Published: May 18, 2022
By: Allison Allsop, LSU Manship School News Service
BATON ROUGE — The House Education Committee on Tuesday killed two bills by a conservative lawmaker that would have prohibited teaching concepts related to race, ethnicity, national origin and sex.
The committee voted unanimously to involuntarily defer the bills after much debate over whether or not the Legislature should set school curricula.
The bills, House Bill 1014 and House Bill 747, were both authored by Rep. Raymond Garofalo, R-Chalmette. The bills tackled what many would call critical race theory.
“Our classrooms are set up so that students can get the basic skills that they need: reading, writing, arithmetic, history, accurate history,” Garofalo said. “They are not setup so that we can indoctrinate our students into a political way of thinking.”
Critical race theory, as described by the NAACP, is “an academic and legal framework that denotes that systemic racism is part of American society.” The two bills attempted to dissolve critical race theory within the schools from different sides.
HB 1014 would have prohibited many concepts related to race, ethnicity, and national origin, including whether any race is inherently superior or inferior, from being in the K-12 curriculum.
The bill also would have prohibited any teaching about whether the U.S. is a systematically racist country.
During 1 ½ hours of debate, multiple representatives questioned whether indoctrination was an actual issue.
Read more at The Shreveport Times
LSU Manship School Statehouse Bureau 