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Orange County teachers might finally stop indoctrinating students into the glories of the Soviet gulag system. Sorry for the facetiousness, but it’s easy to mock the new curriculum proposal by Orange County Board of Education Trustee Ken Williams. It would prohibit “instruction that advocates or teaches communism with the intent to indoctrinate.”
We didn’t know this was such a thing. If Williams has examples, he ought to share them given that such indoctrination already is a no-no under state law. In reality, his 14-point list of forbidden “indoctrination” topics is little more than political theater.
The proposal extols Americans’ free-speech rights, but then would ban topic categories and hobble the ability of teachers to have serious discussions about civil rights, race and gender. The proposal favorably references Martin Luther King Jr., but then likely puts many of his speeches off limits for classroom debate.
Public-school teachers should not promote divisive progressive social nostrums. But the conservative board’s attempt to ban Critical Race Theory and other nebulous ideas is fraught with problems. If it passes, the school board would ultimately become the censor of any classroom discussion that touches on history or current affairs.
Teachers ultimately would censor themselves. It would cast a Big Brother-ish pall over any potentially controversial topic. This proposal isn’t really an effort to stop teachers from promoting liberal political views as a means for a conservative board member to impose his political views on kids.
For instance, the proposal bans anything that advances “dismantling of criminal laws and systems of criminal justice” and “reduction of police-officer presences.” So, a teacher could violate these policies by criticizing the drug war or any police behavior. The board’s authority is limited to special-education and alternative schools. It cannot dictate policy for districts, but it’s still an abuse of power.
When we endorsed conservative board members in this year’s election, we did so with the hopes they would spend more time promoting competition and educational reform and “less time preening for Fox News.” There’s still time for them to eschew the latter.
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