I've only really read Sullivan on this issue, but I think you're missing his point.
I'll grant you that he's conflating teaching with speech in some of his arguments, but I don't know how important that is to the crux of his argument. In his article, "Don't Ban CRT. Expose It," he tells you *exactly* what he's opposed to and he thinks you should do instead. In the title.
His main objection is that banning an ideology is not a good way to fight it. A significant problem with the woke ideology is, in fact, the idea that banning conflicting ideologies is a good solution to the problem:
"Banning illiberal ideologies like CRT makes us indistinguishable from the woke — who would ban any speech they didn’t like if they could get rid of the First Amendment (just look at what “liberals” are doing in Canada or Britain, for example, where they lock people up for resisting this ideology). Replacing CRT with crude, jingoistic versions of history or society is no answer either. "
You argue that the current CRT banning strategy is "working". I disagree completely--depending on how you define "working". Sure, laws are being passed, but whether that will have any effect whatsoever on the problematic teaching those laws are meant to address is a different question all together. In general, laws like this are little more than political posturing and any effects they're likely to have are probably going to be off-target.
I think Sullivan has a deep commitment to liberal democracy and he genuinely views attempts to ban things as an affront to liberal democracy, and I tend to agree with him.
Just think for a minute about a law that bans any teaching that could lead an individual to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex.” It's absurd, vague, and exactly the sort of "snowflake" ideology that the anti-CRT crowd is usually fighting against. I could easily interpret such a ban as prohibiting the teaching of the holocaust. In my own experience, I could reasonably say that such teaching in public schools caused me psychological stress because of my race.
The argument is that the bans are bad and they are. They aren't in the spirit of liberal democracy. I don't think they're going to prevent the sort of awful indoctrination described in Sullivan's article, and I think off-target effects are likely. I don't think you have to get carried away to reach this conclusion...
I actually agree to an extent, but I think there's also an element of fantasy in Sullivan's views. If we can refute/beat CRT with discussion, that's great - but one of the traits of CRT is that it considers attempts to refute it/beat it as racism; at least the people who are interested in teaching it aren't really all that particularly interested in debating it; it's a done deal for them. The whole point of the media rush to say "there's no CRT in schools!" was *because* they know it's broadly unacceptable - they just don't care, they want it anyway.
So that leaves a position where we either ban it or it just keeps on keeping on. I'd be much more sympathetic to leaving it alone at the university level (because there's a choice there) but here it's a little different - the parents don't always/usually have a choice.
So the command ends up being something like "Complain about this, but at the same time also accept that your kids go to race indoctrination camp you pay for 8 hours a day". In the balancing act of things, I put a lot of weight on something like "the right to raise your child" and this is a direct, intentional attack on it; that changes the algebra for me quite a bit.
Agreed that there's an element of fantasy to Sullivan's desired approach, but it's sort of the fantasy that "liberal democracy works," isn't it?
I also agree that CRT-theorists aren't open to debating it, but disagree that banning it will keep it from keeping on. There's no less fantasy on the side that the bans will work. I haven't read many of them in detail, but what I've seen excerpted sure doesn't seem like a good idea.
I don't think anyone's suggesting that we accept that you have to send your kids to race indoctrination camp, either. Sure, some of the examples sound terrible, but I've been to public school; they're not good enough to pull off race indoctrination camp 8 hours a day even if they wanted to. And really, we give you "the right to raise your child," as evidenced by you homeschooling yours. If you don't have the means or inclination, we have public schools where, sure, some of the time they'll tell your white kids that they are oppressors and you can tell them their teachers are wrong. And it also turns out that while teachers don't have a right to free speech in classrooms, students mostly do. I learned in public school that the civil war wasn't really about slavery, but it's not like I wasn't able to update when confronted with actual evidence later...
And whatever you think about a CRT ban, a law that says teachers are not allowed to question the motives of the country's founders is about as illiberal as you can get and really does border on constitutionally protected speech... even in a classroom. Even if I wanted to granted you that it'd prevent teachers from telling white kids they are oppressors (it won't), the solution is worse than the problem.
What would be your view if teachers wanted to teach Nazi ideology in a positive, aspirational light? Or if teachers wanted to teach kids that the world was flat? Would it be bad for liberal democracy for elected governments to ban teaching both of those things?
I haven't reviewed the laws in question, but the excerpted parts do sound poorly crafted. Perhaps it will always be difficult to prevent persistent ideologue teachers from teaching what they want to teach. Nevertheless, I disagree completely that elected governments attempting to ban the teaching toxic, racist nonsense or clear falsehoods in government schools is a threat to liberal democracy.
I don't think anyone really thinks that public school teachers should be able to teach anything they want, do they?
I don't think this is a useful hypothetical. While some individual teacher could certainly attempt this, I'd think it could be resolved by a school principal--no need to get the legislature involved. If there's enough nazi education going on that we really thing we need the legislature to fix it, it seems like the democracy has some serious problems. I think an attempt to ban this sort of thing by the legislature would also be really hard to do well. You shouldn't ban teaching Nazism (after all, it's pretty important for the children of a liberal democracy to learn about things that have gone badly). You can't ban teaching Nazism in an aspirational light because that's nearly impossible to enforce. You probably shouldn't even attempt to do so either--banning ideas is probably the best way get them to spread....
I would agree that an *attempt* to, "teaching toxic, racist nonsense or clear falsehoods in government schools is a threat to liberal democracy," on its face. But I don't know how you can do that in such a way that isn't very problematic. Surely a law that says, "Teachers are forbidden to teach toxic, racist nonsense or clear falsehoods in government schools," would cause more problems than it solves and would, in fact, be an affront to liberal democracy...
