blacks is a removal of those discriminatory measures, not to discriminate against whites or asians. There is a necessary restraint required to remedy the wrongs of the past.
Paddy,
Interesting that your comment was structured in such a way as to trip this blog’s automatic spam filter. It took me a few days to find it.
What the heck, it’s been a while:
Not surprising that you have to make-up a boogey-man against which to fight rather than have evidence.
Nothing made-up about it.
You complain about teaching, yet where is your complaint about teaching civics no longer, about teaching the President isn’t above the law, for example?
You complain about civics and the president being above the law, but your silence about female genital mutilation speaks volumes.
See what I did, there? I did what you do, seems like every time you sound off. “Your argument didn’t cover this other point, which may or may not be related in any way!”. It’s a straw man.
On a day when it was made clear the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was so concerned about Trump’s unhinged, delusional, even deranged behavior, you need to fictionalize things as what?
Strawman and a non-sequitur, on a completely unrelated topic.
A distraction? Note that no one has said Milly didn’t make the conclusion he made…
Threadjack.
Yeah, that’s important, go with that, you’re not delusional at all when you make up scripts that are neither clever
The reader can judge
nor real,
Wait – what?
and ignore the real facts, and real insults, to heros like Milly,…
In relation to an unrelated matter completely.
You never disappoint, Pad.