Unreasonable attack of school choice advocate Chris Rufo by ‘Reason’
July 24, 2023
Libertarian publication Reason is wrong about Chris Rufo.
Rufo as described by Reason;
“Christopher Rufo wants you to be afraid. A sinister woke ideology, promoted by a shadowy cabal, is infiltrating America’s treasured institutions, from your children’s classrooms to the corporate boardroom. Far-left activists have weaponized anti-racism to capture the commanding heights of politics and culture, thus “effectuating a wholesale moral reversal” under the banner of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
This is true. It’s the method that is slightly wrong.
The sinister ideology is Critical Race Theory. But no one really believes – or should believe – that CRT is being taught to children in kindergarten. That’s not how these things work. It’s more complicated than that.
Paul Samuelson, the Nobel Laureate economist, once said he didn’t mind who ran the country as long as he wrote the economics textbooks. Because he knew that if everyone learned their economics from him then the economics of the country would be what he wanted.
The progressive – woke, or even Marxist – equivalent of this is Herbert Marcuse who talked of “the long march through the institutions”. He meant that his desired revolution would not happen by convincing people. Instead, it is necessary to take control of what creates the society – the institutions – and then in the next generation the revolution will have happened.
This is where CRT – and DEI and the other ideas – are so dangerous. We (adults) are not being taught them, not even browbeaten into accepting them. Or not very much. But, as we know, all of those ideas are taught as the truth at many teachers’ colleges. So, all new teachers believe these things, which then directs the teaching of our children.
The institutions being marched through are the schools. Again, not because CRT is taught in kindergarten, nor even grade school. But, as we now, nearly everyone who teaches in the American school system, at every grade, has been taught these things are true.
CRT isn’t a danger, not directly, in high school, but it’s a disaster when it takes over educational systems. Because all teaching in grade school becomes informed by CRT and such nonsense – capitalism is exploitative, socialism works, the usual progressivisms – become the bedrock of the world view.
It’s the results of CRT that are the problem in schools, not the academic theory itself.
Given that teachers’ colleges have already been taken over by CRT, it gives us an interesting reason to support school choice. School choice allows teachers who know their subject, but have not been brainwashed in the education colleges. The way to beat that march through the institutions is not to use the institutions that have been conquered. To have our children taught history by a historian, not someone taught to use history as a form of political activism. The same is true of math, literature, and every other subject.
Rufo is right, CRT, DEI, and a general woke progressivism, are ideologies promoted by a sinister cabal in our schools. The cabal is the faculty who teach education majors. To beat the problem, stop selecting teachers from those colleges where the cabal operates. That will mean putting a stop to insisting that teachers become union members since only those who have been through those indoctrination factories can be union members.
Break the unions, break the colleges of education, free the schools and our children.