Sticking to a far right conservative playbook of autocracy, fear, intimidation and suppression, a number of West Virginia Republican legislators are trying their best – to the detriment of the greater good – to pass legislation that would outlaw honest conversations in our classrooms about the role of race in society, past and present.
Of course, American history – or most any social studies class – cannot be taught without a discussion of race. The most obvious: How would our children learn lessons of the Civil War without an unobstructed view of slavery?
And yet, in our free and open democratic society, these lawmakers want to limit free speech and critical thinking. Not satisfied with writing bad law, they now want to extend their oversight into our state’s classrooms – because they think they know more about education than our educators.
They couldn’t be more wrong – on myriad levels.
House Bill 4011 proposes the warm and fuzzy sounding concept of “curriculum transparency,” which, via intimidation, prohibits the teaching and discussion of specific racial and non-discrimination topics. It is copied from efforts in a dozen other states where like-minded, far-right radical lawmakers want schools to post lists of all of their teaching materials online, including books, articles and videos.
Make no mistake, it is a fight over Critical Race Theory, CRT, the academic concept typically taught in some college courses – but not in any West Virginia high school – to examine how laws and institutions perpetuate racism.
This push emerged over the past year after at least seven conservative think tanks publicly called on legislators to enact such laws. Two of them, the Goldwater Institute and the Manhattan Institute, have published model bills, policies and resolutions for legislators to cut and paste and offer up as their own.
But don’t be fooled. This policy – no matter its final form – is not about transparency. It is about ideological control. It would put in place proposals that would excessively scrutinize daily classwork and lead teachers to pre-emptively pull potentially contentious materials to avoid drawing criticism. Already, parents and legislators have started campaigns elsewhere to remove books dealing with race and gender, citing passages they find obscene, after finding out that the books were available in school libraries and classrooms.
These laws, needless and pernicious, are educational gag orders, undermining public education and tying the hands of educators. These laws are tools of censorship.
In this day and age when discredited disinformation is published and subscribed to as fact, can we retain any hope that our children’s curriculum will be based on the truth and not a politicized narrative created out of whole cloth – all for the sake of protecting certain, shall we say, racial sensitivities?
If you wonder why educational outcomes in West Virginia lag national norms, if you wonder why teaching vacancies have doubled in recent years, if you wonder why we can’t break free of the leg irons of a socially repressive society, wonder no longer and look no further than what our legislators are up to in Charleston.
This does not take critical thinking to see what is before us. Bowing to political dogma and running scared of their coming racial minority standing in the world, they are demonizing our teachers and holding our children back from all that they can be.
