LETTER: Critical race theory, gender fluidity and the public schools

In his March 8 column, Victor Joecks highlighted an incident where children were used to lobby the Nevada Assembly on school choice to demonstrate his own fundamental misunderstanding of two current hot topics in education and beyond: critical race theory and LGBTQ+.

Mr. Joecks claims critical race theory “groups people by skin color, not their actions or individual traits. White people are oppressors and Black people are the oppressed.” He then opposes this and compares it to Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream, as if critical race theory were a debate about how America should be.

Mr Joecks makes a fundamental mistake. Critical race theory does not teach that this is or should be how America acts, but how it did, in fact, act at its founding and up through Dr. King’s assassination at the hand of a white supremacist. Critical race theory is history. Mr Joecks should — and I suspect does — know better, but that would hinder his argument.

On LGBTQ+ issues, Mr. Joecks claims schools are “indoctrinating students in radical gender theory” and “brainwashing” them to believe “gender can be different than biological sex.”

Again, Mr Joecks belies his own lack of education.

In 1980, the DSM III — the diagnostic manual for psychiatry — included gender identity disorder (now gender dysphoria) as a recognized medical diagnosis. Does Mr. Joecks believe the APA has brainwashed doctors for 40-plus years? Should we teach accepted science or Mr. Joecks’ morals?

While ideologues such as Mr. Joecks are free to believe what they like, when it comes to education, we should teach what we know. And Mr. Joecks knows not of what he speaks.