Teen Vogue bungles CRT coverage again
December 13, 2021
Teen Vogue entirely misses the point about Critical Race Theory. It is not the Right, or the GOP, politicizing the issue in schools. It is the very introduction of it into schools that is the political act.
Teen Vogue writes, “There are many losers when we let conservative politics win out over education,” and “States like Florida appear to be going after educators, already exhausted after two years of pandemic-teaching, by hyper-politicizing issues like COVID-19 protocols and how racism is taught in schools.”
As Accuracy in Media has said before with respect to CRT and Teen Vogue, let’s take as being true that the insistence that critical race theory is just some idea discussed in graduate schools among legal academics. Pointyhead professors discuss all sorts of things without harm to the real world.
Except that’s not the point at all. CRT is the base approach used in all education schools to teach the teachers themselves. Approaches to teaching about race and racism in schools are not CRT itself, sure they’re not, but everything around the subject is informed and directed by that distortion of both history and reality. It’s not CRT being taught to children, it’s children being taught by CRT.
Being against that is not the hyper-politicization of anything, it’s a natural reaction to the educators politicizing the education curriculum. For that’s what is actually is – CRT is a political theory and using it as the basis of school teaching is to politicize school teaching. But then it’s not that unusual for people to accuse their enemies of their own actions now, is it?
It’s also amusing to see such blame laid on the authorities in Florida. Making teaching so much more difficult for the exhausted educators. The same folks are all getting a $1,000 bonus for their efforts in these trying times. Another $600 million is being spent to raise minimum salaries from $40k to $47.5k. You know, those authorities doing so much to reward those suffering such stress in these trying times.
Teen Vogue is a major media outlet for the teenage market. The publication itself insists it is “educating the influencers of the future” and gains more than 4 million visits a month.
If you’re going to educate as a media outlet it would be worth actually doing so. Educate by, just as one example, managing to get the entry of politics into schools the right way around. CRT is a highly political theory and it’s the introduction of its lessons into the curriculum that is the political act, not either opposition to it or even wondering whether this might not be all that good an idea.