From slavery to socialism, new legislation restricts what teachers can discuss
npr.org
npr.org
Among other things.
We still have government-sanctioned slavery, per the 13th amendment to the constitution banning slavery except during imprisonment (lookup “UNICOR”, one of the ways manyof our corporations make extra profit).
I mean, sounds reasonable to me.
Teach the facts of history. Tens of millions of Jews, Queer people, and POC were slaughtered by nazi fascists. America's economy was founded on the enslavement of Black people and racist behavior is encoded in some of our systems of government and behavior to this very day. That's not teaching something on the basis of a political belief, that's just a fact that happened.
You don't need to sit a K-12 student down and bash them over the head about how they should feel bad for a belief. First, that's not going to change their views. Secondly, we have enough teachers imposing their own political biases onto students.
For many people they applaud the actions of the people who committed these atrocities. Many pine to redo the civil war or try reimagining it as if the South actually won...
These topics definitely can create discomfort. You can't teach the Holocaust without discomfort...but I posit some discomfort is healthy, it encourages us to be compassionate and do better.
The only people who'd feel guilt or anguish are the ones who's parents are Neo-nazi's I'd imagine, but that's a large amount of kids in America -sadly.
I miss the days when we could just teach facts unabashed discomfort or no, just the facts and show what really happened .. I mean in 8th grade we watched a Documentary (1994) that showed items made of Human skin for the Nazi regime, and horrendous images of concentration camps. Definitely makes me not want to take lightly the idea of persecuting people and risk redoing something that heinous.
If we forget or gloss over the hard stuff, we risk losing our discomfort and disgust, and in the process we grow closer to recreating the behaviors that led up to that.
Oops. You just described the foundation of critical race theory, any mention of which is explicitly forbidden in the bills being discussed. So you can teach the history of America's founding, but you just can't teach that slavery was in any way racist, and you definitely can't teach that "racist behavior is encoded in some of our systems of government and behavior to this very day." Because that would make white people, and in particular modern day white supremacists, feel uncomfortable.
The article mentions numerous ways in which these bills are crafted explicitly to prohibit the teaching of certain uncomfortable truths, while expressly requiring teachers to apply political biases defined by the state (such as the Indiana bill forbidding the teaching of "anti-American ideologies.") Their purpose is not to allow the teaching of fact, but to enshrine into law the teaching of right-wing Christian conservative orthodoxy as fact.
What CRT actually does or doesn't bring to the table isn't relevant, since opponents aren't using a good faith or accurate interpretation of it to begin with.
This makes way more sense when you realize that CRT was originally a niche interest of folks interested in criminal justice reform, long a conservative/libertarian pursuit that liberals and progressives were otherwise quite skeptical of. The whole point was to ask questions like "can we really suppose that the U.S. is a colorblind society when even influential liberals like Sen. Biden - who should know better - go around calling black people 'super predators'? How does this make any sense? It makes no sense! And if Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit." (Seriously, postmodern academic rhetoric has a lot in common with the Chewbacca defense. It's not called "wokie" ideology for nothing!) It spread around from there.