Hacker News Reader

Comment by seneca | Hacker News Reader

> And, a surprising number of my wife's friends from church have opted for homeschooling, so they can teach their kids from the Bible and skip all that science and math "liberal indoctrination".

I can assure you, the people newly complaining about "liberal indoctrination" in schools don't mean science and math. It's fine to disagree with people about what should be taught, but it's not productive to ignore how much education has changed and why people object to it, and then disingenuously mischaracterize them.

View on HN

I'm pretty sure most of them have no real idea what they're complaining about, other than what the angry man on TV told them. See the giant, nonsensical hubbub over "critical race theory" a few years ago, as well as stuff like this: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/us/desantis-florida-ap-af...

There are probably legitimate criticisms of recent changes to public education, but it's never the things that Republican politicians harp on.

Also, for what it's worth, much of what my generation was taught in school was utter bullshit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me. If anything, the idea that my children would be taught that the Pilgrims and Indians were best friends, that Columbus was someone to look up to, or that the Civil War was really about states' rights is what would compel me to homeschool, not "liberal indoctrination." But many, like DeSantis, still appear to believe that these lies should be taught.

Critical race theory is not some made up Boogeyman. It's real, it's used to influence the curriculum being taught, and it's just as bad as described

Bullshit:

"Opposition to what was purported to be critical race theory has been adopted as a major theme by several conservative think tanks and pressure groups, including The Heritage Foundation, the Idaho Freedom Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and organizations funded by the Koch brothers. [...] In 2021 [Christopher Rufo] wrote on Twitter, 'The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical race theory'' and 'We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.'"

"The Economist and Reuters have conducted polls on how much the general public understands CRT, a 'once-obscure academic concept', and they found that most people are unfamiliar with CRT and misunderstand it."

(From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020s_controversies_around_cri....)

It is absolutely a conservative boogeyman and (for the most part) has never been a taught subject outside of college.

CRT is mainstream, and the foundation of tainted beliefs like "whiteness" being "evil" and somehow being the root of problems. It's a foundation in what teachers learn in training and apply in their teachings.

I would assume you also oppose teachers getting their Master's in education? After all, that's not a subject that has never been taught in any primary school ...

This. Even if I don’t fully agree with the motives, it’s dishonest to say they are just afraid of science and math ignoring the politicized atmosphere we’ve been dealing with in recent years across all spectrums of society.

Gah, it's not even the politicization! I dare you to sit through a 3rd grade class at your neighborhood school. Nothing gets done. They do projects with little to no mooring to curriculum. That is, unless you live in a top percentile district that values curriculum mapping, but then you were already going to be in the middle class at least. In the meantime, most of these schools are day cares so parents can work. Marx wasn't that wrong.

At my daughter's kindergarten they provide hours per week of ESL support, in addition to the regular material. The walls are covered in curriculum, including more about phonics than I was taught in my first 2 years growing up in the southeast. (Thankfully that era's anti-phonics fad passed by and even those schools got better.)

Things aren't always getting worse. And IME the schools tend to get better in the long term.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com