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Comment by woofie11 | Hacker News Reader

I kinda feel like the central problem is that CRT is that its an ideology. It's a bundle of ideas, packaged together, and you can take it or leave it as a whole. Promoters take it. Opponents leave it.

I read and re-read CRT papers to understand what they're talking about, and they make a lot of really good points. They also have a fair number of errors. That's common to most documents.

It'd a brilliant starting point for a critical discussion.

As-is, it's trivial for people on the left to point out obviously true statements missing from the central narrative, and call opponents racists.

It's equally trivial for people on the right to call out things which are obviously wrong, and discount the whole thing.

What we need, though, is to sort out the good parts, refine them, and get rid of or fix the bad parts. We can argue about the ratios there, but I don't think we can argue it's 100% wrong or right.

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It seems to have a lot of incredibly ill defined, unscientific, unproven, and frankly racist and divisive ideas if you ask me. Any criticism or request for evidence, logic, or results is met with wildly disproportionate reactions from bullying at worst to strawmen very often, but rarely actual answers or willingness to discuss things openly.

Recently I've noticed the theme is to post purile edicts proclaiming that CRT is "just acknowledging that racism exists and is bad" (and therefore if you question it or this post, then you're a racist). But no, that's a lie. That's not what CRT is, it absolutely should be critically examined and questioned.

When one tears into "race" its really just tribalism. A "Us vs them" or "Them vs us" or even "My tribe is better than your tribe" ... petty to be perfectly honest yet somehow politics put weight behind it and now its taken as fact. Maybe we are not the smart specie we think we are.

With the above, it doesn’t make sense to be teaching this at a grade school level and would be expected to be introduced in late high school and more thoroughly in college.

As and ideology it would be good to introduce when one is reading Adam Smith, Marx and Mussolini.

But I think a lot of the concern is that CRT isn’t being taught as an ideology amongst others, but it is being employed as the underlying “unseen” lens that is being applied to all aspects of curriculum and the classroom.

I also think CRT like a lot of more modern movements lacks a central authority that then allows the practitioners to take it in all sorts of directions that may or may not have been intended.

You can see in many CRT zealots that race predetermines everything. Like when talking to a Marxist. Everything is understood if you just apply the right lens. If only the world was so simple.

Like so much of education it is just another passing fad applied badly. My concern is that the opportunity to make the needed change is going to be missed due the extremes fighting and not getting to meaningful improvements.

And if you go to school in a Christian community, Christianity will be the unseen lens that underlies the curriculum. And so on with any other culture. It's not ideal, but it is what is.

CRT is a helpful lens, much like Marxism, Smith-style capitalism, and many other lenses. Like all of those, it has its limits. I want my kids to have as many lenses as possible, and to be able to use them critically.

I'll mention -- even elementary school kids have no problems understanding these lenses. I'd argue Smith, CRT, and Marx ought to be taught around 3rd-5th grade, not high school. My problem is CRT is being taught in kindergarten.

What evidence is there that it is helpful? What measurable improvements is it responsible for?

I don't agree any of those things should be taught in 3rd-5th grade because I think it is much more important to exercise the fundamentals of critical and creative thinking, logic, imagination, etc. at those ages.

I also have a big problem at any level of schooling with these unscientific and unproven "theories" (if you can even call them that) being taught by people who have entirely bought into the cult thinking and have no ability to critically reason about them let alone the desire to.

Would lessons about socialism and collectivism teach why the system can generally only sustain itself at a state level by devolving into a single party police state dictatorship in which the people most certainly do not own the means of production? Doubtful.

Would the teaching of CRT expose it for the unproven religious-like propaganda that it is? Or would it teach the horrific hurtful and racist pseudoscientific lies about toxic whiteness or children bearing some responsibility for things done by other people due to their race? Probably the latter, right?

It's like inviting a white supremacist to teach children lessons about nazism. Or a creationist to teach biology. Or a flat earther to each geology. Not a helpful lens at all.

> I don't agree any of those things should be taught in 3rd-5th grade because I think it is much more important to exercise the fundamentals of critical and creative thinking, logic, imagination, etc. at those ages.

That's exactly how you develop it. You teach complex concepts which require kids to sort truth from fiction. You don't teach one. You teach many.

> I also have a big problem at any level of schooling with these unscientific and unproven "theories" (if you can even call them that) being taught by people who have entirely bought into the cult thinking and have no ability to critically reason about them let alone the desire to.

I agree.

> Would lessons about socialism and collectivism teach why the system can generally only sustain itself at a state level by devolving into a single party police state dictatorship in which the people most certainly do not own the means of production? Doubtful.

You're generalizing an awful lot from n=1. We had the Soviet Block. That's the only time it's been tried. It'd be like evaluating liberal democracy from the French Revolution or the current collapsing Afghani government.

> It's like inviting a white supremacist to teach children lessons about nazism. Or a creationist to teach biology. Or a flat earther to each geology. Not a helpful lens at all.

I teach my kid those alternative theories too. I do a sincere job of it too. He doesn't believe me, in part due to other adults in his life.

> That's exactly how you develop it.

I disagree.

> You teach complex concepts which require kids to sort truth from fiction. You don't teach one. You teach many.

And there are many. Take away nazism, flat eartherism, and CRT, and there are still many. Many more interesting useful and fruitful things to teach at that age.

For sure teach them to beware of said charlatans and snake oil peddlers, but there's really no need to spend any amount of time on the bullcrap they believe. There are countless unscientific cult beliefs like this, you're going to pollute your child's mind with all of them when they are like 8-10 years old??

> You're generalizing an awful lot from n=1.

I'm not, I'm talking about the basic human nature behind it (and resulting in not only CPSU but CPC, and WPK, CPK, etc.) But I'm not here to litigate the merits of socialism so much as to say it's unproven and unscientific at best. Looks like snake oil no matter how you look at it -- promises to be all things to all people, and has no proven results behind it and arguably many spectacular failures.

> I teach my kid those alternative theories too. I do a sincere job of it too. He doesn't believe me, in part due to other adults in his life.

That doesn't mean it's good for your kid though. An if it is, you're the one generalizing an awful lot from n=1.

I don't actually know how my child will learn to recognize charlatans and snake oil peddlers unless he learns many contradicting theories, has to sort through that, and gain experience doing exactly this.

The one place where we tend to confuse ourselves is that we're charlatans and snake oil peddlers too. We all hold countless unscientific cult beliefs, some individually, and some by virtue of being embedded in a given historical and cultural context. Those are embedded in EVERY cultural and historical context. Anything you teach your kid might be snake oil, and I have enough of an open mind to know I might be wrong.

Ergo, I don't have a problem with teaching kids things which are wrong, so much as with the cult-like way in which schools teach many concepts like CRT, or the right-wing equivalents.

So, you want to teach your kid all kinds of hateful weird cult theories from a young age. That's incredibly weird and almost nobody else would think that's a good idea, so I really can't see how you can possibly think you can speak with total authority on the matter ("that is exactly how you develop it", etc.).

You are firmly an N=1 case here. I'm not going to argue the merits of your teaching ideas any more because it's clear you believe in them, but if you don't realize your ideas are pretty extreme and fringe, then you should.

I'm not sure I'd call flat earth or a geocentric model hateful, but if you think so, more power to you.

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