An article in The Economist reviews the issues surrounding the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in public schools. It is an instructive report, although, I will argue, not correctly related to the economic way of looking at the social world. (See “‘Critical Race Theory’ Is Being Weaponized. What’s the Fuss About?” July 14, 2022.)
Originally focused on racial discrimination, CRT is now often seen as encompassing all “woke” ideas, including sex and “gender.” I am not sure that The Economist is right in attributing this extension only to conservatives who are fighting CRT. It must be noted that CRT is an application of a more general and older strand of analysis called “critical theory,” which challenges classical liberal institutions with a Marxist-influenced methodology.
The Economist estimates that some CRT is part of the curriculum for at most a third of pupils in American public schools, generally on an optional basis; it is on the contrary restricted by state law in a third of the states. What passes as CRT is certainly biased against individual liberty, but The Economist claims that its threat has been exaggerated by conservatives.
The magazine explains:
The origins of CRT go back to the 1970s. The legal theory stressed the role of “structural” racism (embedded in systems, laws and policies, rather than the individual sort) in maintaining inequality. …
Progressives stretched the scope of CRT before conservatives did. The theory has spread into concepts like “critical whiteness studies”: read “White Fragility”, by Robin DiAngelo, and you might think white people can hardly do anything about racism without inadvertently causing harm to non-whites. …
Opponents claim that pupils are being taught that white children are inherently racist, and that white pupils should feel anguish about their skin colour because of their ancestors’ actions. …
Whether framed as CRT or not, educators are incorporating progressive ideas about race, gender and more into the classroom.
Like many people, the authors of the story seem to imagine only two alternatives: ignoring injustice to racial or other social groups; or emphasizing group-identities and embarrassing or humiliating the pupils who don’t “belong” to the right group. Also, they do not mention the inescapable dilemma of public schools between propagandizing the majority’s views and teaching the basic tools that will allow each pupil to start understanding the world. (Note that we are talking about primary and secondary schools, not universities, as emphasized by Bonnie Kerrigan Snyder in an invited opinion.)
To this intellectual, educational, and political mess, a simple solution exists, inspired by a normative value that is closely associated with economics (while admitting that normative values must be distinguished from positive analysis). It would suffice that public schools teach—not in a dogmatic or proselytizing way—one basic idea of Western civilization, more clearly formulated by, and during the run-up to, the Enlightenment: only individuals count and they are or should be all equal holders of liberty. Why neither the left nor the right think that this principle is sufficient or even simply agree with it provides a key to understanding our troubled times.
An implication is that nobody should care whether a pupil is black or green, whether he has been born in a rich or poor family, whether the person has or not (to speak like the White House) birthing capabilities, etc. Another implication is that the state should neither ban nor promote CRT or any ideology, except for some minimal individualist idea as proposed above. This seems to be the way economists, with their characteristic respect for the individual and his preferences, would naturally think about the issue. Ideas along those lines can be found in James Buchanan’s book Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative. Tyler Cowen wrote a relevant piece in the New York Times several years ago: “A Profession With an Egalitarian Core” (March 16, 2013).
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P.S.: As our reader Scott Gibb suggested (see his comment and my response below), my claim that “The Economist estimates that some CRT is part of the curriculum for at most a third of pupils in American public schools” requires pulling some uncertain numbers from the magazine’s hat and is thus very questionable.
READER COMMENTS
Craig
Jul 18 2022 at 11:11am
Aside from depriving parents of choices in and of itself, a major problem of publicly run education is that those schools, indeed all schools, need a curriculum and when that school is publicly run the issue of what the curriculum should be becomes a political question.
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 18 2022 at 11:56am
Craig: You are right in the sense that when the state claims responsibility of everything, everything becomes a political matter. My proposal is an attempt to escape that. Whether and how that is possible is a fundamental constitutional and economic question.
Richard W Fulmer
Jul 18 2022 at 1:30pm
That goes to the discussion on your post on populism. As the federal government’s power grows, winning elections for one’s “tribe” becomes more and more critical.
nobody.really
Jul 19 2022 at 1:41am
Evidence? For example, can we identify a point in time when government was so small that people did NOT care about whether their “tribe” won an election?
Counter-proposal: Voters pursue tribalism through government not when so much is at stake, but when so little is at stake that voters feel that they can expend their vote for purely symbolic benefit. Black people had every reason to pledge loyalty to the party of Lincoln. But as lynchings increased in the 1920s, they were willing to switch to the party that would protect and promote black people’s interests. Likewise, inflation is prompting ever more Latinos to vote for the party of Donald Trump. In each scenario, a desperate need for protection against threat causes people to transcend tribalism. In contrast, people who do not feel the same level of personal threat are free to use their votes to pursue other agendas.
