A parent group in Nevada's Washoe County (think Reno) wants to outfit teachers with body cameras in order to ensure no one teaches Critical Race Theory. Let's get to the fun stuff:
- This could do wonders for student nutrition. Parents will finally see that their kid consumes a steady supply of chips, Red Bull, and Skittles when they're out of Mom's sight. Those carefully packed veggies? Trash can.
- Parents will learn that there's a reason their daughter chooses to wear an unseasonable sweatshirt every day in late spring. Related, they will also learn that halter tops have never gone out of a style for teens.
- The public will learn that teachers are every bit students' equals when it comes to procrastination.
Of course, there's the obvious points -- e.g. This would lead to gross violations of student privacy; It's so impractical that it would near-impossible to implement; CRT is a niche theory usually covered late in law school or maybe some public policy grad programs; No one is teaching 12-year-olds about different philosophies on how to deal with structural racism, etc.
But we all (should) know this isn't about Critical Race Theory as an academic theory. C'mon -- maybe a few thousand people in this country of 330 million could succinctly explain CRT and none of them teach kids.
This is about CRT as another boogeyman for the culture wars. It'll come to represent anything and everything deemed dangerous by grifters, ideologues, cynics and the credulous idiots who finance them. See: Common Core, Colin Kaepernick kneeling, etc.
This practice itself is older than the country. You can draw a line from Salem Witch Trials to the Satanic Panic to QAnon and you'll see the same cast of opportunists and morons.
Are Reno's schoolteachers going to be wearing body cameras? Uh, no. I don't think this parent group is any more representative of public sentiment than your typical post on Nextdoor. But it's a useful reminder that moral panics will always be with us.
