Idaho Republican lawmakers, Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin and the Idaho Freedom Foundation have it backwards.

They insist on stamping out critical race theory in Idaho’s public schools and institutions of higher learning.

They have passed laws to discourage teaching about the role of race and racism in American life. They’ve formed task forces to root out indoctrination in the schools. They’ve blocked federal funding of early childhood education on the same basis.

But Idaho doesn’t have too much critical race theory.

It has too little. Its textbooks are bland and in a conservative state, it pays to play it safe.

Before you fall for the line that critical race theory warps reality, consider how Rep. Chris Mathias, D-Boise, defines it. Before he was essentially shut down by GOP objections in an early May floor debate, Idaho’s lone Black legislator put it this way:

“Critical race theory and critical race theorists do believe this single thing: that America’s social institutions, our legislatures, our courts, our schools, you name it, they do have, to varying extents, they are embedded, to varying extents, with some bias toward people of color. ... When you look at outcomes, virtually every law and policy that we maintain has a disparate and adverse impact on people of color. Housing, health, education, wealth, income. People of color always come out on the losing end. Always, and I don’t think it’s unfair to acknowledge it.”

In other words, critical race theory involves learning about things we don’t hear about — such as the 100-year-old race massacre at Tulsa, Okla., or the brutal murder of Emmett Till in 1955 — and answering obvious questions Idaho students have about the country where they live:

l What was the nature of slavery in the United States and the Civil War that abolished it? What is the legacy that remains, from Jim Crow and segregation to the Civil Rights movement? And what are we learning in the year since the murder of George Floyd and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter awakening?

l What are these reservations that dot Idaho and the American West? What was the displacement of indigenous people that led to the creation of those reservations? What promises were made? What promises were — and continue to be — broken?

l What were these internment camps at Minidoka near Twin Falls and the Kooskia Internment Camp near Lowell? During World War II, 120,000 citizens of Japanese ancestry were confined in these camps throughout the West. Why were Japanese — and not Americans of German and Italian ancestry — removed from their homes and imprisoned?

l What’s behind this “illegal” movement of people living south of the U.S. border to communities with names such as San Diego, San Antonio and Los Angeles?

l How does a country that prides itself on freedom of expression explain its assault on individual thought during the red scares of the 1920s and the 1940s and ’50s?

Nobody says this is not a great country. But it is a tapestry of many threads, both dark and bright.

It is a country built on the creed that all people are created equal, one that has steadily expanded the circle of freedom — sometimes at great cost and after committing many grave mistakes.

Whose interests does it serve to tell only the heroic side of that story while downplaying or even ignoring the unsettling features?

Certainly not the young person raised on a Hollywood-version of history, only to become disillusioned when confronted with the bigger picture.

If you don’t understand America’s flaws, you can’t appreciate its inexorable drive toward that “more perfect union.”

Try running a vast, pluralistic, continental democracy if people can’t share a common, accurate and evolving narrative of where they’ve been and who they are becoming.

You can’t learn to think for yourself unless you’re challenged by different points of view, different life experiences and, yes, uncomfortable truths. The student who remains embedded within the comfort of his own information silo is not far from becoming the unwitting victim of the next unscrupulous manipulator to come along.

Current political trends in Idaho and elsewhere wish to discourage students from embarking on that journey. Here’s betting the kids are better than their politicians. — M.T.