The War on Guilt

A one-room school in Alabama, 1935. (Wiki photo)

I don’t want to talk about nutty school boards run amok, though it makes for good social-media outrage. But I do want to talk about guilt.

In short, why in the world would anyone feel guilt, of all things, learning about anything? American history? Michelangelo’s David? Really, walk me through it. 

Guilt is central to the reasons given by the 35 states that have introduced bills limiting what schools can teach about race, economics, history, politics, sex, and gender. 

It is argued that lessons on these topics need to be curtailed because they can produce discomfort, and especially guilt. Maybe I’m hard-hearted. I’m white. I don’t have a penis—Davidesque or otherwise. And yet learning about civil disobedience and Renaissance sculpture doesn’t come close to kindling guilt in me, where guilt is what I feel when I take too big a helping of communal pasta or studiously ignore an unhoused person because I don’t have cash. 

I don’t think I felt guilty in high school even when I was instructed to feel it about, say, underage drinking. Am I empty inside?

In Florida it’s guilt-in-classrooms that Governor DeSantis explicitly seeks to preempt with his Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act, which he signed into state law last April. The Stop WOKE Act exists to penalize anyone who teaches topics that cause students or anyone else to “feel guilt, anguish or any form of psychological distress” about their identities. 

In South Carolina, a proposed law prohibits teachers from discussing any subject that creates "discomfort, guilt or anguish" about their students’ political beliefs. 

In Oklahoma, Gov. Stitt, who is otherwise signing into law a wholesome bill that names the American Quarter Horse the state horse (potentially guilt-tripping Appaloosas?), signed into law a bill limiting the teaching of civil rights and other subjects on the grounds that an Oklahoman student shouldn't feel "discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex." 

OK, I got it. Guilt is in the crosshairs. But is guilt while learning really a big problem—even if it’s one I don’t feel? Is it such a problem that the First Amendment must be trespassed—and the ACLU confronted—to subdue it?