Remember Cooperative Learning? Critical Race Theory Falls Into the Same Panic-Filled Place

I must admit that it was a masterful job of labeling. Cooperative learning never had a chance.

That's not to say it was never happening before the controversy, sometime in the 1990s (I forget how long ago, but the phenomenon is quite fresh.). Yes, teachers were allowing students to work together on homework. They were teaching each other.

This was dangerous to those who weren't paying attention in their classrooms enough anyhow to realize that there might actually be value in it. Once they learned about it, though, it emerged as an ongoing threat to everything that made America great.

The old saw about the self-made individual came out, and overwhelmed all other creative thinking about how kids might learn better. People said really dumb things, like:

• How can you identify anyone's work if they do it together?
• Someone might get away with getting the same credit while doing less work than someone else. That never happens in the real world.
• Will testing go away, too? Maybe the kids will stop knowing how to take them. How can we tell who's smarter than anyone else? What would it now mean to get on the National Honor Society? How can we tell who will get scholarships? How can we save money on college?
• This country was built on the concept of everyone earning their own way. No loafing allowed.
• Sharing is wrong. Damn liberals. No accountability. This is socialist, or maybe even communist. At the very least, it's horribly un-American, a danger to our way of life.

Parents panicked. School boards cringed in self-defense: We didn't know this was happening! This needs a public airing! Where's Pontius Pilate?

So, of course, school administrators had to scurry about, promising that absolutely no cooperative learning would happen anymore. So they gathered their teachers together and told them that.

And the teachers, so horribly discovered (Aren't they sneaky?) and cauterized, went back to their classrooms and did none of it--for a while. Then, when the coast cleared, after the education and mainstream media (There they go again!) stopped paying attention to it, they went back to it without announcing it, knowing that: 

• administrators didn't know then and wouldn't know now that it was still happening; and 
• besides, as long as classroom problems diminished (which they did because kids got along better), they didn't mind a bit, since it sure wasn't hurting anything.

And nobody said a word. That's how nearly everything worked back in the day. And it may work once again with critical race theory, or CRT. 

Liberals are back making trouble! They're teaching that:

• Racism is systemic because it's been baked into many of our institutions;
• Everybody's a racist to some degree, which means we've been born terribly prejudiced (which is not our fault but there it is), though if we wanted to we could work on that;
• The country's very beginnings were filled with racism, because slaves became the tool for getting a lot of the tougher work done; besides,
• There isn't nearly enough discussion of the effects of racism on our lives in both the past and the present.

All of which are accurate. Let me assure you:

• Administrators will, once again, deny that such a thing is happening, whether it is or not;
• Teachers will teach what they wish about racism and either deny that they're engaging in critical race theory or not mention the phrase while they're actually doing it; and 
• Regardless of what state legislatures have already done and will do since some Republicans won't want to be called wimps, teachers will continue down the same road if they think it should be done.

Anything a legislature does will scare some teachers some of the time, and may make administrators review curricula for signs of critical race theory, however obscure or vague it may be, to say that they've done so. So yes, it will be slowed down some. For a while.

When ex- brings it up again, he'll brag that it has been removed from schools because of him, which again would be a lie. But conservatives love to condense ideas into neat little phrases and then rise up and suppress them, giving themselves non-victories over non-issues.

Meanwhile, in some form or another, and certainly not announced out loud, education will go on and address racism because racism has gone on, is going on, and will go on in an America tainted with it for all kinds of reasons. The most basic one is that the Europeans who came over here first were very used to its existence and considered it part of international trade--which it had been for at least a thousand years. 

Losers of wars ended up being slaves in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Being an unfortunate victim of a tribal leader's insatiable need for gold got you a lifetime sentence of slavery. Some slaves were respected enough to become soldiers, but some of them rose up and overthrew their rulers, too. 

You might also get shipped to the New World where, if you survived the awful trip, you lived a relatively short life of abject misery. Those facts are undeniable and also necessary to understand that the movement to not only end slavery but end the effects of slavery have gone on, and had to go on, for some time now. And because slavery is hard-baked into many societies' natures, going back those hundreds of years, it won't be eradicated any time soon, tragic though that is.

We have not taught that well enough; I know I didn't. You don't have to haul out a phrase like 'critical race theory' to keep trying to teach it better. But teachers will; they'll keep working at it. You can trust that. 

Knowledge builds on itself, whether people accept that or not. Someday, somewhere down the road where none of us can now see it, this truth, too, like cooperative learning, will overcome this temporary panic and set us free.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark