If passed, the legislation would make it illegal to teach students that a person should be treated favorably or discriminated against because of his or her race or sex, that a person bears responsibility for the past actions of others of the same race or sex, or that a person of a certain race or sex is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive.
When it comes to teaching about current events, the bill specifies that teachers should not be pressured to discuss “controversial issues of public policy or social affairs.” If teachers want to discuss those issues inside the classroom, they have to try their best to present the subjects from “diverse and contending perspectives” without showing favor to any of them. Students would also not be allowed to receive credit for participating any activity involving social or public policy advocacy.
In addition, the bill seeks to amend the state law to make sure that the mandatory civics education include ideals and writings that are essential to the founding of the United States. Civics and social studies teachers would be require to teach “the fundamental moral, political, and intellectual foundations of the American experiment in self-government,” and documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, specific Federalist Papers, the first Lincoln-Douglas debate, and French historian Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.”
The Texas bill comes amid a nationwide debate over critical race theory and its increasing presence in America’s social, cultural, and economic institutions. An outgrowth of the European Marxist school of critical theory, critical race theory sees society through a lens of power struggle between the race of the oppressor and that of the oppressed. As a result, according to the theory, the very foundations of the American system—such as rationalism, constitutional law, and legal reasoning—are considered to be tools of racial oppression.
