Critical race theory and remote learning are making American students stupid

Critical race theory reframes every discipline as one regarding race, racism, and activism. In history, which is its most obvious home, it demands that students first understand that racism is the cause of all historical problems, and then find them. In politics, philosophy, poetry, pottery, each discipline, and all the others, can be rewritten to show that racism was the primary driver and each are tools of oppression. Yet even in math the concept of "right answers" has been deemed to have racist overtones.

Racism is the only answer given as to why things happen; racism is the only thing that is deemed to have any importance in each course of study. This forces students to focus on this superficial aspect of study, noting the given oppressors and victims in each case. Instead of learning how to do math, or what happened historically, they learn that those who founded the nation were not worth reading about other than to understand how evil they were, and that math, for example, is too hard for students of colour to learn outside their ancestral cultural context.

Remote school has sent children out of the classroom and into the homes to sit behind screens, if the kids can get them. Students from ages 5 to 18 sit at their computers all day, and when they're finished with school, they don't turn away from their screens. Instead, they use their computers to do homework, to find entertainment, to talk to friends and family.

Before the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic, educators told us to keep screens out of our kids' hands, but during the pandemic, and still in many school districts, there's no other avenue to life. That schools are teaching kids virtually doesn't mean that kids have the tech necessary to find success with their lessons. Remote school offers a shockingly limited amount of education. Students are bored, cut off from social interaction, and learning nearly nothing.

Standards have been obliterated. There are a few reasons for this, and they are, namely, critical race theory and remote school. Critical race theory tells us that children of colour cannot measure up to the given standards of academic excellence because historical and systemic racism has made it impossible for them to attain their full potential.

The logic goes that because people who share the same race as these children have been discriminated against, kids should not be held to the same standards as those who have not been discriminated against, because their inability to measure up is not an indication of their overall intelligence. The academic failures caused by remote school, despite students' best efforts, have made it so that kids can't measure up to the given standards. This logic goes that, since it's not their fault that they didn't measure up, they should not be held to account for failing to make the grade.

These three things have the intention of creating students who can't think for themselves, who don't have basic skills, and who don't even know how far behind they actually are. Yet each of these initiatives are undertaken with compassion at the core. The emergence of critical race theory in education is supposed to give students another perspective to the mainstream narrative, to show that our heroes were not untarnished, but instead it has become the only perspective permissible.

Remote school was created to make sure no one got sick from coronavirus. Yet even after it was made clear that kids are not particularly sound vectors of the virus, that school was not breeding grounds for contagion, and that remote learning was causing harm, teachers unions kept the schools closed. Their reasoning was to use the virus to get more of what they wanted.

The removal of standards is intended to make students not feel bad for not succeeding, but not measuring failure doesn't make the failure any less acute. Additionally, when standards of testing and screens to entry to top schools are removed or lessened, the group that mostly suffers are Asian-American students, with white students primarily standing to benefit from their departure. Everyone suffers from the soft racism of lowered expectations.

These are the trends in American education, and they will leave behind an electorate that is easily manipulated, driven by emotion, and lacking in any real knowledge. Their minds instead will be filled with how to identify racism before truth, how to navigate a Google workplace, and they won't even know how far short they've fallen until the nation is plunged into intellectual darkness.