Missouri GOP bill follows other states trying to bury uncomfortable historical truths
The Missouri House bill that would limit how American history is taught is dangerous. The bill, which had its first public hearing of the 2022 legislative session last week, would arm people who have only a narrow understanding of its implications with tools to tear down the shrinking number of educators dedicated to providing students with knowledge needed to create a better society.
It robs kids of the opportunity to know “enough about the complexity of race and ethnicity,” to repair “preconceived ideas about race,” said Yoana Zamora Miranda, a Clay County high school senior, during the House Elementary and Secondary Education Committee hearing.
The committee spent hours discussing proposed legislation that would stymie, and potentially eliminate, teaching about race and racism, sexism and oppression from history lessons in the state’s public school classrooms.
Miranda is against it. Students, she told legislators, “are not people to manipulate into what you want them to think or be by banning conversations in the classroom about anything that pertains to controversial topics.”
That this discussion has led legislative debate this year indicates where lawmakers are placing priorities. Proposed restrictions on how — and what — history is taught are included in a “Parents’ Bill of Rights” that would give parents oversight on school curriculum and set out a process for recalling school board members.
It comes after a year of attacks on schools from parents and political officials opposed to mask mandates; diversity, equity and inclusion training; as well as the teaching of critical race theory — a college-level concept that is not part of Missouri’s K-12 curriculum outside of the Kansas City and Hazelwood school districts.
We don’t support this divisive legislation. Of course parents should monitor their child’s education. But the idea of not teaching kids the full scope of America’s history is absurd. We need to teach our history. The whole story.
GOP lawmakers here and around the country began focusing on how schools teach racial history after the highly publicized police killing of George Floyd touched off nationwide racial justice protests in the summer of 2020. The protests led to calls for more police accountability and a greater understanding of the African American experience. But Republican lawmakers have pushed back, in particular aiming at how race is taught in public schools.
Missouri’s legislation mirrors others adopted and proposed elsewhere.
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis won support to limit teaching about race by distorting critical race theory as “teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other.”
Indiana GOP state Sen. Scott Baldwin, who proposed legislation banning honest teaching about our country’s history, said recently that teachers’ lessons about fascism and Nazism should be impartial. Really? Because the U.S. took a side on that issue 80 years ago when we entered World War II.
After widespread criticism of his comments, Baldwin reversed himself saying teachers “should condemn those dangerous ideologies.”
The Missouri legislation bans identifying “people or groups of people, entities, or institutions in the United States as inherently, immutably, or systemically sexist, racist, biased, privileged, or oppressed.”
So don’t teach that white people bought and sold Black people in America? Or that equal access to education and the right to vote didn’t come for women until the 20th century? Or that Jim Crow laws were established to prevent Black people from liberties afforded to white people?
The section that bans classifying “persons into groups for any purpose” stumped even some GOP legislators. “How do you teach about the civil rights movement without classifying people into groups for any purpose whatsoever?” state Rep. Phil Christofanelli, a Republican from St. Peters, asked during the hearing.
The nonsensical battle to ban critical discussion of racism and other “isms” in schools has opened the door to conservative groups urging parents to report teachers who mention racism. Others give step-by-step instructions for parents to anonymously post examples of “wokeness” at their kids’ schools on social media.
Because other states have mistakenly adopted such ill-conceived bans that only damage public education is why Missouri’s bill should die in committee.
