No, it says that critical race theory cannot be offered. That's specific and distinct from required.

It also depends on what is offered in its place.

We don't debate this enough, because it's invisible to most people.

Free speech in the broadest is exactly about curation, implied approval (proof by authority doesn't work philosophically, but absolutely does work rhetorically and politically), and access to airtime and audiences.

All of those can be bought with money.

To make an obvious point - if you can use money to impose your choices wrt curation etc, speech is no longer free.

This is a completely different meaning to "Talk about this and the government will imprison and/or murder you."

The latter hardly happens to anyone now. The former is absolutely foundational to the media.

There is no "marketplace of ideas" because those with money and political power can always enforce their narratives on those without - and they can do it cleanly, deniably, and effectively without needing to murder or jail dissenters.

They can even do it from behind various front organisations and curated movements, pretending to be scrappy freedom fighters railing against an oppressive mainstream.

Speech isn't free in any genuine sense while that remains true.

Ah, I see: that affects whether it's allowed to be taught in an elective class or not. Yes, to fully oppose censorship, we should allow critical race theory to be taught in optional elective social studies classes. But then we should also allow optional elective science classes to teach that evolution is wrong, because to do otherwise would be censoring the young-Earth creationists.

If you can find a way to teach that without violating the Establishment Clause, sure. The only way forward I can see here would look like a comparative history of religions course, which would teach various creation stories from a neutral viewpoint. And that doesn't seem to be what those campaigning for anti-evolution education have been looking for. Curious if you've got any fresh ideas, though.

Maybe that was a bad example. What if instead of something religious, there was a class teaching some kooky conspiracy theory as fact, like a physics elective saying that perpetual motion is possible, but that the patents to make it work well enough to overcome friction have all been bought up by Big Oil and suppressed?

It would need the support of textbook companies to print it, school boards to buy into it, teachers to deliver it, and students interested in taking it. There's a whole marketplace of ideas out there, and the course you're proposing simply wouldn't survive it.

Teaching intelligent design needn't violate the Establishment Clause. Nobody says schools can't mention religions and what they believe, just that they cannot require students to adopt one.

Using taxpayer money to promote religion has been held to be equivalent to an "establishment" of religion. This means that any schools funded by the tax man have to be strictly secular, even in their "elective" activities.

The language I used allows that possibility. But, in the specific legal challenges I'm aware of in this area, that's been the constitutional obstacle to teaching creation as fact.