It's not that they're teaching CRT, it's that they're teaching IN CRT.

The thing that continues to bother me about controversy in relation to CRT in K-12 schools is that we're still not actually defining the language that we're using.

Just replace the CRT discussion with something like socialism. Should we teach socialism in schools?

Well, it depends on what you mean.

Should we talk about the Cold War? Of course. Should we have some understanding of the Gulags conveyed to our kids? Yeah. Can we accurately talk about these components of 20th Century history without talking about Marx and socialism? No. So, we absolutely should teach socialism as a concept.

I don't think anybody should be concerned with students being taught that there are certain ideas that people have and that they act on those ideas.

What people rightfully object to is authority figures who were generally C students sliding normative values into curriculum and packaging those ideas as clearly right or wrong.

I would have zero objections to an elective highschool class called Introduction to Critical Race Theory. Not every parent wants his or her kid to become an existentialist but my folks never objected to me being assigned Camus or Sartre. So long as the curriculum is about evaluating the student's comprehension of the material and their ability to properly form thoughts, there should be little to no objection outside of extreme circumstances.

No, it's when fifth graders are being assigned privilege charts in their math classes, which has happened, that we should get pissed. If authority figures are presenting information and letting kids work through it themselves, that's fine. When students are going to be punished by not complying with an ideologically driven assignment given to them by a government actor, that's fascism.