The Hundred-Year Road To CRT - Critical Race theory

A brief look at the progressive agenda in education reveals that critical race theory is just the latest in a long series of attempts to deform and ultimately fracture the country. 

While critical race theory has rightfully garnered much attention of late, it is simply the latest step in advancing what is known as cultural Marxism. Many people lay the origins of America’s left turn to the 1960s, but in fact, it actually dates back to the Progressive Era, a time of social and political reform that started over a hundred years ago....

In 1916, education reformer John Dewey began professing what we now call “social justice.” At the same time, Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist came upon the scene. He believed that it was most effective to spread revolutionary ideology slowly and incrementally. By doing it gradually, he thought that enough people would eventually be won over to Marxist thought. His approach eventually became known as the “long march through the institutions.”...

In 1923, a group of professors known as the Frankfurt School, came to the fore. These German Marxists—notably Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse—hated capitalism and traditional morals....

But things became unhinged in the 1960s. Radicals ruled many college campuses and Saul Alinsky, the uber-leftist community organizer, was hired by the National Education Association as a trainer. John Lloyd, an NEA insider at the time, warned that to understand the union one must learn about Alinsky. Reading Rules for Radicals, will help one “understand NEA more profoundly than reading anything else,” he said...

Published in 1980, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States became extremely popular and still dominates our classrooms. Zinn insisted that teaching of history “should serve society in some way”...

When I began teaching full time in the 1990s, I saw the progressive infestation up close and personal....

In the 16 years since writing the missive to Tancredo, the long march through the institutions has continued. With critical race theory currently making its way into classrooms across the United States, I wonder how much more we can take before the country—as we have known it—is lost.