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 19 2022 at 11:24am
nobody.really: Some of the ideas in your comment are worth considering. However, they have to be reconciled with the fact that when you are in the voting booth, there is nothing at stake in the sense you seem bo be implying. Since an individual’s single vote has, for all practical purpose, a 0% chance of changing the outcome of the election, an individual votes only for one (or perhaps a mix) of three reasons:
1) to follow his tribe;
2) to entertain himself, which may fuse with #1, like when you applaud or shout at a hockey game without having any significant impact on the level of noise; the pleasure of expressing an (inconsequential) opinion can also be considered entertainment;
3) to do what is morally right by expressing a morally right (but otherwise inconsequential) opinion.
nobody.really
Jul 19 2022 at 2:28pm
Yet elections appear to produce different results, and those results appear to have consequences. You may well be right, and voters may well be delusional. Yet those delusional voters seem to influence the outcome of elections. True, they may do so as a group rather than as an individual; that fact does not pose the same conceptual challenge for me as it seem to pose for you.
When confronted with monsters, you can choose to close your eyes, but that doesn’t make the monsters go away. It makes perfectly good sense to say “nobody should care whether a pupil is black or green”–provided race doesn’t correlate with any variable anyone cares about; but it does. We can proudly proclaim our individual morality–but how do we explain the Milgram experiment, which demonstrated that roughly 2/3 of people are willing to inflict lethal doses of electricity on a perfect stranger if put in a specific social context?
We explain this by recognizing that social dynamics matter. People are free to close their eyes to these facts–but the facts endure nonetheless.
We may choose to TEACH something less than the full truth, for reasons pedagogical or otherwise. But we should not fool ourselves.
Anonymous
Jul 21 2022 at 7:47pm
They correctly intuited that they were not, in fact, inflicting lethal doses of electricity.
Jim Glass
Jul 23 2022 at 8:58pm
can we identify a point in time when government was so small that people did NOT care about whether their “tribe” won an election?
We can certainly point to peoples with no government who identified with their tribes completely. So it doesn’t look like we need an increase in government to increase tribalism.
nobody.really
Jul 19 2022 at 3:22am
Summary: “Golly, we’d all get along if only everyone could simply agree with ME!”
Apocryphally, Mark Twain said that he’s less worried about the parts of the Bible he doesn’t understand than by the parts he DOES understand. In that vein, I don’t know what Lemieux means in this post, but what little meaning I can discern I may disagree with. But also, I may not. Rather than pursuing multiple rounds of clarifying questions, I ask this: What function should education serve? I argue for letting form follow function.
Contra to Lemieux’s stated values, I recognize the importance of groups and the need to promote group cohesion to ensure the perpetuation of social order upon which much else depends. In particular, I want to preserve the norms of (classical) liberalism–including some version of the individualist values Lemieux has tried to articulate. One possible strategy to achieve my aim is to do precisely as Lemieux has proposed and teach that individualism is ALL that matters. I don’t care that this teaching is false; I merely care if it tends to promote the ends I desire.
After all, I often teach false ideas for developmental reasons. I try to teach my kids that they’re safe with me–even though I know that I cannot shield them from many kinds of harm. I teach them that they can’t subtract a large number from a small number because I haven’t yet introduced them to the concept of negative numbers. I teach the Bohr model of the atom because it provides an easily grasped aid for illustrating chemical bonds. For similar reasons, I teach them simplified social models such as classical liberalism.
But people embrace false ideas for lots of reasons. When I look at the catalogue of known cognitive biases, I have to suspect that many types of false beliefs help people adapt and thrive. Henderson wrote a post about the value of asymmetric strategies: If the harm of Type 1 error is larger than Type 2 error, a rational actor would design a strategy biased in favor of Type 2 error; the goal is not to minimize error, but to minimize harm. Arguably we would take this kind of analysis into account when designing an educational system.
In sum–
1: I disagree with Lemieux about the exclusive value of individuals.
2: I MIGHT come to agree with Lemieux about the advantage of teaching kids about the exclusive value of individuals–at least at some early stage of their development. The jury is out.
nobody.really
Jul 19 2022 at 10:30am
C.S. Lewis, “Notes on the Way, published in Time and Tide, vol. XXIV (September 4, 1943) at 717 (advocating meritocracy in education).
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 19 2022 at 11:14am
nobody.really: I haven’t read Lewis’s article, but I will order it from the library. However, you seem to assume that democracy is the ultimate value. It depends what “democracy” is. If it is unanimous consent (a notion foreign to Aristotle), you are saying more or less thing as I say. If it is X%<100%, then it means that anything may be thought.
