Contested Questions in Public Schools
The pandemic that opened this decade gave many American parents a firsthand look at their children's education, expanding their awareness of changes that had been quietly taking place for years. School closures and virtual instruction meant that, in many cases for the first time, parents were able to observe the pace of their children's learning, the attention they received from teachers and, most notably, what their children were being taught. When it came to sensitive topics involving race and gender, many parents did not like what they saw. According to researchers at the Brookings Institution, this disillusionment helps explain why, when schools eventually reopened, many parents sought alternative options.
Despite the post-pandemic increase in the popularity of private schools and homeschooling, the vast majority of American children have continued, and likely will continue, to receive a public education. However, doing so in an institution that hasn't acknowledged its failures ensures that both the educational crisis and its associated erosion of democratic norms will persist. This means that rebuilding trust in this institution matters — although doing so will require us to first understand how public schools lost their way.
In some sense, concerns about education in this country are nothing new. The fact that schools are both highly visible and subject to political control has long made them battlegrounds for a wide range of topics. In the 1960s, for example, national leaders questioned whether our schools were producing citizens scientifically and morally competent enough to prevail in the Cold War. People debated everything from racial integration and busing to sex education. Then, in the 1980s, concerns moved toward rising teen pregnancy rates, drug use, and violence. The 1983 report A Nation at Risk further intensified public scrutiny by highlighting poor academic performance. By the 2010s, education reformers pointed to the "teaching to the test" done under No Child Left Behind as the most salient problem.
Throughout these earlier debates — whether they were over busing, sex education, or academic standards — there was a broadly shared understanding that public schools were civic institutions tasked with preparing students for participation in a democratic society, even if people disagreed about what that preparation should look like. Political neutrality, while often falling short in practice, remained an aspirational norm. Today, while language about civic participation can still be found in mission statements and public rhetoric, what this preparation actually entails has changed.
A transformation has occurred in our schools that has fundamentally altered how teachers and administrators think about inclusion, diversity, fairness, and equality. Ideologically based assumptions about heated political topics — including policing, slavery, gender and sexuality, and immigration — have made disagreement morally unacceptable. The slow pace of the shift has meant that, by the time parents started to voice concerns, it was already well established.
By the 2020s, disagreements were no longer merely about the means to achieving a shared goal — for instance, how to best improve academic achievement — as they had often been decades earlier. They were about what it means to be inclusive, kind, or tolerant; in other words, they were about what it means to be a good person.
When parents did begin to complain, many described the problem as "indoctrination." And while many of their concerns are warranted, the term misdiagnoses what's happening. Indoctrination implies an intent to control knowledge, often as a means to retain power. Yet, in most cases, educators are likely pursuing what they believe to be right, true, and beneficial for students. In fact, their genuinely good intentions are part of what has made this problem so intractable. Because when educators sincerely believe they're promoting universal values, they see critics as opposing the values themselves.
The real problem we face lies elsewhere — in the guise of schools presenting politically contested assumptions as settled facts. By making disagreement immoral, teaching contested interpretations as objective truths has undermined the very capabilities essential for democratic deliberation. Democracy depends on people's ability to evaluate different perspectives, understand competing frameworks for complex social issues, and engage meaningfully across ideological differences. An alternative approach will not only create space for political and ideological disagreement, it will also foster it. To understand why this is needed, it helps to first examine how current moral education differs from traditional approaches.
IS AND OUGHT
Since the problem lies in the way schools are teaching children what it means to be inclusive, tolerant, and kind, someone might argue that schools should stick to basic academic subjects and leave moral instruction to families. "That's the parents' job," the thinking might go. But schools have long taught children right from wrong, and many parents see this as an inherent part of education. The issue lies in how contemporary moral lessons are embedded as simple statements of fact.
The problem reflects the is/ought distinction, famously articulated by Scottish philosopher David Hume. Hume's Law reminds us that claims about how the world is are separate from claims about how it should be. Without anyone necessarily realizing it, moral education has long preserved this boundary, and this separation has created the space for democratic thinking. When teachers said, "you shouldn't lie," students learned to examine the factual foundation (did someone tell an untruth?) separately from the moral principle (people shouldn't do this because it undermines trust and cooperation). Students could then debate what exactly counts as lying, why it's wrong, when exceptions might apply, or why honesty matters, and understand how factual claims connect to moral conclusions.