You're essentially taking a conservative position about the efficacy of government, at least I this case. That's fine and I am sympathetic to that perspective, both in general and in this case in particular.
It's still not clear to me though how the fact that policy is a crude tool in this case means that trying to use it to snuff out teaching an ideology that itself is an affront to liberal democracy is an affront to liberal democracy.
Is it simply the precedent? But as RC points out, that precedent already exists. Is it then expanding a precedent?
To broaden the debate a little, what would you propose instead to prevent kids at government schools from being taught a toxic ideology that you thought was damaging to liberal democracy? (I'm not saying you think this about CRT, but people do and I think it helps clarify the argument to put the costs and benefits of legislation in the same unit of measurement - damage to liberal democracy).
I think a core requirement for a liberal democracy to flourish is freedom of dissent. I realize I'm getting into freedom of speech (which isn't the issue here), but feels very much related to the issue. If your education system is set up to produce monolithic output, I think that's going to have a negative impact on your liberal democracy. Broad consensus leads to restricting freedom for those outside of the consensus. Diversity of opinion is good--it's the only way we make changes.
I think banning ideologies from schools is just a way to try to impose your preferred monoculture. I don't want schools teaching kids that white silence is violence, but the fact that any attempt to legislate schools into not doing that is going to go poorly is a really important consideration. If the law isn't going to do what I want and is probably going to do something else, it's better not to have the law.
It's not the precedence--in fact the opposite. We've got a lot of history to show that trying to legislate political or cultural teaching goes badly. I'll dredge up historical examples if you want, but it seems like a thing we're always fighting about.
To answer your question: I don't think we should try to prevent government schools from banning toxic ideology that I think is damaging to liberal democracy. Suppose we've got a group of history teachers who want to focus on the great successes of authoritarian governments while playing up the failures of liberal democracies. I think this is problematic, but *less* problematic than any attempt to ban this sort of teaching. And while it's worrisome, it might do some good--contrarian thought often gets us good places. I guess the short of it is that I value diversity of opinion (even bad opinion) over attempted state-regulated monoculture.
This is a boss telling people who work for them "No, don't do that." It's not banning CRT any more than you telling someone who works for you "No, you can't read whaling novels instead of filing TPS reports" is banning Moby Dick.
Now, if you want to argue that these laws are poorly drafted, great, they probably are. But then let's talk about that and not muddy the waters with accusations of book burning and attacking liberal democracy.
Maybe, but mandating a method is far less objectionable. At question is a state mandating that its educators stick to pro-state propaganda. Which is absolutely an attack on liberal democracy. You know, like, legislating that you cannot teach that slavery is anything other than contradictory to the founding principles of the state.
I think this is where to conflict comes in for me. The state and it's educators are indistinguishable here to the end-user. To the parent who opposes CRT, the results they are seeing are either "state mandates my kids learn my race is bad and a bunch of other stuff I disagree with", or "state mandates something different".
I'm not nearly as concerned with the state-state interaction as I am with the state-citizen interaction, and the state-citizen interaction is already in a pretty illiberal "sometimes we force your kids to learn a radical, state-approved ideology" position here.
Sure. My problem isn't with the state-state interaction either. I'm not remotely concerned about the freedom of the teachers here, so apologies if I made it seem like I am. I'm concerned that state-mandated propaganda-filled curricula is fundamentally incompatible with a liberal democracy. Some of this moving quickly into territory where the public schools are being used to prop up the state through indoctrination. Even if I like the state, that's not good for it in the long term.
I appreciate that we have a long history of public schools basically being state-indoctrination devices (having students recite the pledge of allegiance is particularly problematic here). I also appreciate that one mans facts is another man's lies (evolution), and we use school as a place to litigate this. And that having some standards about what public schools teach is probably a reasonable idea.
So if we accept that public schools are a necessity (I'd guess you'd be in favor of abolishing them completely), the state is going to have to set some standards about the content of the education. I'm fine with mandatory content, but banning controversial content is bad, no matter the content. For instance, it's completely acceptable to teach creationism in a religious context, in an anthropological context, or in a literary context. It's not okay to teach it in a scientific context. But I don't think I can possibly craft a law that says, "you may not teach creationism in a scientific context," that will mean anything. I also think legislating that, "It is forbidden for you to teach creationism," is a terrible idea.
Furthermore, the more controversial something is, the more I think it should be taught in schools. I absolutely think CRT is a legitimate field of study for an interested university student in public school. Of course, that's not what this debate is about. What this debate is about is that some people don't want their children being told that they are oppressors simply because of the color of their skin. I don't think it's possible to legislate that in any meaningful way, and thus far the attempts to do are fundamentally illiberal.
If you have public schools, someone needs to decide what they teach. If making that decision is attacking democracy, then the only way to avoid that is abolishing public schools entirely. Is that really the road you want to go down?
I don't personally want to go down that road, but I bet some do. I think I address this in my response to RC, but basically: broad inclusive content requirements are fine. Content bans are pretty much always bad. Political content bans/requirements are attacking democracy. If I ban teaching anything negative about the president of the US, that's attacking democracy. If I require teaching that the president is unquestionably good, that's attacking democracy. Anything that starts encroach on this sort of content is attacking democracy. Legislating that well is hard/impossible. Not legislating is easy. When in doubt, don't legislate.
