A Critical Look at Critical Race Theory in America’s Classrooms

A Critical Look at Critical Race Theory in America’s Classrooms

The Heritage Foundation invited 13 scholars to contribute to “The Critical Classroom,” a volume that uncovers the often surreptitious application of critical race theory and analyzes the effects that such a biased theory has on teachers and students alike. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.) “The Critical Classroom” traces the origins of critical race theory and explains that racist institutions, such as slavery and Jim Crow laws, violated our nation’s ideals—and adds that America is not systemically racist.

“There is little to no evidence that critical race theory itself is being taught to K-12 public school students,” The Associated Press wrote recently.

If that’s true, why would the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, invest in a campaign to keep the theory in K-12 instruction? That is, how could the union keep critical race theory in classrooms if it wasn’t there in the first place?

The answer is simple: School officials around the country not only are teaching critical race theory’s components, such as “intersectionality,” to K-12 children. They also are applying the theory’s principle that discrimination is appropriate and necessary for school activities in the form of mandatory racial affinity groups. For example, where students are separated by skin color for different school functions.

Racial prejudice left a shameful mark on America’s past, but contrary to what critical race theorists believe, racism does not define America. And racial discrimination has no place in law or culture today.

The Heritage Foundation invited 13 scholars to contribute to “The Critical Classroom,” a volume that uncovers the often surreptitious application of critical race theory and analyzes the effects that such a biased theory has on teachers and students alike. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

“The Critical Classroom” traces the origins of critical race theory and explains that racist institutions, such as slavery and Jim Crow laws, violated our nation’s ideals—and adds that America is not systemically racist.

Yet radical activists who aim to keep critical race theory in schools want students to believe that America’s laws and cultural institutions are beyond repair.

As Heritage’s Mike Gonzalez writes in the opening chapter of “The Critical Classroom”:

If, from the start, one teaches the young population that the system of beliefs of their parents and grandparents has produced an oppressive conceptual superstructure, and that they must begin de novo, then one can change society’s blueprint in a generation or two.

Read More

Scroll to top