‘No teacher has a First Amendment right to teach his or her children that two plus two is five,’ Cruz said.
In a Tuesday interview with National Review, Senator Ted Cruz addressed the intra-conservative debate over state-level bans on the teaching of radical race and gender ideology in public schools.
While the populist wing of the GOP has enthusiastically embraced state laws banning critical race theory and gender ideology from public school classrooms, some establishment holdouts argue such laws are overly broad and will expose teachers to punitive lawsuits, filed by parents who object to benign curricula.
Critics of anti-CRT legislation have observed that a Tennessee law banning concepts “ascribing character traits, values, moral or ethical codes, privileges, or beliefs to a race or sex, or to an individual because of the individual’s race or sex” might result in the censorship of some of Martin Luther King Jr.’s writings and speeches on the culpability of whites in upholding racism.
Sitting down with National Review after a Young Americans for Freedom event in New Haven, Conn., Tuesday evening, Cruz rejected the claim that anti-CRT laws like Tennessee’s might be interpreted to exclude the teaching of widely recognized historical facts about racism, slavery, and the civil-rights movement.
“Anyone who interpreted these state statutes to mean that they ban the teaching of Martin Luther King and other foundational civil-rights leaders would be imbecilic,” Cruz said.
The Texas lawmaker went on to cite the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which has been adapted for use in K–12 in schools, as an example of inaccurate, politically charged curricula that’s overtaking American public education. The central claim of the essay series is that America’s true founding occurred on the day that the first African slaves were brought ashore in North America, and that slavery has been the defining feature of American society ever since.
“School districts across the country are adopting the 1619 Project as an element of their curriculum. No teacher has a First Amendment right to teach his or her children that two plus two is five. Even if it’s a free-speech matter, if you’re a math teacher and you teach your students that you should be fired,” he said. “Lying to children and teaching them things that are fundamentally false is not the role of education.”
Cruz defended the notion that the history of racism and slavery should be taught by examining “the incredible heroes of civil rights, Dr. King or before him Frederick Douglass and W.B. Dubois.”
A graduate of Harvard law school and the former attorney general of Texas, Cruz defended his free-speech bonafides but said that teachers’ speech should be constrained by their responsibility to educate their students.
“I embrace the free-speech tradition of John Stuart Mill. I believe the best cure for bad speech is more speech,” Cruz said.
“That being said, the fact that you or I or anyone else have the right to say whatever we like does not mean we have the right to say it in every context to every child we wish to address. Elementary schools and schools of all kinds set curriculum,” he continued. “If a kindergarten teacher wishes to speak all day and do interpretative dance, he or she may do so but not in lieu of teaching the curriculum in kindergarten. If they don’t want to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, they should resign from their job and go to the local community theater.”
By passing anti-CRT laws, the right isn’t engaged in censorship, Cruz argued, but is instead simply rolling back the wave of “indoctrination” unleashed by leftist activists and educators.
“When it comes to critical race theory, the hard Left has used our schools as vehicles for indoctrination. The state has full authority to set the curriculum and that includes affirmative decisions about what should be taught but also decisions about what should not be taught,” Cruz added. “A state is not only justified but indeed acting in the interest of their children to say, ‘We will not allow our teachers to lie to our kids, to paint explicitly revisionist history of our nation and to turn them against each other on racial lines.’”
“That’s not censorship, that is setting the curriculum of the school,” he said.
He also argued that the left’s claims about critical race theory are contradictory in that they insist it’s not taught in schools while simultaneously arguing that CRT bans will fundamentally alter public education.
“The defenders of CRT put forward a series of contradictory propositions. First, they insist, CRT is taught nowhere on earth other than in obscure graduate schools. Secondly, they insist, CRT is essential and must be taught everywhere. Thirdly they insist, if you ban CRT, we will be telling our students we never had slavery, we never had a civil war, there was no civil-rights movement, and the Martin Luther King monument is made to a mysterious man whose name we cannot utter. Nobody with an IQ that breaks into the double-digits would believe such a proposition,” he said.