When you make something forbidden, it makes people more interested. Critical race theory is garbage, but if you make it illicit, it will make it more appealing.
Go ahead and teach it (at an age-appropriate level), just teach the rebuttal as well.
The point of an education is not to indoctrinate, nor to shelter people from ideas, but to teach them how to evaluate things.
When people say critical race theory shouldn’t be taught in school, they mean that children shouldn’t be taught about social behavior and history from a framework of critical race theory, of course, not that all discussion of CRT should be suppressed.
Since American public schools generally don’t teach things like “here’s an idea about how the world works, let’s examine it” except maybe in 11th or 12th grade AP classes, the kind of teaching of CRT you suggest doesn’t have a comfortable place in the curriculum. But of course it’s a perfectly valid position that there should be more of that kind of teaching, in which case it would definitely be a good idea to include CRT among the topics examined.
There is certainly a distinction between “teaching critical race theory” and “using it as a framework,” and as you point out, the latter is the problem. It’s those unexamined, hidden assumptions that are the most problematic.
If you “teach Marxism,” you’ll explain what it says, and what people say about it. But if you use Marxism as the assumption behind your teaching, people won’t examine it — they’ll just assume it.
I am out of touch with what goes on in schools, but I remember as early as elementary school that topics and concepts would be raised, and we’d learn what people said on both sides. Not in any great detail, but at least we heard the pros and cons.
They don’t do that anymore?