For years, the debate over critical race theory in public education has focused on concerns about politicization, ideological activism, and racial essentialism. But an arguably more important aspect of it, which hasn’t been adequately publicly explored, is how profoundly idiotic and intellectually dulling it can get.

Last month, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) published what may be the most ignorant policy brief I’ve read in a decade as an education policy analyst: " Culturally and Historically Responsive Education " by professor Gholdy Muhammad. "Culturally Responsive" education may sound like it involves tethering lesson plans to points of interest for students. But, as the author notes, a key tenet is cultivating a "sociopolitical consciousness," i.e., a CRT-based ideological worldview bent on "problematizing" everything.

To "justify the need for culturally and historically responsive education," Muhammad "problematize[s]" the New England Primer , a textbook introduced to the American colonies in the late 17th century. She accuses the Primer of "center[ing] whiteness and white representation, including white characters."

But the primer doesn’t have any characters. (Unless you count two sentences on John Rogers, the first Protestant martyr burned at the stake in 1554 under Queen Mary.) Muhammad also faults the Primer for not including "Black excellence, Black thought, or Black language." But no established African American English literary tradition existed in the 1680s. It’s also unclear what Muhammad intended by "Black language," given that the oldest known written documents in Swahili were published decades later, and Yoruba was not codified in writing for another 150 years.

She faults the Primer, written by a British colonist for British colonists, for "privileg[ing] the English language" and for being "apolitical and lack[ing] criticality." Specifically, the "readings did not offer opportunities for children to understand race, gender, class, [or] sexuality." But today’s concept of "gender" did not exist then. And the suggestion that teachers should help children understand sexuality would have prompted the Puritans to reach for their guns.

The Primer is also deficient for not providing "opportunities for all youth to see themselves or to make sense of their multiple identities. Due to the focus of whiteness, it appeared as if this was the only group that mattered." But no child of race could "see themselves" because the book contained no representations of any children. It was entirely concerned with promoting Protestant Christianity, and the equation of Christianity with "whiteness" is insulting and degrading to people of color. Muhammad also declared that the Primer was "constructed to promote skills-only education." False on two accounts: (1) it contained no skill-building exercises, and (2) it promoted moral and religious education.

Good teachers warn students not to judge the past by the standards of the present. But at least when it comes to human beings and moral intuitions, doing so can lead to enlightening conversations. There is, however, no redeeming value in faulting a document for not including material or concepts that didn’t exist when it was published.

Less than a century ago, under the influence of traditionalism, NCTE promoted a great books curriculum, featuring authors such as Tennyson, Eliot, and Shakespeare. Less than a quarter century ago, under the influence of multiculturalism, it refused to promote any particular reading list. Today, under the influence of CRT, it promotes a style of reading where the text makes no difference whatsoever to its interpretation.

The point, according to Muhammad and the NCTE, is to promote "criticality," aka CRT, or "the ability to understand power, oppression, antiracism, and other anti-oppressions." This ideology is promoted under the banner of “culturally responsive" education, arguably the biggest buzzword in education today. The NCTE policy paper goes on to recommend that state standards, curriculum, data collection, and teacher evaluation be reformed to center "culturally responsive" pedagogy and "criticality."

Some pundits have argued that CRT in K-12 education constitutes a neo-Marxist conspiracy to indoctrinate children. Others have argued that public schools are too heterogenous to pull off a conspiracy, and too ineffective to execute indoctrination at scale. The truth, and danger, may lie somewhere in the middle. Effective indoctrination may be hard, but dumbing things down is easy. Any bozo can take any book and "problematize" it according to CRT ideology if the requirement to tether argument to text is dropped. And the NCTE, the premiere professional authority for American English teachers, is leading by example on this front. To the extent that teachers take their cues from organizations like NCTE and education professors like Gholdy Muhammad, their students’ learning, and perhaps even their souls, will suffer.

Max Eden is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.