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Notes -
Why not? If people are interested, then I think these courses should be offered as electives.
Think you are forgetting the amount of education of a high school grad even one going to an elite school.
Africans just haven’t figured into the big world events that high school kids don’t know. They’ve had zero influence on major ideologies, political systems, communism versus capitalism etc. The course is either going to be about soul food, Tulsa race riots, and rap music or be a crt/Marxist indoctrination.
The former I think high school kids need training in bigger things or the latter is just woke training.
If it's strictly optional I don't see a problem in teaching "lesser" things in addition to bigger ones. The school by necessity both would spend some time teaching you stuff you'd never need and would fail to teach you stuff you need or interested in. This is the inevitable effect of schools being mass product and people being different, even as kids. If optional courses can mitigate this to some degree, I don't see a problem with that. Teaching CRT I would see a problem, because it is evil and actually makes students worse off - it's like having them beaten up instead of PE. But if it's African history, or even soul food and rap music - I see no big deal with it as long as the necessary bases are still covered as much as they were before.
I admit I never went to US high school, and the high school I went to was special even for the place, so I don't have "normal" high school experience to rely on. But am I wrong to conclude that participating or not in that AA studies course was voluntary and not required for anybody who doesn't want to take it?
I'm always wary of "tax dollars shouldn't" argument. I mean, I am a libertarian. For me, there's a very restricted set of things that tax dollars should go to - military, courts, police, maybe maintenance of governmental buildings and such. But the vast majority of where the tax dollars go, they shouldn't. But US is decidedly not a libertarian country. We have a federal budget that is in trillions, and keeps inflating with nothing to stop it. And then there are state and local budgets. And the US citizens are perfectly fine with it. Given that situation, begrudging a small change spent on teaching some bullshit, when I know if it weren't, it would be spent on teaching some other bullshit, because of "tax dollars shouldn't" - sounds to me a bit hypocritical. I mean, if nobody ever want to sign up for this course, then fine, there's no point in it. But if there are some - then I don't see why I would have better stance to oppose them using the tax dollars than any other group using the same tax dollars. The only hones approach is either nobody gets to use it, or any democratically determined use of it (provided it is not connected to violation of somebody's rights of course) carries the same moral valuation. I don't see any argument that would allow me to say it's ok for me to use tax dollars to teach what I like, without allowing somebody else to use the same dollars to teach what they like. I mean, we could argue teaching math is better than teaching bullshit, but we'd have to leave the dollars aside - dollars then have nothing to do with it.
Oh, I completely agree. But I don't think either side of the debate here questions the premise that the democratic processes should be used to establish oversight over the spending of public money. So in my view, mentioning tax money does not add much to the discussion - if both sides agree that it's legitimate for us to discuss what is taught in the schools, then the money is not the question, we're past that point.
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