About a billion years late to this thread, but the bill referred to (from Tennessee, HB0580) does not "[ban] any teaching that *could* lead an individual to 'feel discomfort, guilt, anguish...'"
Here is the corresponding text from the bill:
"(a) An LEA or public charter school shall not include or promote the following
concepts as part of a course of instruction or in a curriculum or instructional program, or
allow teachers or other employees of the LEA or public charter school to use
supplemental instructional materials that include or promote the following concept
[...]
(6) An individual *should* feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of
psychological distress solely because of the individual's race or sex;"
Emphasis mine. As you can see, the bill bans teaching that an individual *should* feel bad about their race. It does NOT restrict the teaching of historical events that might make students of a particular race feel uncomfortable.
Geeze. I was about to say that I was reading a quote of a NYT article and would have thought they wouldn't have misconstrued the law so badly, but good on you for checking, because that's a totally different thing all together.
I think the law is still bad and probably unconstitutional. That list of 14 bits of banned content is still problematic, even though not as problematic as the NYT misconstrued. Content bans are still a bad way to go about fixing this problem.
If someone tells you to do something that straightforwardly helps his interests and harms yours, but claims that it's really in your interest becaise of some less straightforward chain of events or scenario, it's probably motivated reasoning or concern trolling, and you should reject it. This is a general principle that applies in far more than just this one situation, and I've noticed it over and over.
What strikes me as strange reading some of the comments here and other places around the internet is that people don't seem to get that having these sorts of fights is precisely what entails once you have mandatory government schools: the government has to decide what gets taught and what doesn't. Whatever shape the government takes, whether a school board, state curriculum board, principle, teacher, some agent(s) of the government decide and make it so. To the extent we as citizens control the government, we have to argue, debate and fight other citizens to determine how those agents act.
Which is why public schools are a bad idea. Much better to just let people choose which schools will indoctrinate their kids themselves.
CRT in history is just telling the story from the perspective of ~1/5th of the population instead of ~4/5ths. To shit on the entire concept because some of its contributors are idiots is asinine. I personally think it absurd that you focus on the technicality of their argument as opposed to the bizarre phrasing of the proposed law they're against.
I mean, the idea that you can't teach something because it might be discomforting cordons off huge amounts of very useful things to teach. Can we teach the suffragettes? Can we teach the janissaries? That non-violent political affiliation is also listed suggests that we would introduce discomfort in merely stating the times when student's preferred political party lost an election.
So considering how kafka-esqe the whole proposed law is, the only crazier thing is seeing how many lines you pissed away arguing against a technicality of the argument someone made against it.
Part of the conflict you are seeing is that everyone involved in the article - French, McWhorter, Sullivan - views the teachings themselves as super toxic. "CRT is fine, it's just history" is mostly just a tankie-level thinking at this point.
Because I'm not arguing against people who think it's harmless, but instead people who think it's harmful, what I'm left with is arguing against the places we do disagree, or places they aren't being particularly honest. In this case, if they (or you!) cared about the overbroadness of the law as anything but a tricky sort of misdirection, they wouldn't be arguing against making laws - just making them more specific and more targeted. But, since they care about something different besides over-broadness (or else they'd propose narrowing it, which none of them dows), it's worth pointing at that including it in their arguments is a weird kind of deception.
> CRT is fine, it's just history" is mostly just a tankie-level thinking at this point.
I don't see how this statement is much different from Godwin's law. To presume some sort of bespectacled scholarly pomp while arguing at this kind of playground level is a bit of a farce. You should think about how far you've dragged your Overton window and whether or not you truly understand who you've placed outside it because it doesn't sound like you do.
"they care about something different besides over-broadness"
Correct. Lousy drafting of legislation can be overcome, but the three care much more about another issue. So what is it that they care about, and how might the issue be addressed (from a classical liberal rather than from an authoritarian nor from a progressive perspective)?
I think you are reading too much into McWhorter's tweet (I don't know the other 2 who I presume are also American public intellectuals).
As you are effectively saying, it can be interpreted as: "don't make this a zero sum game. When you go up against more powerful players you lose"
So I think the commentary would be better around how to make this a positve sum game for determining curiculum content. After all, this is the message of the American system. I believe your (I'm a Kiwi) federal government effectively requires free trade between States (so States use regulation etc to gain rivalous advantage, but that is another story). America has become rich through free trade among its states.
Just to add: NZ, as a small nation that trades internationally, is constantly having to convince more powerful players that there is value to be gained for both sides from free trade. This applies particularly to powerful nations like China and the USA and to blocks of states like the EU, and is why our government is invested in supporting international institutions.
You could use this as a model for how to improve your national schooling system.
Granted all institutions are vulnerable to ideological capture. We home schooled one of our kids for a time because the school system was failing him, though he has still chosen to more or less follow an unconventional career. He dropped out of Uni and has now works in an equestrian centre. Actually I did much the same in my 20's and have still done pretty well for myself and my family.
Here I will use the word "liberal" in the classical liberal sense, not in the American political sense.
The problem is that "liberal democracy" is not a pure concept in practice. What I mean is this: there are situations where the liberal part comes into conflict with the democracy part. I'm pretty sure, having read and listened to a fair amount of his recent work, that Sullivan is very pro-liberal-democracy. But when the demos starts to put into place things that he considers illiberal, the concept breaks down and he cannot support it without dirtying the concept. If you had a system where elites like French and Sullivan had the legal ability to strike down democratic decisions they viewed as illiberal, that's not a liberal democracy--it's a liberal oligarchy (assuming the elites correctly delineate liberal from illiberal). If the demos votes for an objectively illiberal policy (let's pretend such a thing exists), then that's not a liberal democracy--it's an illiberal democracy.
