In new bill, one Ky lawmaker decides what students read and think about race, history
So in an attempt to be positive, I think Sen. Max Wise, R-Campbellsville, is trying to find some kind of middle ground in the contentious debates over race, history and the bogeyman known as critical race theory in our schools.
Unfortunately, with Senate Bill 138, the middle ground can still be wrong.
Once again, Republicans have decided that local control of education is nice in theory. But with this bill they must try to control the thoughts, minds and instruction of children from the halls of the Capitol, despite the fact that we have a professional teaching class and a well-worn process for choosing curriculum.
For example, under this bill, teachers would be allowed to teach about slavery and Jim Crow, but racism apparently stopped in 1964: “The understanding that the institution of slavery and post-Civil War laws enforcing racial segregation and discrimination were contrary to the fundamental American promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, but that defining racial disparities solely on the legacy of this institution is destructive to the unification of our nation;”
Then we get some good old GOP orthodoxy on bootstraps: “Personal agency and the understanding that, regardless of race, sex, or socioeconomic status, an American has the power to succeed when he or she is given sufficient opportunity and is committed to seizing that opportunity through hard work, pursuit of education, and good citizenship.”
Then there’s the new reading list that “shall be embedded” across middle and high school curricula. After the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which I’m pretty sure kids already read, there’s a kind of tit for tat list: The Monroe Doctrine followed by “What is a Slave” by Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, two pieces by Martin Luther King Jr. and “A Time for Choosing” by Ronald Reagan. Everyone should look at the entire list themselves and see what they think.
I understand that someone like Wise was raised with mother’s milk on the certainty that Reagan was the greatest president who ever lived. But I’m old enough to remember his states rights’ speech in 1980 in Philadelphia, Miss., the place where three civil rights workers were murdered. Everyone understood exactly what was going on, the Southern Strategy was alive and well and Reagan its latest torchbearer.
As Washington Post columnist William Raspberry wrote after Reagan died: “It was bitter symbolism for black Americans (though surely not just for black Americans). Countless observers have noted that Reagan took the Republican Party from virtual irrelevance to the ascendancy it now enjoys. The essence of that transformation, we shouldn’t forget, is the party’s successful wooing of the race-exploiting Southern Democrats formerly known as Dixiecrats. And Reagan’s Philadelphia appearance was an important bouquet in that courtship.”
In any event, will these books be vetted through the state Education Department’s curriculum process or is Max Wise’s word good enough for all of us? (He was not immediately available for comment to talk about it.) This bill is not as harmful as school vouchers, and it’s certainly better than the travesties coming from the House Taliban Caucus in HB 14 and 18. But at what point did we decide that one person — even if he’s chairman of the Senate Education Committee — gets to decide what our children read, and in fact, what they’re supposed to think?
This story was originally published February 4, 2022 at 10:20 AM.
