Critical Race Theory Bans Are Working

Coverage of public education in the Washington Post has developed a habit of making the opposite point of what the reporter appears to intend. In a December article about parental objections to the pornographic book Lawn Boy, reporter Hannah Natanson quoted the book’s author admitting that his work was profane and expressing surprise it had made its way into public-school libraries. And her most recent article, “Slavery Was Wrong: And Five Other Things Some Educators Won’t Teach Anymore,” actually suggests a more positive and salutary effect from “critical race theory bans” than their proponents could reasonably have hoped for.

“For 14 years,” the article states, “a North Carolina social studies teacher taught excerpts of Christopher Columbus’s journal without incident.” Assigned to read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, students discover that Columbus wrote of the Arawak natives, “They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane. . . . They would make for excellent servants.” Students learned from this that Columbus’s first thought was about enslaving natives. But as historian Mary Grabar has documented, Zinn was profoundly dishonest here (as he was in so many other places). The ellipses in the quote cover days’ worth of Columbus’s journal entries. The ellipses hide that Columbus was not speaking his own opinion, but rather referring to the beliefs of the Arawaks’ neighbors, who attempted to enslave them. Therefore, a parental complaint led to students no longer learning a false lesson — to which the only appropriate educational value judgment can be: “Great!”

ME

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Max C. Eden

Max Eden is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Coverage of public education in the Washington Post has developed a habit of making the opposite point of what the reporter appears to intend. In a December article about parental objections to the pornographic book Lawn Boy, reporter Hannah Natanson quoted the book’s author admitting that his work was profane and expressing surprise it had made its way into public-school libraries. And her most recent article, “Slavery Was Wrong: And Five Other Things Some Educators Won’t Teach Anymore,” actually suggests a more positive and salutary effect from “critical race theory bans” than their proponents could reasonably have hoped for.

“For 14 years,” the article states, “a North Carolina social studies teacher taught excerpts of Christopher Columbus’s journal without incident.” Assigned to read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, students discover that Columbus wrote of the Arawak natives, “They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane. . . . They would make for excellent servants.” Students learned from this that Columbus’s first thought was about enslaving natives. But as historian Mary Grabar has documented, Zinn was profoundly dishonest here (as he was in so many other places). The ellipses in the quote cover days’ worth of Columbus’s journal entries. The ellipses hide that Columbus was not speaking his own opinion, but rather referring to the beliefs of the Arawaks’ neighbors, who attempted to enslave them. Therefore, a parental complaint led to students no longer learning a false lesson — to which the only appropriate educational value judgment can be: “Great!”