It gets even more difficult when you look at this specific situation. You have the the anti-CRT folks with goals that are arguably liberal (in that they promote individualism and discourage prejudice against groups) but who are using means that are arguably illiberal (in that they are supporting a law that discourages speech by certain persons and that potentially removes certain topics from free inquiry). The argument of the anti-CRT folks (broadly) is that the ends justify the means.
Sullivan argues instead that the ends don't justify the means. Even if the democratic result is an illiberal pro-CRT curriculum, it was arrived at by upholding the liberal values of free speech and free inquiry. Maintining the integrity of an overall liberal system might allow for illiberal policies here and there, but it will result mostly in liberal policies, whereas operating under an overall illiberal system is very unlikely to yield anything but illiberal policies.
My feeling is that I agree with Sullivan in theory, but in practice I think the only way that a liberal system can maintain its integrity is by letting the illiberal and liberal sides of an issue battle it out, back and forth, using liberal democratic procedures, until the end result is a liberal policy on that particular issue. And so on and so on.
> Even if the democratic result is an illiberal pro-CRT curriculum, it was arrived at by upholding the liberal values of free speech and free inquiry.
if the consequences of doing nothing is illiberalism, then we'll get stuck with illiberalism either way, and at least banning CRT will mean our illiberalism doesn't have the schools spreading racial hatred in the heart of every kid.
RC, I enjoyed this essay. A couple of quibbles though. I think you're overbroad a bit in stating that teachers can be constrained to say only the things the government wants them to say because they are government employees. The Supreme Court has held that neither students nor teachers shed their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse gates. Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U.S. 503, 506 (1969). However, "the first amendment does not entitle primary and secondary teachers, when conducting the education of captive audiences, to cover topics, or advocate viewpoints, that depart from the curriculum adopted by the school system." Mayer v. Monroe Cnty. Community School Corp., 474 F.3d 477, 480 (7th Cir. 2007).
Public universities are also government bodies, but they cannot compel tenured professors to stick to a curriculum. University professors have broad First Amendment rights to conduct their classrooms, including advocating viewpoints. They cannot be compelled to speak a certain way because "that's what the government wants them to say."
It then boils down to what you called your weakest argument, but which I think is actually your strongest. What have been inaptly called speech codes are actually just curricular prerogatives being exercised by those with the power to exercise them. If a state legislature wants to set a statewide curricular policy (and assuming the state's constitution gives them that power), then they should set the policy as they see fit. If they miss the mark, then throw the bums out. These bills aren't speech codes; they're garden-variety curriculum setting.
While I happen to believe that state-level anti-CRT legislation can be good policy, I do sympathize with McWhorter and Sullivan's concerns about overbreadth, though for different reasons. Take the discussion of the Tennessee bill you quoted from French above. Banning teaching that could lead to an individual feeling "discomfort or guilt" is not narrowly tailored. One might imagine a hyper-conservative parent complaining that their child could feel discomfort or guilt if slavery (or the Civil War, or the Tulsa Race Massacre, or Jim Crow) is taught. No responsible person is saying those topics shouldn't be taught, but an irresponsible parent might use the Tennessee bill's overbroad language to shield their child from these topics. (One might also imagine any number of scenarios where this concept applies in different ideological contexts.)
I must note that in French's critique of the Texas bill, it goes unmentioned that the Texas bill *requires* curricular development of "the history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong." So any hint that the ban on CRT (at least in Texas) is looking to dodge these important topics is just flatly wrong. https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/87R/billtext/pdf/HB03979F.pdf#navpanes=0
I think I'm less concerned about overbreadth because I'm already living in overbreadth world. If I live in a situation where the the current problem is "the government can force you to send your kids to school where they teach them their race is evil, and does!". I'm not sure what I'm dodging here that's worse.
That also plays into illustrating a hidden false premise of sorts - Sullivan and others are asking that I view this as an expansion of powers, but it's not; these powers are really well established, and currently being used in diabolical ways in favor of one tribe. Without the expansion of powers bit, this becomes much more of a trade-off between bad options thing for me, as opposed to, like, the government establishing a new power wholecloth.
I agree that it's not an expansion of powers (assuming that these legislatures do have powers under their state constitutions--a safe assumption I think) for a state legislature to set statewide educational policy.
But overbreadth is always a problem to avoid in legislation. Government should exercise no more power than necessary. So if we see overbreadth on the front-end, it should be corrected. Overbreadth creates problems in implementation (imagine being a teacher subject to license revocation if you trip an overbroad law, for example) and create excess risk of unwanted consequences and legal risk of a statute's invalidation. Proponents of CRT bans should want to do this in as precise a fashion as possible. Based on the descriptions I've seen, Tennessee was much less successful than Texas in this regard.
Your blog was interesting, but you have trouble seeing your own biases. You're pushing an agenda that I don't agree with and I hope your children find their way out of your indoctrination.
I've only really read Sullivan on this issue, but I think you're missing his point.
I'll grant you that he's conflating teaching with speech in some of his arguments, but I don't know how important that is to the crux of his argument. In his article, "Don't Ban CRT. Expose It," he tells you *exactly* what he's opposed to and he thinks you should do instead. In the title.
