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Of Course The Battleground Is Now The Schools
I had a friend a few months ago equate School Board Meetings these days — which are still mostly boring affairs that no one pays attention to — to WWE matches, which they can become in some cases. Those, of course, are the clips that go viral. There’s nothing new about schools as a cultural battleground. We’ve had debates about busing for decades now. Same with debates about the role of church/religion/etc. in schools, which seemed to be a settled issue but now it seems to be creeping back in various forms. Just like a lot of Trump’s particular brand of nonsense dates back to 1824, there’s nothing per se new in the school debates.
Well, maybe that’s not entirely true. More than in recent past, it seems like the discussion nowadays is about what we teach and how we teach it. Book bans and the like. Woke ideology in third-grade math textbooks. Critical Race Theory, being taught to kindergartners and their oversized backpacks! Of course almost none of this is really true — CRT is a law school concept, not something pushed into second-grade circle shares — and while some teachers do get a little woke on white guilt and other topics, I don’t think that’s the norm.
This article, which appears to be a reprint of a Charles Blow column, does a good…