The ability to navigate this distinction is fundamental to how democracy functions. Democracy has always involved disagreements about both factual claims and value claims. Citizens routinely disagree, for instance, over whether a politician actually said something, what was meant, whether a policy really caused an outcome, or whether particular events occurred. And even when they agree on the facts, they often disagree about what should be done — whether to raise taxes, how much to spend on defense, or what the appropriate response to a crisis should be. These disagreements, while sometimes intense, still allow for democratic discourse because the different types of claims remain distinguishable. When factual and moral claims merge, arguing for a stricter tax policy becomes evidence of moral callousness, while questioning defense spending proves a lack of patriotism. When people can say, for instance, "I agree this exists, but I think it has different causes and requires different solutions," agreeing to disagree becomes possible.
The current crisis in our schools largely stems from the collapse of this distinction. What looks like a simple factual statement ("statistical differences exist between groups") actually contains both a specific moral condemnation (discrimination is happening) and a predetermined set of political positions (we must implement anti-discrimination policies, address systemic racism, restructure institutions, etc.). By making disparities evidence of discrimination, the observation, moral diagnosis, and political program become indistinguishable. In short, this approach assumes that all group differences stem from injustice rather than from a complex interplay of injustice, culture, preferences, historical factors, and individual choices — an assumption about which reasonable people might disagree.
In this line of thinking, when students encounter statistical differences between groups, they're not learning to move from is to ought through reasoned analysis. Rather, they're learning that the statistical pattern itself constitutes moral wrongdoing, eliminating the possibility of interpretive disagreement. There's no morally legitimate space to say "yes, these differences exist, but let's consider what might be causing them" without appearing to deny facts or defend discrimination. Any suggestion that factors beyond discrimination — such as cultural differences, individual choices, or even historical circumstances — might contribute to disparities gets dismissed as "blaming the victim," rendering the discrimination diagnosis unassailable.
When facts are presented as having an automatic moral implication, some people develop an intuitive sense that something is wrong with how information is being presented — perhaps explaining why parents have seen such statements as "indoctrination." And when institutions present information this way, it systematically undermines their credibility. This erosion of trust often happens subtley, with a progression that looks something like this: Institutions present contested interpretations disguised as objective facts, these pronouncements erode institutional credibility, broader skepticism about institutional claims sets in, and people become increasingly receptive to alternative institutions and sources, even unreliable ones. When this pattern repeats across multiple domains, it can drive people toward more fundamental forms of institutional distrust — including skepticism about basic factual claims that would previously have been uncontroversial. What begins as a collapse of the is/ought distinction in educational content ends up contributing to a broader epistemic crisis.
The is/ought divide is not philosophical hairsplitting — it's what allows citizens to engage in the kind of reasoned debate democracy requires. And it's why the current moment feels so different from past controversies over values in education. Once this distinction collapses, it doesn't just affect how students think about individual issues; it reshapes their entire understanding of how the social world works.
AN IMPLICIT WORLDVIEW
The idea that disparities stem from discrimination alone changes how we see a wide variety of inequalities, including across racial, gender, and other identity lines. It offers an immediate explanation for why, for instance, there are fewer women in leadership positions, and why men and women display different behavioral patterns. Discrimination can operate through direct bias in hiring, or through gender norms that condition girls to be passive and agreeable and boys to be aggressive and ambitious.
But it does more than this. Once one sees disparities as evidence of discrimination, and observes disparities across multiple identity categories and in multiple contexts, a logical conclusion is that the world is fundamentally structured around oppression based on identity.
It's worth pointing out that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with this idea. On the contrary, there's good reason to believe that oppression plays a real role in the way many societies function today. The problem comes when people moralize disagreement over whether disparities are dispositive evidence of discrimination. A world where questioning a political or ideological claim is seen as evidence of hateful motives or ignorance is not one where political pluralism can survive.
This collapse — treating disparities as evidence of discrimination — has even shaped how we understand gender itself. If differences in outcomes between men and women are assumed to reflect discrimination, then any other factor used to explain those differences must also be traced back to discrimination. This includes measured differences in traits like assertiveness or agreeableness.
According to this logic, if such traits are socially conditioned rather than biologically grounded, gender must exist independently of biological sex. After all, acknowledging stable biological differences between males and females would contradict the core claim that disparities reflect discrimination. In this view, treating biological sex as a meaningful predictor of behavior or preferences risks reinforcing inequality, even if it does so unintentionally. Once gender is detached from biology in this way, its separation is no longer just a theoretical possibility — it becomes a necessary implication of the broader framework. That is, the idea that gender is socially constructed isn't just an argument; it becomes a factual corollary of the assumption that disparities imply discrimination.
