Rod Dreher’s Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents is probably the most important book I have read in the last year. Today The Chalkboard Review published my essay on the lessons of Live Not By Lies for educators, students, and parents of students in K-12 schools. Dreher “warns of a ‘soft totalitarianism’ slowly creeping into American culture,” I wrote. “Unbeknownst to many, K-12 schools are actually the front lines for this effort to impose a radical ideology on society by making young people cheerleaders for the totalizing worldview of critical theory, or at least to make them too afraid to speak up against it.”
My essay is not technially a review of Live Not By Lies (I link to a good review of the book’s overall thesis) but an application for what it means in the world of K-12 education.
Anyone who is even casually observing primary and secondary education can see the growing presence of soft totalitarianism, often dressed in the noble-sounding garb of “anti-racism” and the war over what gets taught – and how – in our schools.
Let me be clear: there are long-standing racial disparities in education that should be of grave concern to everyone. Achievement gaps and lopsided student discipline data based on race are genuine problems that deserve serious, collective investigation. The lack of diversity among the teaching force probably aggravates these problems in ways we’ve not yet begun to understand.
But as I wrote last year for the Imaginative Conservative, the presence of these inequalities does not mean they are explained wholly by racism and oppression. Certainly, bias on the part of educators or within the society at large may be a contributing factor. But only an ideological fanatic could conclude that eliminating racism (a worthy but entirely unrealistic goal) would solve all of these problems.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what is happening in many of our institutions, and educators, students, and their parents need to be prepared to push back when it comes to their school.
Teachers and students should refuse to take part in any “diversity,” “equity,” or “anti-racist” initiatives that treat the assumptions of critical theory as truth, rather than simply as one perspective on a complex set of issues. When they are able, educators, parents, and students should challenge these initiatives openly, exposing their underlying ideology for the extremist, anti-American, anti-liberal agenda that it is. School communities should be made aware of the presence of these programs and demand their school boards provide fair and reasonable oversight.
At the same time, educators must model strategies for taking racial inequalities in education seriously. We can ask ourselves hard, demanding questions about our own internal biases and practices that may have a disparate effect on different groups of students without succumbing to the totalizing assumptions of critical theory. We stand to actually generate far more effective long-term strategies for addressing disparities in this way.
Read the whole thing here. And follow the work of No Left Turn in Education, a national organization with chapters springing up in many states, that is dedicated to resisting totalizing ideologies in K12 education and empowering educators and their students to “live not by lies.”