Students in New York might notice something different as they head back to school this fall. They’ll soon be introduced to a new curriculum, known as “Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education.”

This vague title sounds innocuous enough, but serves to conceal a sinister left-wing attempt to remove the ability of young men and women to exercise courage, undermining their capacity to become engaged citizens and good human beings.

Sound dramatic? Let me offer some helpful historical context.

In 1943, celebrated British author C. S. Lewis gave lectures on education at the University of Durham. Lewis described a troubling trend he had observed: Modern education was quietly embracing the assumption that human reason cannot discern a transcendent standard to distinguish right from wrong. For Lewis, this was a dead-end approach, as students would come to understand themselves only as a random assortment of passions and be incapable of judging anything except as subjectively pleasant or offensive.

Rather, Lewis noted the organ of man’s spiritedness — what he called “chest” — could only be rightly animated by what one believes is objectively good. Man would only perform acts of great courage for the sake of something for which he believed worth dying, something of value beyond his own private estimation. Without “chests,” we are not human beings, but merely “trousered ape[s].”

Of course, though we remove all concept of objective good, we still expect these “men without chests” to exhibit virtue. “We laugh at honour,” Lewis wrote, “and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” The human heart rejects such an impoverished anthropology. It cries out for something to live and die for.

Unfortunately, this chest-less mode of education didn’t disappear with Lewis’s generation — it has re-emerged in our nation’s graduate programs, our college campuses and now, thanks to CRS education, in New York public schools. The CRS education framework claims that culture is “the multiple components of one’s identity, including but not limited to: race, economic background, gender, language, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, and ability. Culture far transcends practices … to also include ways of thinking, values, and forms of expression.”

In other words, one’s environment produces one’s framework of thinking. On the one hand, this description is patently true: early influences in life inevitably shape opinions we hold as adults. On the other hand, ever since Socrates, the goal of education has been to escape the cave of subjective experience and glimpse the light of objective truth and goodness. The very word “education,” in fact, means “to lead out.”

The founders built our nation on a claim of objective truth: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Ever since, we’ve striven — albeit imperfectly — to conform our culture to that unchanging standard. Though we Americans differ greatly, our culture unites around this faith in the equality of natural rights.

CRS education is a declaration of apostasy, a denial of our capacity to exit the cave and see one another in the light of objective truth. Further, it contends that American culture has never been animated by objectively good and true principles, but rather by racial supremacy and eurocentric cultural domination.

Here’s an example of what CRS education means practically: In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, New York high-school teacher Ife Damon explained that “she would be comfortable if students left high school without exposure to Shakespeare” because specific content does not matter, only the skill of critical-thinking does.

“Is it that we want students to analyze information,” she said, “or is it that we want them to know a particular piece of writing?”

What is critical-thinking, however, without an objective standard of good and bad? It’s incoherent, and the authors of the CRS curriculum know this. So they do introduce a critical standard: “a critical lens (racial, gender, sexual identity, linguistic, religious, ability, socioeconomic, or other salient cultural identities) when developing resources and intervention frameworks to de-center dominant ideologies and pedagogies that ignore or marginalize diverse students.”

Thus, in effect, politically progressive “critical theory” will become the new standard that New York schools teach. The new standard or dominant culture will simply be one that is opposed to what Abraham Lincoln described as “ ‘the central idea’ in our political public opinion ,” that is, “the equality of men” as individuals, not as members of identity groups.

Instead of encouraging students to pursue what is higher, nobler and bigger than themselves, CRS education pushes them back in the narrowness of their own frameworks. It’s an approach that, at best, will increase egotism and myopia of youth, and at worst, will fuel mindless political activism that disrupts more than it delivers and terrorizes more than it transforms.

Clifford Humphrey is a Ph.D. candidate in the Van Andel Graduate School of Statesmanship at Hillsdale College. Follow him on Twitter @Cphumphrey.