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A battle over New Hampshire’s “divisive ideas legislation” has been brewing within the state since 2021. The measure restricts instruction on matters that may go away college students feeling inferior or superior based mostly on race, gender, ethnicity, or one other attribute, and in addition applies to coaching carried out by state businesses.
Earlier this yr, state lawmakers proposed a repeal, eliciting greater than 1,000 letters to the Home Schooling Committee. The Hechinger Report, in partnership with The Boston Globe Journal, analyzed a 264-letter pattern to get a way of each side. Most (94 %, or 248 letters) supported repeal, citing considerations corresponding to a local weather of worry amongst academics and the fear that historical past couldn’t be taught totally and actually. In 16 letters opposing the repeal, most argued there was a must preserve academics from indoctrinating college students in vital race concept (a authorized idea not usually utilized in Okay-12 faculties) and that solely mother and father ought to train youngsters about political doctrine.
EXCERPTS FROM COMMENTS SUPPORTING REPEAL OF THE DIVISIVE CONCEPTS PROVISION:
“If a person or a rustic can’t be taught from errors of the previous and work to alter, the place will all of us be?”
A.O. OF GILMANTON
“The Divisive Ideas legislation has a chilling impact on academics, who’re afraid to show sincere historical past for worry of shedding their jobs. That is straight out of George Orwell’s novel 1984, not what we would like in twenty first century New Hampshire.”
B.Okay. OF AMHERST
“[T]he finest hope for our nation to free itself of the terrifying legacy of racial injustice lies in dealing with this fact, studying from it, and selecting to not let both our previous nor even our current outline and decide our future.”
J.G. OF MERIDEN
“It’s laborious to speak about actual historical past — the historical past of oppression on this nation, that it was constructed on slavery and stolen land, and genocide and Holocaust research — however we should discuss this actual historical past so as to perceive trendy social ills and find out how to fight them.”
AMANDA TOLL OF KEENE, STATE REPRESENTATIVE OF CHESHIRE 15 DISTRICT AND A FORMER SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHE
EXCERPTS FROM COMMENTS OPPOSING REPEAL OF THE DIVISIVE CONCEPTS PROVISION:
“Youngsters don’t have to be individuals with a twisted racial slant. Youngsters aren’t born racists. Educating them this type of factor trains them to be.”
N.M. OF BELMONT
“Once you hear buzz phrases like fairness, systemic racism, unconscious bias and privilege, you possibly can make certain that you might be listening to radical Important Race Principle repackaged, which solely sow the seeds of division and hatred, and haven’t any place within the public faculty system.”
L.Okay. OF BERLIN
This evaluation about “divisive ideas” legal guidelines was produced by The Hechinger Report and The Boston Globe Journal. Linda Okay. Wertheimer is an impartial journalist and Hechinger contributor, and Cathy Ching is a Globe correspondent.
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