From White Hot Harlots, a Tumblr account of all things that I was put onto by a thread of other people I read, comes a bleak assessment of the current state and future of education in these here United States.
This, my friends, bodes very poorly for the future of education, regardless of whatever happens in the coming months. A movement that cannot articulate its own worth is not one that is long for this world. Teachers themselves are the only force that can resit the slow press toward the eventual elimination of public education, and they have embraced a worldview and comportment style that renders them absolutely unable to mount any worthwhile resistance.
Part of what he talks about is the adoption of critical race theory (CRT) in the classroom. Some of the downsides of this approach are obvious to everyone except those who have power. CRT popularizer Ibram X. Kendi has said that discrimination that produces equity is antiracist. Well, I can't read his mind to tell you exactly what he has on it, but soldiers tend to take the general's orders at face value, which in the case of some ideologically minded teachers could justify all sorts of abuse.
Then there's the question of whether CRT-based teaching really helps the kids it's supposed to. If it's even meant to do that, which, you have to wonder. One theory making the rounds now is that emphasizing the right answer in math class is whiteness in action. So the solution is to make math in schools fuzzier and more subjective? If that's the path schools take it's pretty easy to see what happens next. A few years down the road, jobs that require mathematical skill go to people who had tutors when they were school-age. No public schoolers need apply!
The idea of "social justice all day" in schools has been deeply endorsed by Randi Weingarten, current president of the American Federation of Teachers. She's also been instrumental in scaring schools off from in-person learning for the last year-plus. If your goal is to defund public education, you really have no better friend.
2 comments:
From what I've read I understood crt to have been a subject discussed in university level academics - namely in legal scholarship or civil rights programs. As such these topics weren't meant to be taught as rote material to younger students.
It was shocking to hear about grade school and high school students being force fed the kind of theories being promoted by Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and Nikole Hannah-Jones among others. George Orwell's 'Animal Farm' came to mind - the part that noted the comrades were used to seeing the slogan, “All animals are equal” in large white letters on the side of the barn. The came the day when they noticed something had been added, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Joseph Goebbel's said, "It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.” That's as scary a statement now as it turned out to be then.
Still, as far as teaching fuzzy math is concerned there are a couple of bits of good news:
The California Board of Education is set to push back against implementing an overhaul of its mathematics curriculum after opponents argued the plan needlessly inserts politics and social justice initiatives into lessons.
The other one is that the Ontario provincial government had announced a similar plan and that one has also been cancelled after people flipped out. (I won't make you look at Doug Ford.)
What's very worrisome is just how we seem to be implementing Mike Judge's Idiocracy without much pushback. I can't resist an example. The court appearance is good too.
Must keep fingers crossed.
CRT was supposed to be an approach to legal studies. It appears to have mutated quite a bit from its origins. I hesitate to use the word "variants" but the metaphor is in the air.
Ultimately I think class is more of a divider than race. Americans like to think this is a classless society. At one time it may have been, at least to a greater extent than now. Everyone can see race, or at least the physical characteristics that are supposed to make up race. So that's what gets used as a divider. The fact that children are subjected to this is a sign of just how little regard our superiors have for us.
Goebbels's definition of propaganda accounts for why so many times in history intelligence has been targeted for destruction.
It's good that there was some pushback in California, where they seemed to have plotted the best way to not teach math to young people. And Doug Ford, like his late brother, manages the feat of being appalling when viewed from either the left or the right.
That Idiocracy scene did make me giggle. "There's that fag talk we talked about."
One has to be positive.
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