It is not the job of public schools to indoctrinate students in any orthodoxy, racial, gender, or otherwise.
In his famous “I have a dream” speech, Dr. Martin Luther King envisioned an America in which his children would be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Such a statement today would be adjudged “racism” in its advocacy of color-blindness. “Anti-racism” in the new woke dictionary requires just the opposite — never forgetting race for a moment and treating it as the essential quality of every person.
And that is wrong.
In The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt identify three bad ideas that have poisoned American parenting and education. The third of those they term “Us versus Them: Life Is a Battle Between Good People and Evil People.” That worldview both falsifies reality and harms those on both sides of the dichotomy. It renders discussion across racial, class, or gender lines futile. And it deludes the alleged possessors of “virtue” into thinking that they are far better than they are.
Haidt and Lukianoff locate the failure of us-versus-them thinking near the beginning of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s classic The Gulag Archipelago. The author is marching to a prison camp in Siberia, in which he will likely freeze, starve, or be beaten to death, if not executed straight away.
At that moment, he recalls how close he came to joining the government security service, the NKVD (predecessor to the KGB). And with that memory comes an unforgettable insight:
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