When the line between disparities and discrimination is blurred, the assumption logically leads to other conclusions — such as power's being understood primarily through the lens of group identity rather than individual agency. Under the logic of group disparities imply discrimination, if one group consistently outperforms another across various metrics, creating inequality in outcomes, the higher-performing group must possess systemic advantages. Otherwise, what would generate the inequality?
It also creates the space for the idea of harm to expand beyond concrete injuries. Since disparities are themselves evidence of discrimination — making the intent to discriminate unnecessary — it stands to reason that other forms of harm against identity groups can happen without anyone intending them, either. In this line of thinking, anything that perpetuates inequalities — including the expression of viewpoints that might justify or normalize them — becomes harmful by definition. By this logic, any argument that normalizes or justifies these disparities perpetuates the harm, regardless of the speaker's intent.
In other words, once adopted, the disparities-imply-discrimination framework naturally extends beyond statistical analysis to generate conclusions about biology, psychology, and identity that schools then present as settled science rather than contested interpretations. What began as a method for identifying discrimination now dictates conclusions about human nature itself.
Although this ideological shift toward the idea that disparities imply discrimination originated as a pragmatic tool for identifying potential discrimination, it ultimately helped transform American institutions' moral operating system. The reach of this worldview becomes clear when examining how it has reshaped the interpretation of existing civil-rights law. R. Shep Melnick has written in these pages about how Title IX, originally enacted to prevent discrimination against women in higher education, has expanded in recent years to encompass transgender rights — expansions endorsed by the principle that institutions must affirm and protect identity-based claims.
Failing to understand this shift has not only kept us from addressing it in our schools; it's prevented us from even being able to agree on whether the challenge is real. People who see the world through this lens (mostly on the political left) tend to view the concerns as part of the political right's coordinated effort to whitewash history, or to take us back 70 years to a time when white men's power and control went unchallenged. And people who see the world differently (mostly on the political right) tend to see what's happening in our schools as one of the most sinister and anti-American threats that our country faces today. Both sides miss the point.
The subtle nature of the disparities-imply-discrimination worldview can also help explain why schools needn't state explicitly that, for instance, "disagreeing with pronoun usage is morally wrong" or that "questioning white privilege makes you racist" in order for that to be the implication. They don't have to: The moral conclusions are built into the factual premises.
LEGAL CHALLENGES
Because the implications of the worldview where disparities imply discrimination can be difficult to recognize, parents who sense something is wrong but struggle to articulate exactly what have often felt they have no recourse but to intervene through the legal system. And yet, even a cursory examination of these cases makes it clear the disconnect is profound. Legal systems are designed to establish rules of behavior, resolve conflicts, and enforce norms. They are not equipped to settle questions about what is true, how we come to know things, or what our morals should be.
The recent Supreme Court case Mahmoud v. Taylor illustrates the tension between the nature of the problem and the legal attempts to solve it. The petitioners in the case were a group of parents in Montgomery County, Maryland. The defendant was the superintendent of schools. According to the petitioners, who included devout Muslim and Christian parents, the county school board had approved curricular materials promoting views on gender that violated their religious beliefs. The school board countered that the texts the families objected to were designed to depict a world where people of different races, national origins, sexual orientations, abilities, and other traits could live together with mutual respect and dignity. The question facing the Court was whether Montgomery County public schools had unconstitutionally burdened parents' rights to free religious exercise when they forced elementary-school children to receive instruction on gender and sexuality against their parents' religious convictions and without notice or opportunity to opt out.
During oral arguments for the case in April, Justice Amy Coney Barrett cut to the heart of the kinds of assumptions described here. Referring to one of the children's books in question that had been used in Montgomery County schools to promote certain ideas about gender and sexuality, Justice Barrett asked: "[I]t presents a worldview, right?" She went on to clarify her thinking: "It's saying: 'This is the right view of the world. This is how we think about things,'" or "[t]his is how you should think about things."
While the Mahmoud v. Taylor case referenced multiple books, IntersectionAllies by Chelsea Johnson, LaToya Council, and Carolyn Choi was mentioned five times during oral arguments. The book introduces several characters, including Nia, Dakota, and Kate. Nia says: "The color of our skin is no reason to hide./We protest for safety, equality and pride." Dakota states that "like my ancestors,/My tribe and I are water protectors./From profit and power, we stand up to preserve/Our nations, our cultures, and the respect we deserve." And Kate says: "Skirts and frills are cute, I suppose./But my superhero cape is more 'Kate' than those bows."
The Notes section of the book then adds context and depth to each of the three characters. "Nia is participating in the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which was started by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi in 2013 to bring attention to the violence and racism that Black people face in the United States." Presenting Nia's involvement in BLM as part of a broader goal of teaching inclusion flows from the worldview described earlier. If racial disparities in policing outcomes exist (and they do), those disparities must indicate discrimination and racism. From this perspective, BLM activism isn't one particular interpretation of complex social issues — it's the natural and morally required response to documented inequality. This makes alternative explanations for police violence (such as neighborhood crime rates, socioeconomic conditions, cultural differences in interactions with police, or variations in local policies) irrelevant or even harmful to consider.
The same Notes section clarifies Dakota's wording:
As community members, we have the right to disagree with anyone's decisions, even government decisions. Concerned groups make their opinions heard and known by contacting politicians, creating signs, chanting in unison, or simply standing together. The water protectors of #NoDAPL did just that. [DAPL stands for Dakota Access Pipeline.]
Viewing Dakota's reference to #NoDAPL as simply teaching inclusion fits the same pattern as Nia's reference to BLM. The factual observation that a conflict occurred between a corporation and indigenous communities (what is) becomes evidence of discriminatory and oppressive systems at work.
It also implies that protest was the morally correct response (what ought to happen). From this perspective, the #NoDAPL protests aren't one interpretation among multiple that weigh competing interests, environmental concerns, economic benefits, and legal rights — rather, they are the appropriate rejoinder. And framings that consider trade-offs between economic development and environmental protection, or between different communities' interests, become suspect. The book never explicitly states that corporate projects affecting indigenous communities are discriminatory, but presenting Dakota's story as part of a lesson in inclusion draws this conclusion for us.
Finally, coming to Kate, the Notes section reads: "When we are born, our gender is often decided for us based on our sex, and sometimes, this affects what we wear or even the toys we play with....But at any point in our lives, we can choose to identify with one gender, multiple genders, or neither gender." The observation that children's clothing and toy preferences often correlate with their biological sex (what is) becomes evidence of gender conditioning. Because traditional gender categories don't reflect natural biological differences, rejecting these imposed categories is a matter of fairness and doing what's right rather than a contested philosophical position about the nature of gender itself.
The book's implicit worldview is apparent because, without treating these assumptions as given, its role in teaching inclusion and tolerance collapses. If readers question whether systemic racism explains policing disparities, whether the pipeline dispute was simply about exploitation, or whether gender is ultimately socially constructed, it's much more difficult to portray the characters' positions as politically neutral "inclusion" lessons. Rather, they become advocacy for contested interpretations. By embedding these disputed positions into school policies and practices, teachers and administrators implicitly communicate which understandings of gender, race, etc. are legitimate and which are morally suspect. What appears to be factual instruction about the world (what is) seamlessly becomes moral guidance about proper attitudes and behaviors (what ought to be), with the connecting value judgments remaining invisible and therefore unchallengeable.
Here again, the point of clarifying the nature of this argument is not to assert that claims made in books like IntersectionAllies are necessarily wrong, nor to suggest the book shouldn't be read. It means that its message should be accompanied by a clarification that people with the same core values of kindness and inclusion can arrive at different understandings of social issues and the correct approaches to addressing them.
While Mahmoud v. Taylor went all the way to the Supreme Court, it wasn't the first case to raise questions about parental rights in an attempt to oppose the worldview in question. The 2023 case Parents Defending Education v. Linn Mar Community School District, which made it to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, involved a school policy that allowed students to change their gender identity without notifying their parents. And in the 2023 Wisconsin court case T. F. and B. F. v. Kettle Moraine School District, parents objected to a policy that allowed students to change their names and pronouns at school without parental consent. The sense of right and wrong embedded in these policies stems from the worldview we've just described: They treat a student's expressed gender identity as automatically requiring institutional validation and accommodation without explicitly acknowledging contested assumptions about the nature of gender identity, parental authority, and institutional responsibility that bridge that gap.
Still other cases challenging this worldview have been argued on grounds of compelled speech. For instance, in the 2022 U.S. district-court case Clark v. State Public Charter School Authority, Gabrielle Clark and her son William claimed that his First Amendment rights were violated when he was required to participate in "identity confessions" — labeling of race, sexuality, and privilege — in a mandatory class. At the university level, similar claims were made in Meriwether v. Hartop, a 2021 case decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. That dispute involved a professor who refused to use a transgender student's preferred pronouns.