His main objection is that banning an ideology is not a good way to fight it. A significant problem with the woke ideology is, in fact, the idea that banning conflicting ideologies is a good solution to the problem:
"Banning illiberal ideologies like CRT makes us indistinguishable from the woke — who would ban any speech they didn’t like if they could get rid of the First Amendment (just look at what “liberals” are doing in Canada or Britain, for example, where they lock people up for resisting this ideology). Replacing CRT with crude, jingoistic versions of history or society is no answer either. "
You argue that the current CRT banning strategy is "working". I disagree completely--depending on how you define "working". Sure, laws are being passed, but whether that will have any effect whatsoever on the problematic teaching those laws are meant to address is a different question all together. In general, laws like this are little more than political posturing and any effects they're likely to have are probably going to be off-target.
I think Sullivan has a deep commitment to liberal democracy and he genuinely views attempts to ban things as an affront to liberal democracy, and I tend to agree with him.
Just think for a minute about a law that bans any teaching that could lead an individual to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex.” It's absurd, vague, and exactly the sort of "snowflake" ideology that the anti-CRT crowd is usually fighting against. I could easily interpret such a ban as prohibiting the teaching of the holocaust. In my own experience, I could reasonably say that such teaching in public schools caused me psychological stress because of my race.
The argument is that the bans are bad and they are. They aren't in the spirit of liberal democracy. I don't think they're going to prevent the sort of awful indoctrination described in Sullivan's article, and I think off-target effects are likely. I don't think you have to get carried away to reach this conclusion...
I actually agree to an extent, but I think there's also an element of fantasy in Sullivan's views. If we can refute/beat CRT with discussion, that's great - but one of the traits of CRT is that it considers attempts to refute it/beat it as racism; at least the people who are interested in teaching it aren't really all that particularly interested in debating it; it's a done deal for them. The whole point of the media rush to say "there's no CRT in schools!" was *because* they know it's broadly unacceptable - they just don't care, they want it anyway.
So that leaves a position where we either ban it or it just keeps on keeping on. I'd be much more sympathetic to leaving it alone at the university level (because there's a choice there) but here it's a little different - the parents don't always/usually have a choice.
So the command ends up being something like "Complain about this, but at the same time also accept that your kids go to race indoctrination camp you pay for 8 hours a day". In the balancing act of things, I put a lot of weight on something like "the right to raise your child" and this is a direct, intentional attack on it; that changes the algebra for me quite a bit.
Agreed that there's an element of fantasy to Sullivan's desired approach, but it's sort of the fantasy that "liberal democracy works," isn't it?
I also agree that CRT-theorists aren't open to debating it, but disagree that banning it will keep it from keeping on. There's no less fantasy on the side that the bans will work. I haven't read many of them in detail, but what I've seen excerpted sure doesn't seem like a good idea.
I don't think anyone's suggesting that we accept that you have to send your kids to race indoctrination camp, either. Sure, some of the examples sound terrible, but I've been to public school; they're not good enough to pull off race indoctrination camp 8 hours a day even if they wanted to. And really, we give you "the right to raise your child," as evidenced by you homeschooling yours. If you don't have the means or inclination, we have public schools where, sure, some of the time they'll tell your white kids that they are oppressors and you can tell them their teachers are wrong. And it also turns out that while teachers don't have a right to free speech in classrooms, students mostly do. I learned in public school that the civil war wasn't really about slavery, but it's not like I wasn't able to update when confronted with actual evidence later...
And whatever you think about a CRT ban, a law that says teachers are not allowed to question the motives of the country's founders is about as illiberal as you can get and really does border on constitutionally protected speech... even in a classroom. Even if I wanted to granted you that it'd prevent teachers from telling white kids they are oppressors (it won't), the solution is worse than the problem.
What would be your view if teachers wanted to teach Nazi ideology in a positive, aspirational light? Or if teachers wanted to teach kids that the world was flat? Would it be bad for liberal democracy for elected governments to ban teaching both of those things?
I haven't reviewed the laws in question, but the excerpted parts do sound poorly crafted. Perhaps it will always be difficult to prevent persistent ideologue teachers from teaching what they want to teach. Nevertheless, I disagree completely that elected governments attempting to ban the teaching toxic, racist nonsense or clear falsehoods in government schools is a threat to liberal democracy.
I don't think anyone really thinks that public school teachers should be able to teach anything they want, do they?
I don't think this is a useful hypothetical. While some individual teacher could certainly attempt this, I'd think it could be resolved by a school principal--no need to get the legislature involved. If there's enough nazi education going on that we really thing we need the legislature to fix it, it seems like the democracy has some serious problems. I think an attempt to ban this sort of thing by the legislature would also be really hard to do well. You shouldn't ban teaching Nazism (after all, it's pretty important for the children of a liberal democracy to learn about things that have gone badly). You can't ban teaching Nazism in an aspirational light because that's nearly impossible to enforce. You probably shouldn't even attempt to do so either--banning ideas is probably the best way get them to spread....
I would agree that an *attempt* to, "teaching toxic, racist nonsense or clear falsehoods in government schools is a threat to liberal democracy," on its face. But I don't know how you can do that in such a way that isn't very problematic. Surely a law that says, "Teachers are forbidden to teach toxic, racist nonsense or clear falsehoods in government schools," would cause more problems than it solves and would, in fact, be an affront to liberal democracy...
You're essentially taking a conservative position about the efficacy of government, at least I this case. That's fine and I am sympathetic to that perspective, both in general and in this case in particular.
