“This is the essence of a liberal education: the nurturing and development of independent minds by erudite teachers of various ideological persuasions through exposure to the widest range of intellectual inquiry. It is what made England, and then America, the greatest force for civilizational progress the world has known.
The crisis engulfing our institutions represents the struggle for ascendancy of an ideology that is literally the antithesis of the educational values that have driven the West’s unrivaled economic, social and technological progress for the past few centuries.
Critical race theory—and its various postmodern cousins—is not some interesting interpretation of social and political history that we are free to examine, embrace or discard. Its proponents do not seek to frame a critique of modern America to be tested alongside alternatives.
They insist that a traditionally liberal approach to evaluating the merits of competing ideas is itself an outgrowth of an illegitimate system of oppression. Rejection of their critique is the product of false consciousness, since critical thought is itself invalid, the product of white male hegemony.
This isn’t really education at all, not in the sense in which the term has been understood in the post-Enlightenment era. It is closer to pre-Enlightenment religious instruction: the imparting of doctrinal truth with the practical aim of saving souls and reordering the world. Hence its migration from college campuses to K-12 schools, where its practitioners expect to find supple and more-suggestible minds. They have taken to heart the old Jesuit maxim about the first seven years of life.”
Summary of this great article in WSJ says it all: ‘Critical Race Theory Is the Opposite of Education
It’s more of a religion. Its practitioners reject the idea of evaluating the merits of competing ideas.’
