US Schools: Culture War Over the Curriculum

Racism theories, sex education, gender: A culture war over curricula is raging in many US schools. Conservative parents and politicians are campaigning against allegedly unpatriotic content.

He did it: Glenn Youngkin, the surprise winner of the governor’s election last November in the US state of Virginia. “No more politics in the classroom,” the Republican promised his parents, hitting a nerve. Youngkin owes the inspiration for his campaign hit to Donald Trump – known for his sure instinct for polarizing issues.

“Our children are taught in school to hate their own country,” Trump never tires of warning patriotic parents. The founding fathers are no longer heroes, as was once taught, but villains.

Allegedly unpatriotic teaching is banned

Trump, Youngkin and their fellow party members have reinterpreted “Critical Race Theory,” or CRT for short, – originally a model for explaining racism from the civil rights movement of the 1960s – as a combat term for any doctrine that they find too left-wing and too “unpatriotic”. One Republican state after another is passing legislation to ban CRT from the school curriculum.

First and foremost Florida with its “Stop WOKE Act”. “Not a taxpayer dollar for teaching our kids to hate their country,” said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Teaching critical race theory is now banned in Florida schools. And where teachers disregard this, parents should sue the school management, according to the governor. “So that parents can enforce the ban on CRT in court, the state of Florida will now pay their legal fees,” promises DeSantis.

Other US states are following suit

And because Republican parents are delighted, states like Oklahoma have followed suit with very similar legislation: “We have to teach history without our children having to be ashamed of being oppressors or culprits,” Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt said to mostly white parents.

The state’s syllabus sanitization reached a temporary high point last month when the Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust comic “Mouse” was banned from a school district in Tennessee last month for being too brutal, too revealing nudes. Author Art Spiegelmann couldn’t believe it. Spiegelmann said in a CNN interview that he had tried to show tolerance for those responsible, who might not even be Nazis.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s about racism, sex education, gender or even just compulsory masks in school buildings: the debate polarizes, it mobilizes – and leaves nobody cold. “Virginia came out on top,” says the new Governor Youngkin smugly. “Now the rest of the country is empowering parents to choose what their children learn!”