How Critical Race Theory gets into classrooms

Many in the American intelligentsia are currently ridiculing any and all concern about the introduction of CRT into American classrooms. It’s another paranoid conspiracy theory, the same as QAnon or the alleged stealing of the 2020 election, they insist. In reality, critical race pedagogy is a cultural tidal wave gathering momentum in America’s schools of education; the wave is only now beginning to crash against the country’s shores. Americans shouldn’t be duped by attempts to convince them that CRT is just a teaching tool or a passing fad. It’s a discipline with self-consciously practical and political prescriptions attached to it. In fact, this kind of practical prescriptivism is central to all kinds of critical theory. Max Horkheimer, who first defined critical theory in his famous 1937 essay, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” wrote that a theory is critical to the extent that it tries “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” and “to create a world which satisfies” their “needs and powers.” Anyone who argues that critical race theory, which is a species of this larger philosophical genus, does not aim at the practical political overturn of the existing social order is either ignorant or deceitful. Moreover, as is evident from the data presented above, CRT has serious and lasting institutional power behind it in the form of teacher-training colleges.