How Critical Race Theory Gets into Classrooms | National Review

Agreat deal of gaslighting has been perpetrated against American parents by “antiracist” activists when it comes to the presence of critical race theory (CRT) in classrooms. These activists often claim that the presence of CRT curricula in American schools amounts to nothing more than teaching accurately and extensively about the country’s tragic history of racial violence. When skeptics question tenets of critical race theory that are far more radical than this anodyne description suggests, these same activists perform one of two rhetorical maneuvers. Either they inform us that critics of CRT simply do not understand the discipline enough to criticize it, or they try to narrow the definition of CRT, insisting it is merely an advanced postgraduate-level legal theory that would never appear in K–12 classrooms.

A cursory examination of America’s most prominent schools of education shows that CRT advocates are making these arguments in bad faith. University schools of education are precisely where academia and the education of children intersect. Consequently, these schools function as something of an information superhighway from the former to the latter. Whatever academic trends prevail in university education departments are likely to make their presence felt in K–12 classrooms. This is precisely why, as a society, we have been guilty of gross negligence by largely ignoring what goes on in these schools. And what goes on in these schools is the promulgation of critical race theory.

In a recent study for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, Jay Schalin examined education-school syllabi obtained from three leading institutions: the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. To get a flavor of what is being taught and assigned, he documented the names of authors who showed up most frequently on required and recommended reading lists at these schools. The results of his research are an unanswerable rebuke to those who claim that concern over CRT’s presence in classrooms amounts to nothing more than moral panic.

The authors who feature most prominently and frequently on lists of assigned reading at these schools indicate that “critical pedagogy” is the chief academic paradigm according to which future teachers are instructed. According to a leading theorist in critical pedagogy, Peter McLaren, “critical educators argue that knowledge should be analyzed on the basis of whether it is oppressive or exploitative, and not on the basis of whether it is ‘true.’” The foundational text of this approach to education is Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1968, which features prominently on reading lists at all the schools Schalin examines in his study.

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