As things heat up at school board meetings — with the new prospect that people expressing displeasure with their local boards may be treated as ‘terrorists’ — it’s worth revisiting the idea of removing ‘divisive concepts’ from schools since they are what so much of the fuss is about.
Let’s begin with a simple fact: School boards exist to take money from everyone and spend it in a way that pleases the majority. That is, they exist for the very purpose of suppressing the rights of people who disagree with the majority, and adding insult to injury by making them pay for that suppression.
It’s hard to think of an institution that is more openly contradictory to the ideals of the American government, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. But like COVID, school boards are here, and probably here to stay.
Which doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways to keep school boards from being weaponized in the service of controversial ideas, as they frequently are now.
A little while ago, the legislature took up some bills that were designed to eliminate the teaching of divisive concepts from tax-funded schools. Unfortunately, these bills sought to delimit a particular set of ideas, which was the wrong approach to take.
(First, because there’s no way to write down a comprehensive list of ideas that divide people right now, let alone ideas that will divide them in the future. And second, because even if that could be done, there’s no way to write descriptions that wouldn’t contain loopholes large enough to make the whole exercise pointless.)
The right approach to take would have started with this question: What makes a concept divisive?
The answer seems straightforward, right? A concept is divisive if people are divided over it.
So the best way to find out whether a concept is divisive is to find out whether anyone objects to teaching it in tax-funded schools. This could be done with polls or petitions, or it could be done by noting how many people show up to school board meetings to register their opposition.
If a significant minority of taxpayers in a district oppose the teaching of a concept, then it is, by definition, divisive, and therefore political; and it shouldn’t be taught using tax money.
(As Jefferson noted: ‘To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.’)
Who could oppose this? Only someone taking essentially this position: ‘I think my political ideas are so important that people — including people who disagree with them — ought to be taxed in order to teach them in schools.’
(Jefferson again: ‘It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.’)
But even if the principle were to gain acceptance, there’s still a wrinkle to be ironed out: What constitutes a significant minority? Probably it would be expressed as some percentage of the number of residents in the district. But what percentage?
People who want to use the schools to promote their political ideas would want that percentage to be as large as possible; while people who want to keep the schools from trampling on their rights would want it to be as small as possible.
Voting on a number — that is, leaving its selection to the majority — would, for obvious reasons, be the wrong way to choose.
Implementing the ideal of the Declaration of Independence — that is, that government must operate by consent — would give any taxpayer a veto. But this would lead many people to fear that ‘a small number of crazy people’ could hold everyone else hostage.
I would suggest doing a poll, to find out what percentage of taxpayers across the state would object to teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic in tax-funded schools — in other words, the percentage of ‘crazy people’ — and then setting the figure just a little bit above that.
But setting a particular figure is less important than recognizing a couple of principles that should be uncontroversial: first, that divisive concepts should not be taught using tax money; and second, that the simplest, most direct, and best way to identify a divisive concept is to see whether it is, in fact, dividing people.
