Senate Bill 167: Critical race theory debate spurs bills banning 'concepts that divide'
The Indiana General Assembly will consider a bill to ban K-12 schools from teaching certain concepts in response to the critical race theory debate.
www.indystar.com
I was going to post this in the anti-woke thread, because it initially just seemed to be another "we can't discuss racism in the classroom" bill, but it goes so much deeper, and worse, than that.
This bill, filed in the Indiana Senate last Thursday, includes the expected language, banning schools from teaching that “any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin, or political affiliation” is inherently superior, inferior, racist, sexist, or oppressive. In addition, schools cannot teach students that they should feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish, responsibility or any other form of psychological distress” based on those same criteria. As I said, so far, your standard "You can't teach that racism is a thing, or that we should feel bad about it." But then you dig a little deeper...
You see, another part of the Senate bill, schools would have to create a curriculum review committee composed of parents, teachers, and others. This committee would then post all materials, lesson plans, and educational activities outside of tests on a web portal for everyone to see. This would allow parents to review the material and opt out of certain items if they wished.
That, to me, is much more troubling. It's basically saying that parents should have ultimate control over what their students learn in school, and if the parents don't want them to learn something, then they won't let them. At that point...it's basically free homeschooling. Well, free for the parents, not the taxpayers. It's one thing to keep parents informed of what their kids are learning, but to let them decide in advance what they will and will not learn is how you get people convinced they are right to only focus on half the picture because someone kept covering up the other half, so to them, it doesn't exist.