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 20 2022 at 4:57pm
nobody.really: It seems your citation is incorrect: see https://summerstudy.yale.edu/sites/default/files/14lewis_priestesses.pdf
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 19 2022 at 11:09am
Whoa! Before sending the jury out, you may want to read or reread Buchanan’s Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative. It will buttress some of your arguments (the importance of social order) but challenge others (such as your first sentence and perhaps your conception of “group cohesion”).
nobody.really
Jul 19 2022 at 1:19pm
I really enjoy C.S. Lewis’s essay on democratic education. That said, 1) the essay addresses the need to promote meritocracy in education rather than the need to teach classical liberalism, and 2) I may have listed an erroneous citation. Wikipedia lists a number of essays Lewis published in Time and Tide, including a 1944 essay entitled “Democratic Education”; this makes me doubt the accuracy of my 1943 cite. But if you merely want to find the text (and are not concerned with finding the date of first publication), you can find it here, pp. 32-36. Here’s an excerpt:
Lewis reiterates many of the same themes in his 1959 essay, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.” A final excerpt:
Feel free to edit or omit this post; it’s long and a bit off topic–but darned fun!
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 20 2022 at 5:47pm
nobody.really: I just saw this added comment of yours.
Interesting thoughts, which may be at at the frontier of conservatism and liberalism, or may show an incomprehension of the modern idea of liberty (that is, of individual liberty). Hayek, who forcefully claimed that he was a liberal and not a conservative, wrote something that could perhaps satisfy Lewis (I am not sure):
But liberalism certainly implies formal equality in some abstract-consensual sense, which does not mean material equality. In his Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative, Buchanan seems to struggle with the limits of the normative ideal of equality. I mention what I understand of that my review of thia Buchanan book in Regulation and in my Econlib anniversary review of Hayek’s first volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty.
For a liberal-anarchist or conservative-anarchist conception of equality more compatible with Lewis’s (I’ll wait you to tell me), you might want to have a look at Anthony de Jasay’s Social Justice and the Indian Rope Trick.
Scott Gibb
Jul 20 2022 at 6:13am
Pierre,
I read through the article, but missed any mention of this estimate
Can you please quote the source?
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 20 2022 at 6:19pm
Scott: Here is the passages I was referring to:
I may have stretched these vague estimates too much, trying hard to give them some coherence. But these numbers can also lead to the conclusion that CRT as such is taught to much less than one-third of pupils. Thanks for pointing out this problem.
MarkW
Jul 20 2022 at 8:01am
Another implication is that the state should neither ban nor promote CRT or any ideology, except for some minimal individualist idea as proposed above.
But the ‘minimal’ idea proposed above (‘only individuals count and they are or should be all equal holders of liberty’) is by no means neutral or widely accepted across our squabbling political tribes. ‘Only individuals count’ is in direct conflict with the current leftist worldview that group membership is paramount.
Really, I think our only solution is moving more and more to vouchers that will allow families to choose schools that match their own ideology. Next best, I guess, is local control so that families have some chance, at least, of foot-voting their way into a public school system that matches their values. But local public school systems seem quite insulated and resistant to pressure coming from voters in their own districts. School board members often owe their elections to highly motivated K12 employees themselves. If you have ever seen a fresh slate candidates take over a school board and try to institute reforms only to be stymied and waiting out by the permanent local school bureaucracy, you know what I’m talking about. And then there have been the incidents of school boards actively retaliating against parents speaking out against CRT in the curriculum and the whole National Assn of School Boards letter asking the Biden admin to investigate their critics as ‘domestic extremists’. It’s quite a mess.
So I do understand the desire to take this to a state level. And at least the anti-CRT activists are seeking to ban a form of indoctrination without trying to impose their own preferred ideologies. It’s far from ideal, but on the other hand, I don’t see that the ‘simple solution’ proposed here (however much I might personally prefer it) is likely to bear fruit.
Craig
Jul 20 2022 at 10:49am
To expound on the same quote: “Another implication is that the state should neither ban nor promote CRT or any ideology”
If the state runs schools, the school must include things in the curriculum, or exclude them.
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 22 2022 at 11:08am
Craig: I tried to reply in advance to this objection in two ways. I wrote that public schools (if they exist) should teach “the basic tools that will allow each pupil to start understanding the world” (reading and of course understanding what you read, and counting are the basics), and “some minimal individualist idea.” These formulations don’t completely solve the problem, but I think solutions lie in this direction.
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