It's still not clear to me though how the fact that policy is a crude tool in this case means that trying to use it to snuff out teaching an ideology that itself is an affront to liberal democracy is an affront to liberal democracy.
Is it simply the precedent? But as RC points out, that precedent already exists. Is it then expanding a precedent?
To broaden the debate a little, what would you propose instead to prevent kids at government schools from being taught a toxic ideology that you thought was damaging to liberal democracy? (I'm not saying you think this about CRT, but people do and I think it helps clarify the argument to put the costs and benefits of legislation in the same unit of measurement - damage to liberal democracy).
I think a core requirement for a liberal democracy to flourish is freedom of dissent. I realize I'm getting into freedom of speech (which isn't the issue here), but feels very much related to the issue. If your education system is set up to produce monolithic output, I think that's going to have a negative impact on your liberal democracy. Broad consensus leads to restricting freedom for those outside of the consensus. Diversity of opinion is good--it's the only way we make changes.
I think banning ideologies from schools is just a way to try to impose your preferred monoculture. I don't want schools teaching kids that white silence is violence, but the fact that any attempt to legislate schools into not doing that is going to go poorly is a really important consideration. If the law isn't going to do what I want and is probably going to do something else, it's better not to have the law.
It's not the precedence--in fact the opposite. We've got a lot of history to show that trying to legislate political or cultural teaching goes badly. I'll dredge up historical examples if you want, but it seems like a thing we're always fighting about.
To answer your question: I don't think we should try to prevent government schools from banning toxic ideology that I think is damaging to liberal democracy. Suppose we've got a group of history teachers who want to focus on the great successes of authoritarian governments while playing up the failures of liberal democracies. I think this is problematic, but *less* problematic than any attempt to ban this sort of teaching. And while it's worrisome, it might do some good--contrarian thought often gets us good places. I guess the short of it is that I value diversity of opinion (even bad opinion) over attempted state-regulated monoculture.
This is a boss telling people who work for them "No, don't do that." It's not banning CRT any more than you telling someone who works for you "No, you can't read whaling novels instead of filing TPS reports" is banning Moby Dick.
Now, if you want to argue that these laws are poorly drafted, great, they probably are. But then let's talk about that and not muddy the waters with accusations of book burning and attacking liberal democracy.
Telling a professor, "No, don't do that," when "that" is "teach a thing someone disagrees with" is attacking liberal democracy.
So it's attacking liberal democracy if a state legislates, say, phonics instead of whole word? Or adopts common core?
Maybe, but mandating a method is far less objectionable. At question is a state mandating that its educators stick to pro-state propaganda. Which is absolutely an attack on liberal democracy. You know, like, legislating that you cannot teach that slavery is anything other than contradictory to the founding principles of the state.
I think this is where to conflict comes in for me. The state and it's educators are indistinguishable here to the end-user. To the parent who opposes CRT, the results they are seeing are either "state mandates my kids learn my race is bad and a bunch of other stuff I disagree with", or "state mandates something different".
I'm not nearly as concerned with the state-state interaction as I am with the state-citizen interaction, and the state-citizen interaction is already in a pretty illiberal "sometimes we force your kids to learn a radical, state-approved ideology" position here.
Sure. My problem isn't with the state-state interaction either. I'm not remotely concerned about the freedom of the teachers here, so apologies if I made it seem like I am. I'm concerned that state-mandated propaganda-filled curricula is fundamentally incompatible with a liberal democracy. Some of this moving quickly into territory where the public schools are being used to prop up the state through indoctrination. Even if I like the state, that's not good for it in the long term.
I appreciate that we have a long history of public schools basically being state-indoctrination devices (having students recite the pledge of allegiance is particularly problematic here). I also appreciate that one mans facts is another man's lies (evolution), and we use school as a place to litigate this. And that having some standards about what public schools teach is probably a reasonable idea.
So if we accept that public schools are a necessity (I'd guess you'd be in favor of abolishing them completely), the state is going to have to set some standards about the content of the education. I'm fine with mandatory content, but banning controversial content is bad, no matter the content. For instance, it's completely acceptable to teach creationism in a religious context, in an anthropological context, or in a literary context. It's not okay to teach it in a scientific context. But I don't think I can possibly craft a law that says, "you may not teach creationism in a scientific context," that will mean anything. I also think legislating that, "It is forbidden for you to teach creationism," is a terrible idea.
Furthermore, the more controversial something is, the more I think it should be taught in schools. I absolutely think CRT is a legitimate field of study for an interested university student in public school. Of course, that's not what this debate is about. What this debate is about is that some people don't want their children being told that they are oppressors simply because of the color of their skin. I don't think it's possible to legislate that in any meaningful way, and thus far the attempts to do are fundamentally illiberal.
If you have public schools, someone needs to decide what they teach. If making that decision is attacking democracy, then the only way to avoid that is abolishing public schools entirely. Is that really the road you want to go down?
Yes, let's abolish government schools and provide vouchers to all kids. This problem is solved, and so are a hundred other problems.
I don't personally want to go down that road, but I bet some do. I think I address this in my response to RC, but basically: broad inclusive content requirements are fine. Content bans are pretty much always bad. Political content bans/requirements are attacking democracy. If I ban teaching anything negative about the president of the US, that's attacking democracy. If I require teaching that the president is unquestionably good, that's attacking democracy. Anything that starts encroach on this sort of content is attacking democracy. Legislating that well is hard/impossible. Not legislating is easy. When in doubt, don't legislate.
