“This came to me from cadets, from families, from soldiers with their alarm and their concern about how divisive this type of teaching is that is rooted in Marxism,” Mr. Waltz said.

The debate over how school children are taught about slavery, civil rights and racism has become the most recent battle in the culture war between conservatives and progressives. And Republicans are gearing up to use the controversy as political fodder during the 2022 midterms.

Answer: because academic, journalistic and movement efforts to critically interrogate the lasting impact of slavery and American racism fundamentally challenge the free market fundamentalist ideology this network has mass-produced for decades. Koch network libertarians have propagated the fantasy that we all do (or should) live in a radically free market, populated by unraced and ungendered free individuals, all pulling ourselves up by our proverbial bootstraps.

But alongside this reassessment, another American tradition re-emerged: a reactionary movement bent on reasserting a whitewashed American myth. These reactionary forces have taken aim at efforts to tell an honest version of American history and speak openly about racism by proposing laws in statehouses across the country that would ban the teaching of “critical race theory”, the New York Times’s 1619 Project, and, euphemistically, “divisive concepts”.

This is the educational equivalent of the “Big Lie” that Trump won the election, occasioning and the wave of voter suppression laws promoted by the same political forces.

This powerful statement comes from an 1867 Harper’s Weekly editorial rallying its mostly Northern readers to the fight for robust public education as part of the post-Civil War reconstruction of the South. It rightly rooted this struggle in the violent denial of literacy under the slavocracy. In that context, learning — or teaching others — to read and write was indeed abolitionist.

The political project of white supremacy has always included attacks on education and those attacks continue in 2021. Today’s Republican Party is not so bold as to suggest educators be prohibited from teaching their pupils to read the alphabet, only that we be prohibited from teaching them to read the world. Continue reading.

Unfortunately, rampant misinformation about what is taught in schools is forcing teachers to omit difficult parts of our history and not teach students that racism is wrong and is adding yet another stressor for teachers at the worst possible time.

That is why respected organizations collectively representing millions of parents, educators, students, and other Americans of goodwill have come together to form the Learn from History Coalition.

Download the toolkit that’s right for you and help ensure that schools can continue teaching fact-based history.

10,561 views • Jul 22, 2021 • What does money and influence have to do with the sudden panic over critical race theory? Journalist Judd Legum explains.
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