Preventing Public Schools From Promoting Critical Race Theory Isn't an Attack on Free Speech

The content of public school curricula have always been subject to democratic control.

"31931 2011 Blue Bird 77 Maximum Passenger School Bus" by bsabarnowl is licensed under CC BY 2.0

I went to high school in Cobb County, Georgia, a bellwether Metro Atlanta county that has over the past decade become increasingly fertile ground for Democrats.

In the early 2000s, one of the main culture wars in the area was how science classrooms in public school should teach students about the creation of the U.S. The local school board voted to put stickers in all biology textbooks warning that “evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things,” and that “this material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.”

A couple of years later, a group of parents decided to sue the district, arguing that the stickers amounted to the endorsement of a religious belief. In 2005, District Judge Clarence Cooper sided with those parents and ordered the removal of the stickers.

One of the attorneys who represented the parents celebrated the ruling in the following way:

“This is a great day for Cobb County students,” said Michael Manely, an attorney for the parents who sued over the stickers. “They’re going to be permitted to learn science unadulterated by religious dogma.”

As Manely demonstrated with his statement above, the parents who were suing Cobb County wanted us to only be taught evolution in science classrooms. They objected to Young Earth Creationism and other forms of religious teaching in biology class, arguing that these ideas were unsupportable by science and inappropriate for those forums.

This is an excerpt from today’s subscriber-only post. To read the entire article and get full access to INQUIRE, you can subscribe for $6 a month or $60 a year.