THE LIMITS OF COURT RULINGS
The Supreme Court decided Mahmoud v. Taylor in June 2025, ruling that the Montgomery County school board's introduction of the contested books, without parental notice or the opportunity for opt outs, represented "an unconstitutional burden on [parents'] religious exercise." "[T]he books are unmistakably normative," the Court said in its opinion. "They are clearly designed to present certain values and beliefs as things to be celebrated and certain contrary values and beliefs as things to be rejected."
While the Court is correct in identifying an implicit worldview behind the school board's actions, Americans must also acknowledge that the legal system cannot ultimately resolve the underlying problem. Framing a parent's concern about how gender identity is presented in schools in terms of religious-rights violations overlooks the epistemological issue at play. The court case becomes structured around religious freedom while the deeper problem — which affects both religious and non-religious families — remains untouched.
Consider the topic of abortion, where a similar challenge is handled differently, if not always perfectly. When discussing abortion in civics or health classes, few educators would dispute that they have an obligation to present it as a complex ethical issue with multiple perspectives, noting that Americans hold deeply different views about when life begins and the moral status of a fetus. They might even say: "Some people believe life begins at conception and abortion ends a human life, while others believe personhood develops later and early abortion is morally permissible."
When implemented well, this approach to abortion can succeed because it explicitly acknowledges different viewpoints as morally legitimate. It creates intellectual space for students to understand different positions without moral condemnation. If gender identity, for instance, were discussed with the kind of epistemological humility that is applied to evolution or abortion — as in "here's one understanding of gender, though there are different perspectives" — I suspect that many parents who currently feel compelled to opt out or litigate might feel their concerns are being addressed.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of relying on courts to resolve these disputes is that doing so removes the topics in question from democratic deliberation. Instead of allowing communities to wrestle with how to present contested issues in ways that honor pluralism, these questions are swallowed up by legal resolutions that make such discussion unnecessary.
While some may view the Court's ruling in favor of the plaintiffs in Mahmoud v. Taylor as a victory for democratic pluralism, it creates new problems. The legal sanction given to religious parents to opt out of certain materials limits who else has legitimate grounds for objection. Not only does this overlook the root issue of normative claims presented as factual, it opens the door to a potentially endless stream of new court cases about which materials qualify, who gets to object, where the line is, etc. Courts simply aren't equipped to repair a public-education system that remains blind to its own foundational assumptions.
POTENTIAL OBJECTIONS
Understanding that an implicit worldview has become embedded in schools points toward a solution. It's one where educators are clear and explicit about claims that are contested across political lines.
Of course, a reasonable skeptic could question whether grade-school children are really able to understand the kind of complexity — related to issues of race, gender, and the like — that we're discussing here. And yet, if the answer is "no," and the material is too complicated, the solution isn't necessarily to maintain the status quo. The response most compatible with strengthening pluralism and democratic citizenship may be to wait to introduce topics that are disputed along political lines until children are old enough to understand their inherent complexity. But even this approach — deciding which topics to delay and at what ages to introduce them — should be subject to community discussion rather than treated as a moral imperative with predetermined correct answers.
A school administrator might agree here in principle that teachers could be more explicit about politically contested assertions but still object to the implications. The worry might be that, if taken to an extreme, such epistemological caution would mean that schools would no longer be able to instruct students that the Earth orbits the sun. Trying to manage that, an administrator could argue, would paralyze education entirely.
While this is a valid concern, it misunderstands the point. When it comes to scientific observations such as the Earth orbiting the sun, the underlying claim about the world is broadly shared across political perspectives — just like the notions that lying, cheating, and stealing are wrong.
Someone could also point out that refraining from talking about particular subjects — waiting until children are older, for example — is itself a decision with consequences. When it comes to transgender issues, there might be costs to not bringing them up at early ages: Without such a pointed conversation, a five-year-old who believes he was born in the wrong body might feel more alone than he otherwise would.
The assumptions on which this objection rests bring us full circle. They include that children as young as five can meaningfully experience gender dysphoria in a way that requires external validation; that this experience is primarily an innate identity rather than a developmental phase or response to social cues; that this validation must come not just from parents or health-care providers, but from peers and school environments through institutional affirmation; and that the potential harm to these students without such school-based affirmation outweighs the benefits of allowing children to develop their understanding of gender without early institutional intervention. These reflect a specific framework for understanding child development, gender identity, and the proper role of educational institutions that is itself politically contested — and schools need to acknowledge it as such. When schools treat these claims as factual and self-evident, they make particular policy choices appear as natural consequences of child development rather than decisions based on debatable values about identity, harm, and institutional responsibility.
