RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/moral-narcissism-national-education-association-richard-l-cravatts/

On May 19th, the 6200-member United Educators of San Francisco teacher’s union passed a grotesque “Resolution in Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” committing its members to sign on with the anti-Semitic BDS campaign, stating “that UESF endorses the international campaign for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against apartheid in Israel,” thereby becoming the first K-12 teachers’ union in the United States to endorse the BDS movement.

Not to be outdone by its union brethren further north, chapter chairs of the United Teachers Los Angeles, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and the second largest teacher’s union in the country, also voted overwhelmingly in May in support of a statement, almost identical to the San Francisco version, that expressed its “solidarity with the Palestinian people and call for Israel to end bombardment of Gaza and stop displacement at Sheikh Jarrah . . , [called] on the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden to stop aid to Israel [and endorsed] the international campaign for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against apartheid in Israel.”

The engagement of public school teachers in activism against the Jewish state continued unabated in June when the 3-million member National Education Association proposed two anti-Israel resolutions, New Business Item 29, which committed the NEA to “publicize its support for the Palestinian struggle for justice and call on the United States government to stop arming and supporting Israel,” and NBI 51, which would create a campaign to “use existing digital communication tools to educate members and the general public about the history, culture, and struggles of Palestinians.”

The rectitude of the NEA educators pushing for condemnations of Israel manifests itself as what has been termed “moral narcissism,” the tendency of members of the well-meaning, intellectual elite to align with causes and ideological positions which are based, not on the actual viability or justice of a cause, but on how the moral narcissist feels about him- or herself by committing to a particular cause or movement.

So, apparently, vilifying Israel and focusing singularly and obsessively on the Jewish state make the NEA’s moral narcissists feel that they are standing up for something important and making a moral cause for a people they see as victimized and oppressed, even when so many much more pressing and tragic social upheavals are taking place around the world. But it is Israel that the NEA puts in its crosshairs.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/important-reading-on-the-critical-race-theory-in-schools-debate/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Conservatives are on the march in the political offensive against the teaching of Critical Race Theory and related racialist concepts in K-12 public schools, a battle that has moved into state legislatures. I have written about some of the philosophical problems with the “anti-anti-CRT” movement. But it is also the case that the anti-CRT initiatives must navigate a series of political and legal obstacles, and prudent consideration of those is a worthwhile task for those of us who believe in that cause.

Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has some thoughts worth reading in a blog post co-authored with three other FIRE staffers. FIRE is, as I have detailed, an essential defender of free speech rights in higher education, without which conservative college and graduate students would be in a much worse situation. As you might expect, Lukianoff is somewhat skeptical of using state laws to limit the teaching of ideas in any school, particularly universities, but he takes a thoughtful approach to the important distinctions: between public and private schools, between universities and K-12 schools, between academic freedom and the power of government to intimidate and indoctrinate students. On the legal and political status of public K-12 education:

The modern view of education as a pipeline designed to carry children from preschool to graduate school tends to obscure the fact that K-12 education had a very different evolution from the university system. Compulsory public education was a project advanced by politicians and enacted by legislatures for a political purpose [as far back as 1794]…[W]hat will become the curriculum in most public K-12 schools is democratically decided by a combination of state legislatures, local school boards, and individual schools. As such, they represent the will of the people, as expressed in local and state elections. The individual schools cannot exceed the scope granted them by their school boards, which themselves derive power and authority from the state…Because K-12 attendance is compelled by the state and, at public schools, funded predominantly by local taxes, it is understandable that the substance of that teaching is subject to democratic oversight, through state legislatures and elected (or appointed by those who were elected) school boards. Legislators are expected to exercise oversight when citizens with children in the schools voice legitimate concerns about curricular matters.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/07/its-critical-race-theory-that-is-un-american-not-laws-banning-it/

Without breaking a sweat, the New York Times has gone from insisting critical race theory doesn’t exist to arguing state legislatures must let public schools inflict it on kids. Kmele Foster, David French, Jason Stanley, and Thomas Chatterton Williams claim in the Times that “Anti-Critical Race Theory Laws Are Un-American.”

This is exactly backwards. It’s teaching critical race theory that is un-American. The reframed Marxist ideology aims to destroy core American cultural and legal norms, including those these authors claim as the basis of their support for forcing taxpayers to subsidize its racism.

Just to name a few, critical theorists oppose free speech, the consent of the governed, freedom of association, and equal justice under the law. This is not about banning them from speaking, but in using representative government to deny them the privilege of taxpayer sinecures to help them foment America’s subversion and collapse.

CRT teaches not only that people are defined by their skin color but also that paler skin is inherently evil. So this theory is used to justify the insistence that the United States is inherently evil, which is also patently anti-American.

The concepts of “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” “anti-racism,” and “equity [as opposed to equality]” all stem from critical theory. Since this ideology is obviously false and toxic, state legislatures have moved to protect children from being taught it as gospel in the public education systems they directly oversee.

Racists Can Still Speak Freely, Just Not on My Dime

Despite the obvious anti-American racial toxicity of this worldview, here’s the core of the four men’s NYT argument against banning its promulgation in public schools:

They are speech codes. They seek to change public education by banning the expression of ideas. Even if this censorship is legal in the narrow context of public primary and secondary education, it is antithetical to educating students in the culture of American free expression.