Ohio lawmakers terrified of well-informed white children| Opinion

The Council of Chief State School Officers  named Kurt Russell of Oberlin High School as the 2022 National Teacher of the Year Tuesday.

Russell was eligible for this honor after having been chosen as the Ohio State Teacher of the Year by the Ohio Department of Education. 

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Russell, a history teacher for 25 years, attended Oberlin High School himself, also coaches basketball, and regularly teaches courses that focus on race and gender.

In the "CBS Mornings" segment in which the announcement was made, Russell’s students speak glowingly about his willingness to challenge and help them grow. Russell is a shining example of what teachers do every day: inspire, challenge, and encourage his students to think, do, and be better.

But if Ohio State Representatives Mike Loychik and Jean Schmidt get their way, Russell will have to fundamentally change his curriculum – one the students in his school feel enriched by – or risk losing his license.

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House Bill 616 will prohibit any public and private school instruction using material it calls “divisive or inherently racist,” which the bill defines as “(a) Critical race theory; (b) Intersectional theory; (c) The 1619 project; (d) Diversity, equity, and inclusion learning outcomes; (e) Inherited racial guilt; (f) Any other concept that the state board of education defines as divisive or inherently racist.”

These prohibitions are intended to suppress an honest account of American history in order to silence important conversations about race and justice in the present. The bill’s vague, open-ended definition of “divisive” materials endangers teachers, who risk losing their teaching licenses and jobs for discussing important, difficult topics with students.

School districts that offer professional development around the topics of diversity, equity, or inclusion run the risk of losing state funding. In fact, school districts that simply support teachers doing this important, difficult work run the same risk.

The passage of this bill will yield a generation of Ohio children who will be taught only the comfortable parts of American history, leaving them ill-equipped to be active citizens in a diverse and democratic society. They will be well-equipped, however, to be passive subjects in an authoritarian and uncritical one. Maybe that’s the point.

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The bill also restricts any effort to “teach, use, or provide any curriculum or instructional materials on sexual orientation or gender identity” to younger children.

Books that show all kinds of families as happily, boringly normal are to be made invisible in order to shield heterosexual family structures from the mere possibility of critique. Identities considered “deviant” by some must be hidden from all.

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According to GLSEN’s 2019 National School Climate Survey, done before the current spate of “don’t say gay” bills sweeping the country, LGBTQ children are profoundly and negatively affected by their experience in unsupportive schools: these children suffer increased levels of homelessness, significant harassment by peers, disparate discipline by teachers and administrators, and a considerable decrease in educational attainment.

These efforts to control and limit discussion about fundamentally important topics in our classrooms do not signal confidence or certainty; they signal fear and insecurity.

These bills suggest an unwillingness to engage in the kind of questioning that John Stuart Mill argued must be the foundation of a society that takes liberty seriously.

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 These bills suggest a callow fear that if we allow honest discussion about the racialized history of our country, white children might take up the challenge of creating a country where racial justice actually becomes a thing of the past, rather than remaining a problem in the present.

These bills suggest a realization that seeing other ways of life in the pages of a book could offer freedom from the constraints of heterosexuality and gender norms.

Taken together, these bills make clear just how much work the those who support them are doing in an effort to erase two important truths: that America must address historical racial injustice in order to take responsibility for and repair contemporary racial injustice and that gender and sexuality are and always have been more diverse than the options presented to us in school.

Children crave truth.

They observe many things we hope they don’t see. But unlike adults, they don’t yet know when something might be controversial or uncomfortable.

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As a result, children freely ask questions about the world. It’s our responsibility to provide them, just as freely, with access to information. That includes full information about our nation’s history – comfortable or not – and its people in all their diversity.

Heather Pool is an associate professor of  politics and public affairs at Denison University. She is the author of "Political Mourning: Identity and Responsibility in the Wake of Tragedy."