Here is an article I found explaining CRT in the classroom.
Why have so many K-12 educators been so resistant to the idea that students should understand multiple perspectives on history and current events? For its 2016 word of the year, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) chose “post-truth,” which it defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in...
kappanonline.org
For those that do not want to read it, some relevant sections:
Some critics have argued that CRT’s efforts to highlight and analyze the role of white supremacy in U.S. history, politics, and culture only serves to heighten racial divisions. However, a thoughtful use of CRT can, in fact, be a unifying force, providing opportunities for students of every race and ethnicity across the United States to wrestle with the ways in which racial oppression has held all of us back (Rose, 1996) and to understand that racism will only continue to hamper our collective progress as the world becomes more globalized and connected. Ultimately, the point of CRT isn’t to assign blame to one group of students but to enable students of all races and ethnicities to have informed, productive conversations about the forces that have shaped, and continue to shape, the society in which they live.
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Bringing multiple historical perspectives of U.S. history into the curriculum creates important opportunities for high-level thinking and analysis. It requires students to consider differing narratives, wrestle over competing views, and come to their own conclusions about the past and its influence on the present. Ideally, the classroom offers a safe place for such public debate, one where young people can learn to make and defend arguments and, in the process, develop a healthy ”respect for the equal standing of all citizens and common recognition that reasonable people can disagree” (Justice & Macleod, 2016, p. 5).
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Even after the course was approved, the controversy didn’t end. Over the subsequent weeks, the course gained national attention in both the news and social media. Ironically, while the course was designed to stem the polarized nature of discussions surrounding race in the U.S., it attracted intensely polarized responses. The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by civil rights activist Robert Woodson (2020), who took issue with the course for promulgating a “lethal message of despair and distortion of history.” While Woodson’s contributions to the civil rights movement cannot be overstated, it’s important to recognize that CRT is not focused on individuals and their successes but on institutions. Although individuals from marginalized groups can avoid despair and express their agency within an oppressive system, they may be less able to freely and equally do so than others. Accomplishments such as falling poverty rates among Black Americans, which Woodson cites in his article, should absolutely be celebrated, but we should also ask how the poverty rates differ between Black and white Americans and what institutional factors make it more difficult for Black Americans to accumulate wealth. It is through examining institutional policies and their effects, which CRT encourages, that productive conversations about race can occur.
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While critics complain that CRT imposes guilt on white students and reduces their self-esteem, CRT addresses systems and structures, not individual people’s guilt. Students sitting inside classrooms today were not alive when the major institutions that shape their lives were created, and no student who identifies as white should feel guilty that those institutions exist; however, they should be empowered to understand how and why ethnic Europeans combined together to be identified as a single “race.” Rather than reducing self-esteem, I would argue that such an understanding helps students build their identity.
When we teach history there is a POV attached. What life was like in the colonies, in the antebellum, in WWII. It all has a POV attached. That POV traditionally has been universally White and traditionally people with certain means. It isn't a universal perspective of what being an American is, it has been a somewhat glorified perspective of what being a White property-owning male is. That has always been a minority of America. Let's for a moment that CRT is wrong, how do we present the perspective of ordinary Blacks, Native Americans, women?
Or better, should we present a POV of these people? I sometimes get the impression some think we only should present the POV of the elite.
