There is a persistent fiction in American public life that classrooms can be neutral spaces. That teachers can present facts without framing. That curricula can be assembled without choices that reflect values. This fantasy serves a purpose: it allows the powerful to pretend that the status quo is simply the natural order of things.
Every textbook is an argument. Every reading list is a statement of priority. The question has never been whether politics enters the classroom. The question is whose politics get to pretend they are not politics at all.
When a school board removes a book, that is a political act. When a school board keeps a book, that is also a political act. The difference is that one is visible and the other is invisible. The invisible acts are the ones that shape generations.
The current wave of curricular restrictions sweeping state legislatures is not an aberration. It is the logical conclusion of a system that has always treated certain perspectives as default and others as controversial. What has changed is not the politics of education but the willingness of some to be explicit about it.
Students deserve honesty about this. They deserve to understand that every source has a perspective, every omission is a choice, and the most dangerous form of bias is the one that presents itself as objectivity.