RECOVERING DEMOCRATIC VIRTUES
Schools need an approach that isn't rooted in the disparities-imply-discrimination worldview. They need one compatible with the goals of teaching students to respect the dignity of all persons and preparing them for life in a democratic polity. If educators understand one of their obligations to be helping students live with disagreement, imparting these values without making politically contested assumptions about race, gender, and identity is not only possible, but desirable. The key is to ground such an approach in shared values — particularly in beliefs that are widely held across political perspectives — rather than in contested assumptions about the nature of identity, power, or social systems.
If such preparation is our goal, then when teachers seek to instill the virtue of kindness, for example, the lesson should no longer be defined by affirming identities, using the "correct" language, and avoiding harm as subjectively identified by a vulnerable group. Kindness also includes treating people with respect and dignity regardless of whether one agrees with their identity claims. With this broader goal, empathy should no longer be inextricably tied to acknowledging disputed claims about the systemic context tied to a person's race, ethnicity, or other identity trait, but to being sensitive to another person's feelings, thoughts, and experiences. Fairness should no longer require treating people differently based on their group membership as compensation for past injustices. It should include the idea that fairness also means applying equal rules and moral standing for all. And critical thinking should be decoupled from the identification of power and privilege or the uncovering of systemic injustice and include the freedom to question frameworks about power, privilege, and identity itself.
Sometimes advocates label the kind of approach I'm describing as ideologically and politically neutral. Others say that, far from being neutral, it's simply a different set of ideological commitments masquerading as neutrality. This is a legitimate criticism, and it's why framing this as a quest for neutrality will reproduce the same dynamic of hiding ideological commitments behind claims of objectivity. The goal isn't to identify the "right" foundational truths, but to be transparent about which assumptions are being treated as settled versus which remain open to legitimate disagreement.
What might this alternative look like in practice? Imagine a child says in school: "There are only two genders." The disparities-imply-discrimination worldview would suggest gently correcting the child, affirming the existence of non-binary identities, and potentially framing the statement as harmful or exclusionary. Yet this response rests on several layered assumptions: first, that gender exists on a spectrum rather than as a binary; second, that expressing binary gender views causes psychological harm to transgender and non-binary individuals (which could probably be empirically demonstrated); and third, that preventing such potential harm outweighs the value of open discussion about contested beliefs.
A response that doesn't make these assumptions, by contrast, might involve a teacher permitting the conversation about "there are only two genders" to continue but steering it toward respectful disagreement. He might even say: "Some people believe there are more than two genders. Others don't. What's important is that we treat everyone with kindness, even if we see the world differently." Here, the underlying belief is that students can hold different views without moral condemnation and that kindness doesn't require agreement.
Or imagine it's time for a school's annual assembly to mark the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday. Under the worldview that now prevails, the assembly may focus on white privilege, systemic racism, and a moral imperative to be "anti-racist." The underlying assumption here is that racial injustice is still deeply embedded in American society, and that addressing it requires acknowledging collective responsibility. An alternative approach might stress King's message of equality, non-violence, and individual dignity. In practice, a teacher might say:
There are ongoing debates about the causes of racial disparities, and reasonable people disagree about both those and about the solutions. But part of being a democracy means that all people should be given equal rights — and while we haven't always lived up to that ideal, it remains our fundamental commitment.
At its core, our educational crisis reflects a fundamental epistemic problem that neither litigation nor legislation alone can solve. When schools collapse the distinction between what is and what ought to be — treating statistical observations as moral imperatives — they undermine students' ability to engage in the kind of reasoned analysis democracy requires. Rather than entrenching unstated premises as unquestionable truths, schools need to explicitly acknowledge contestable assumptions and create space for respectful disagreement. This alternative approach doesn't mean abandoning values like kindness and inclusion, but rather recognizing that these values can be upheld without demanding ideological or political conformity.
By failing to identify hidden assumptions, evaluate competing claims, and recognize that reasonable people can disagree, schools are undermining the very capabilities essential for democratic citizenship. If educators instead embrace epistemic humility — acknowledging what we know, what we believe, and the difference between them — they can prepare students not just for academic success, but for meaningful participation in a diverse democratic society.