The Boogeyman of Critical Race Theory and Conservative Attacks on Education
Critical Race Theory (CRT) was an obscure highly academic form of study, focussing on systems of power and how they are affected by race. A lot of what it teaches can be proven, black people are offered jobs less with identical resumes, given higher sentences for the same crimes, and disproportionately affected by poverty, lack of services, and other institutional forms of injustice. In the last year and months, it has surged into the mainstream, or at least a vague made-up version of it has. It has become a point of contention for the right. In America, CRT has been banned from schools and has caused large crowds to yell at teachers and school boards, but in Canada, it is slowly becoming a topic of debate for the right to obsess over. Scrolling through the comments of any right-wing politician reveals this. The debate however is not and never was about the highly academic and specialized field CRT actually is, but rather teaching about racial justice, social justice, and almost anything the right disagrees with. The fight over CRT is just part of a long attack by the right on public education. It is a fight the left cannot afford to lose, and a plethora of leftist thinking has been put into how the left should move forward with educational reform, most notably Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy. The right will continue to attack public education, CRT is just one method they are using right now, but the left must defend and reform one of the greatest accomplishments of modern civilization.
Critical Race Theory is not taught in elementary schools, discussions might talk about racism and social justice but even opponents of Critical Race Theory admit that Frantz Fanon is not being assigned as reading for elementary school students. The debate was never actually about CRT as it actually is, instead, it is a sinister reaction to a broader movement to make education more inclusive, this reaction forms as an attempt by the right to make education less about education and more about indoctrination, and an attack on public education as a whole. Conservatives have railed against public education being “unpatriotic” or “leftist” propaganda for decades, in Trump’s last days he published ‘the 1776 commission’ which attempted to establish a guideline for patriotic education, deifying slave owners, denying the fundamental role of racism, and attacking the civil rights movement. Trump is not the first conservative to attack public education. In Canada, Doug Ford set out on an agenda early on in his role as Premier of Ontario to defund education, attack teacher unions, and privatize and make the education system “profitable.” Conservatives want to leave public education up to the market, they want more private schools (which the poor and working-class simply cannot afford), and they want to reduce the number of teachers to save money with often insane ideas including replacing teachers with pre-recorded videos all in the name of cutting costs. Conservatives claim to care about the deficit (while often ballooning them), they justify their cuts to public services (most often among them education) in the name of saving money, and they claim that public education is indoctrinating their children into being leftists with claims of un-patriotic lessons and attacking the nonexistent CRT, thus crippling education as a whole. The left needs to defend public education, but we also need to advocate for reforming and improving it. Luckily plenty of leftist theorists have proposed solutions.
Paulo Freire was born in rural Brazil, he is often considered the father of Critical Pedagogy, a theory for education that focuses on an oppressed-oppressor relationship and seeks to help the oppressed reclaim their humanity. His most famous text Pedagogy of the Oppressed is the third most cited book in the social sciences. Freire had multiple ideas, but his main ideas involved using teaching as a way to reveal contradictions in the world around the students developing a conscientização (conscientização is an in-depth understanding of the world, allowing for the perception and exposure of social and political contradictions), and by making teaching less of a teacher-student banking form of education, and more of a continual dialogue where the students express their world views and contribute in the development and guidance of their own education. In this same vein, leftists should take after Friere’s Critical Pedagogy and advocate for the education system to foment the development of critical thinking skills revealing the contradictions in the world around them, and push for education to be more inclusive catering to the needs of the community and getting students more involved in what they are taught. The right offers students increased privatization and decreased quality of education, the left offers students freedom and a higher quality of education.
The right’s attack on public education is not new, CRT is just another tool they now have. Covid has only made this attack on public education worse as students have been forced to switch between online, packed schools, and then online once again, because of Doug Ford’s failure to properly prepare schools for reopening. The right is not going to stop attacking public education any time soon, leftists in America would be wise to support and develop militant teachers unions and fight back against disinformation about CRT. Leftists in Canada and abroad need to support the teacher unions they have and fight back against the austerity and privatization this pandemic has brought.
The CRT debate was never about CRT, at best it was tangentially about the teaching of history as it truly was, about racism, and about social justice, but broadly it is a long-standing pattern of conservative attacks on education. Do not let this conversation about some leftist agenda with the teaching of CRT in elementary schools distract you from the real fight, the continuous and strong attack on our education systems. Leftists and progressives alike need to advocate for a reduction in class sizes, an update to the curriculum making it more reflective of our increasingly diverse world, and making it a tool for the development of critical thinking. The right will always attack public education, the left needs to stand by it and advocate for progressive change.
