The 'steal' of Stop the Steal is, of course, a lie. But the scare isn't.
The scare is the point. Finding something to scare people about is the way of ex-, the way of people who blindly follow him. If he says we should be scared, they not only are scared, they help spread the scare.
Instead, we should push back with a simple phrase: Stop the Scare.
This is a very simple way of responding to the boogeyman created by Critical Race Theory. The phrase is real, but it's only been (until now) applied to a graduate collegiate level. Nothing like it has been pontificated in high schools and middle schools. Few, if any, teachers have gone out of their ways to try to include it in their curricula.
The current frenzy in Mequon-Thiensville and lots of other districts, among well-educated people who should know better, is an excellent example. The their entire school board is being recalled because of some misapplied belief that our children are somehow being indoctrinated with CRT.
In several places, I've indicated that this is nonsense, as such. There is nothing incredibly pervasive about the teaching of the history of race relations in the United States that has been adopted by an overwhelming percentage of the faculty thereof. Yes, The 1619 Project has been introduced, and I'd imagine that some teachers have read it and taken some things from it and added it to their teaching. But have they sold out to it? I highly doubt it.
One more time, and please try to understand: Standardized testing, brought to you by the very same kinds of people who are peddling all this fear and trepidation, gets in the way of introducing new and dynamic curricular choices. To say it in plainer English: You run out of time when you bring new stuff into the classroom because you have to be sure to 'touch all the bases' so the students are exposed to as much general information as possible so you can go to sleep at night knowing that you led all these horses to enough water, even though you know they won't all drink it. Never mind that such an approach pretty much eliminates the need for teachers to augment their base knowledge, which reduces their overall effectiveness, but nobody seems to care about that.
Nevertheless, the point is that with so little time to teach so much, any new ideas can be brought into the room, but the goal is to cover the material, not to get them to think new things. We all lose when that happens, but anyone's notion that radically new concepts are somehow seeping into the kids' heads and staying there forget their own classroom experience. It's based mostly on the idea that, along with other subjects, the goal is to get through it well enough to remember well enough to pass the tests and move on, diploma firmly in hand.
Let me say what I've said to certain people who push this panic button: Do you remember any of the questions, never mind the answers, in your English final exam your senior year in high school? You don't? Well, neither do I, and I was a pretty good student. What makes you so sure that the kids won't think of CRT as another quirky concept that didn't stick until someone's going to bring it up at the 10th class reunion?
But when new things are brought up with enough emotional shock and enough buzz words to imply that the apocalypse is (again!) just around the corner--something these people are getting awfully good at--everything is supposed to stop and we are all supposed to act as if all else has been stopped, so that all other curricular avenues have been interrupted and we are all caught staring at some chimera. We're all supposed to be rightfully scared. Hysteria does that.
My pushback is simple, and directly entirely at them: Stop the scare. You're trying to scare people over very little, conjured by someone who knows better. You can't scare me, at least, because I've been in the classroom and I know how things work.
Some of the people who are in the classroom now, and have been in the past, need to step up and expose this imaginary monster for what it is. A lot of very good things still happen inside our public school classrooms every day. We need to return to doing what's really needed: Supporting them and the job they're doing in producing decently educated citizens.
The victims, in fact, are the ones spreading this nonsense. Because the person who's at the bottom of this doesn't care one whit about them. In fact, he thinks of them as chumps, acting crazy in spite of their own education: easily fooled, easily manipulated, easily scared, malleable as putty, ready to run off into the next vacuum, off the next cliff, whenever he wishes. That others are doing his work for him makes the danger all that much deeper.
Stop and think, folks. Stop trying to scare us.
Be well. Be careful. Get a booster. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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