About a billion years late to this thread, but the bill referred to (from Tennessee, HB0580) does not "[ban] any teaching that *could* lead an individual to 'feel discomfort, guilt, anguish...'"
Here is the corresponding text from the bill:
"(a) An LEA or public charter school shall not include or promote the following
concepts as part of a course of instruction or in a curriculum or instructional program, or
allow teachers or other employees of the LEA or public charter school to use
supplemental instructional materials that include or promote the following concept
[...]
(6) An individual *should* feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of
psychological distress solely because of the individual's race or sex;"
Emphasis mine. As you can see, the bill bans teaching that an individual *should* feel bad about their race. It does NOT restrict the teaching of historical events that might make students of a particular race feel uncomfortable.
I also want to note that you are not accountable for this misconstrual as it originally appeared in the anti-ban NYT article.
Geeze. I was about to say that I was reading a quote of a NYT article and would have thought they wouldn't have misconstrued the law so badly, but good on you for checking, because that's a totally different thing all together.
I think the law is still bad and probably unconstitutional. That list of 14 bits of banned content is still problematic, even though not as problematic as the NYT misconstrued. Content bans are still a bad way to go about fixing this problem.
If someone tells you to do something that straightforwardly helps his interests and harms yours, but claims that it's really in your interest becaise of some less straightforward chain of events or scenario, it's probably motivated reasoning or concern trolling, and you should reject it. This is a general principle that applies in far more than just this one situation, and I've noticed it over and over.
Excellent post. It must just be that time of year, as I wrote pretty much the same thing earlier in the week. Probably not so well! (https://dochammer.substack.com/p/why-libertarians-are-so-awkward-with)
What strikes me as strange reading some of the comments here and other places around the internet is that people don't seem to get that having these sorts of fights is precisely what entails once you have mandatory government schools: the government has to decide what gets taught and what doesn't. Whatever shape the government takes, whether a school board, state curriculum board, principle, teacher, some agent(s) of the government decide and make it so. To the extent we as citizens control the government, we have to argue, debate and fight other citizens to determine how those agents act.
Which is why public schools are a bad idea. Much better to just let people choose which schools will indoctrinate their kids themselves.
CRT in history is just telling the story from the perspective of ~1/5th of the population instead of ~4/5ths. To shit on the entire concept because some of its contributors are idiots is asinine. I personally think it absurd that you focus on the technicality of their argument as opposed to the bizarre phrasing of the proposed law they're against.
I mean, the idea that you can't teach something because it might be discomforting cordons off huge amounts of very useful things to teach. Can we teach the suffragettes? Can we teach the janissaries? That non-violent political affiliation is also listed suggests that we would introduce discomfort in merely stating the times when student's preferred political party lost an election.
So considering how kafka-esqe the whole proposed law is, the only crazier thing is seeing how many lines you pissed away arguing against a technicality of the argument someone made against it.
Maybe even crazier is the fact I read it all.
Part of the conflict you are seeing is that everyone involved in the article - French, McWhorter, Sullivan - views the teachings themselves as super toxic. "CRT is fine, it's just history" is mostly just a tankie-level thinking at this point.
Because I'm not arguing against people who think it's harmless, but instead people who think it's harmful, what I'm left with is arguing against the places we do disagree, or places they aren't being particularly honest. In this case, if they (or you!) cared about the overbroadness of the law as anything but a tricky sort of misdirection, they wouldn't be arguing against making laws - just making them more specific and more targeted. But, since they care about something different besides over-broadness (or else they'd propose narrowing it, which none of them dows), it's worth pointing at that including it in their arguments is a weird kind of deception.
> CRT is fine, it's just history" is mostly just a tankie-level thinking at this point.
I don't see how this statement is much different from Godwin's law. To presume some sort of bespectacled scholarly pomp while arguing at this kind of playground level is a bit of a farce. You should think about how far you've dragged your Overton window and whether or not you truly understand who you've placed outside it because it doesn't sound like you do.
"they care about something different besides over-broadness"
Correct. Lousy drafting of legislation can be overcome, but the three care much more about another issue. So what is it that they care about, and how might the issue be addressed (from a classical liberal rather than from an authoritarian nor from a progressive perspective)?
I think you are reading too much into McWhorter's tweet (I don't know the other 2 who I presume are also American public intellectuals).
As you are effectively saying, it can be interpreted as: "don't make this a zero sum game. When you go up against more powerful players you lose"
So I think the commentary would be better around how to make this a positve sum game for determining curiculum content. After all, this is the message of the American system. I believe your (I'm a Kiwi) federal government effectively requires free trade between States (so States use regulation etc to gain rivalous advantage, but that is another story). America has become rich through free trade among its states.
Just to add: NZ, as a small nation that trades internationally, is constantly having to convince more powerful players that there is value to be gained for both sides from free trade. This applies particularly to powerful nations like China and the USA and to blocks of states like the EU, and is why our government is invested in supporting international institutions.
You could use this as a model for how to improve your national schooling system.
Granted all institutions are vulnerable to ideological capture. We home schooled one of our kids for a time because the school system was failing him, though he has still chosen to more or less follow an unconventional career. He dropped out of Uni and has now works in an equestrian centre. Actually I did much the same in my 20's and have still done pretty well for myself and my family.
Here I will use the word "liberal" in the classical liberal sense, not in the American political sense.
The problem is that "liberal democracy" is not a pure concept in practice. What I mean is this: there are situations where the liberal part comes into conflict with the democracy part. I'm pretty sure, having read and listened to a fair amount of his recent work, that Sullivan is very pro-liberal-democracy. But when the demos starts to put into place things that he considers illiberal, the concept breaks down and he cannot support it without dirtying the concept. If you had a system where elites like French and Sullivan had the legal ability to strike down democratic decisions they viewed as illiberal, that's not a liberal democracy--it's a liberal oligarchy (assuming the elites correctly delineate liberal from illiberal). If the demos votes for an objectively illiberal policy (let's pretend such a thing exists), then that's not a liberal democracy--it's an illiberal democracy.
It gets even more difficult when you look at this specific situation. You have the the anti-CRT folks with goals that are arguably liberal (in that they promote individualism and discourage prejudice against groups) but who are using means that are arguably illiberal (in that they are supporting a law that discourages speech by certain persons and that potentially removes certain topics from free inquiry). The argument of the anti-CRT folks (broadly) is that the ends justify the means.
Sullivan argues instead that the ends don't justify the means. Even if the democratic result is an illiberal pro-CRT curriculum, it was arrived at by upholding the liberal values of free speech and free inquiry. Maintining the integrity of an overall liberal system might allow for illiberal policies here and there, but it will result mostly in liberal policies, whereas operating under an overall illiberal system is very unlikely to yield anything but illiberal policies.
My feeling is that I agree with Sullivan in theory, but in practice I think the only way that a liberal system can maintain its integrity is by letting the illiberal and liberal sides of an issue battle it out, back and forth, using liberal democratic procedures, until the end result is a liberal policy on that particular issue. And so on and so on.
> Even if the democratic result is an illiberal pro-CRT curriculum, it was arrived at by upholding the liberal values of free speech and free inquiry.
if the consequences of doing nothing is illiberalism, then we'll get stuck with illiberalism either way, and at least banning CRT will mean our illiberalism doesn't have the schools spreading racial hatred in the heart of every kid.
RC, I enjoyed this essay. A couple of quibbles though. I think you're overbroad a bit in stating that teachers can be constrained to say only the things the government wants them to say because they are government employees. The Supreme Court has held that neither students nor teachers shed their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse gates. Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U.S. 503, 506 (1969). However, "the first amendment does not entitle primary and secondary teachers, when conducting the education of captive audiences, to cover topics, or advocate viewpoints, that depart from the curriculum adopted by the school system." Mayer v. Monroe Cnty. Community School Corp., 474 F.3d 477, 480 (7th Cir. 2007).
Public universities are also government bodies, but they cannot compel tenured professors to stick to a curriculum. University professors have broad First Amendment rights to conduct their classrooms, including advocating viewpoints. They cannot be compelled to speak a certain way because "that's what the government wants them to say."
It then boils down to what you called your weakest argument, but which I think is actually your strongest. What have been inaptly called speech codes are actually just curricular prerogatives being exercised by those with the power to exercise them. If a state legislature wants to set a statewide curricular policy (and assuming the state's constitution gives them that power), then they should set the policy as they see fit. If they miss the mark, then throw the bums out. These bills aren't speech codes; they're garden-variety curriculum setting.
While I happen to believe that state-level anti-CRT legislation can be good policy, I do sympathize with McWhorter and Sullivan's concerns about overbreadth, though for different reasons. Take the discussion of the Tennessee bill you quoted from French above. Banning teaching that could lead to an individual feeling "discomfort or guilt" is not narrowly tailored. One might imagine a hyper-conservative parent complaining that their child could feel discomfort or guilt if slavery (or the Civil War, or the Tulsa Race Massacre, or Jim Crow) is taught. No responsible person is saying those topics shouldn't be taught, but an irresponsible parent might use the Tennessee bill's overbroad language to shield their child from these topics. (One might also imagine any number of scenarios where this concept applies in different ideological contexts.)
I must note that in French's critique of the Texas bill, it goes unmentioned that the Texas bill *requires* curricular development of "the history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong." So any hint that the ban on CRT (at least in Texas) is looking to dodge these important topics is just flatly wrong. https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/87R/billtext/pdf/HB03979F.pdf#navpanes=0
I think I'm less concerned about overbreadth because I'm already living in overbreadth world. If I live in a situation where the the current problem is "the government can force you to send your kids to school where they teach them their race is evil, and does!". I'm not sure what I'm dodging here that's worse.
That also plays into illustrating a hidden false premise of sorts - Sullivan and others are asking that I view this as an expansion of powers, but it's not; these powers are really well established, and currently being used in diabolical ways in favor of one tribe. Without the expansion of powers bit, this becomes much more of a trade-off between bad options thing for me, as opposed to, like, the government establishing a new power wholecloth.
I agree that it's not an expansion of powers (assuming that these legislatures do have powers under their state constitutions--a safe assumption I think) for a state legislature to set statewide educational policy.
But overbreadth is always a problem to avoid in legislation. Government should exercise no more power than necessary. So if we see overbreadth on the front-end, it should be corrected. Overbreadth creates problems in implementation (imagine being a teacher subject to license revocation if you trip an overbroad law, for example) and create excess risk of unwanted consequences and legal risk of a statute's invalidation. Proponents of CRT bans should want to do this in as precise a fashion as possible. Based on the descriptions I've seen, Tennessee was much less successful than Texas in this regard.
Your blog was interesting, but you have trouble seeing your own biases. You're pushing an agenda that I don't agree with and I hope your children find their way out of your indoctrination.
This is the most Twitter thing anyone has ever said to me and the greatest comment I have ever received.
That is a wonderful response.