So the last sentence of my post was accurate then. Thanks for clearing that up.
So basically: no, Marx is not anything that literature students study. They do not study the man or Das Kapital. They study a theory that incorporates some of the techniques that both Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx used in formulating their seminal works:
In fact, the whole field of “critiquing” seems to actually derive from Kant, not from Marx. This hardly makes a person a Marxist, and the article you linked to often uses the term “Marxian” to distinguish the techniques, not Marxist. Things Karl Marx did would be “Marxian”, ideas he attempted to promulgate would be “Marxist”.
So basically your first post was just your own opinions and biases, and your second post attempted to rationalize the first. Got it. Thanks for clearing that up.
“Subversive” books are part of school curricula for the same reason that we’ve seen William Burroughs in sneaker commercials. Because people who were ONCE young, self-styled rebels are now middle-aged teachers and advertising executives who still think they’re cool and edgy, and want to SHOW everyone how cool and edgy they are by promoting the stuff they liked when they were teens.
A former rebel who’s now a middle-aged high school English teacher wants desperately to think he’s cooler and hipper than his own high school English teachers were. "I’m not like MY boring old teachers who tried to make me read The Great Gatsby," he tells himself. “My kids love me, because I have them read Salinger and Vonnegut.” Of course, Salinger and Vonnegut are as ancient to current teens as F. Scott Fitzgerald was in the teacher’s adolescence, but he manages to overlook that.
A former rebel who’s now an advertising exec doesn’t want to admit he’s a sell-out working for “The Man.” So, he sticks Allen Ginsberg references in a toilet paper commercial or uses Velvet Underground songs as jingles, and imagines he’s not a mere corporate flunky.
Well, actually, that’s not what I said. I was personally assigned to read the Manifesto and parts of Das Kapital as remediation for lamentable holes in my previous education; everyone else in my classes had either already read them or wouldn’t admit to not having done so. It was just assumed we were already well-versed in Marx’s works. As for “studying the man,” it was assumed that studies of authors were irrelevant and outdated. Barthes was iconic.
That’s an interesting distinction that I’m sure is crucial in some contexts, but in the context of the OP, I don’t think it is.
Are you saying that to do critical theory is to “do a thing” and not to “promulgate an idea” (or engage with a promulgated idea)? Or are you just obliquely kvetching about revolutionism as a requisite aspect of Marxism? If the latter, I got news for ya…
My first and subsequent posts were intended to address the OP’s subjective question – “Do Schools Teach Subversive Literature to Subvert Its Message?” – with my own subjective opinions, which are informed by my own experiences, which, while not quantitative studies, are nonetheless applicable. This is, after all, GD and not GQ, and the OP did not ask “What Percentage of High-School Literature Teachers Are Revolutionary Marxists?”
You finally caught us. We English teachers of the English speacking world are in fact trying to overthrow the world establishment.
We do it by subtlly influencing the young minds of the world with books like 1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, Silas Mariner, Julius Caesar and the Scarlet Letter. When we have taken over the young minds, we will convince them to pay English teachers rediculously large salaries and we will all join Club Med and lie around the beach naked all day long. Then when the young people see us lying on the beach, they will immediately go blind.
You’ve discovered out plan.
(I am not actually an English teacher, but I am married to one.)
When I get out my tools to cut and join wood, I’m not engaging in Christian activity.
When I eat a bagel, I’m not furthering the Torah.
Using critical theory to evaluate something doesn’t necessarily imply any connection at all with the socio-political-economic ideas held by the person who first developed (or, as I’ve shown, further refined) the process.
When you use a lightbulb, are you inundated with the political thoughts of Edison?
Hee! This brings back a tangentially relevant memory: Seven friends and I decided, between our junior and senior years, in 1986, to try to talk our parents into letting us all rent a house together for a month (since we lived in a tiny town with a big university, landlords were eager to rent to anybody during the summer). We wrote up elaborate plans to convince the 'rents, outlining exactly how we would NOT get into any trouble, and would eat cheaply but nutritionally, go to sleep at a reasonable hour, not do drugs, refrain from sex, fail to burn the house down or electrocute ourselves, etc. We presented it as an exercise in practicing responsibility. We made provisions for group decisions and settling disputes without hierarchy, and we were a bunch of neo-hippies, so, of course, we started calling it “The Commune Project.” Most of us wanted to call the document containing our plans “The Communist Manifesto,” but the two of us with Republican parents vetoed this. Much to our surprise, all eight sets of parents decided to let us do it. We ended up calling our experiment “The Bosom Commune” and we stuck a great big red curlicue letter A on the front door for the duration – because we were all giant geeks and had spent spring semester in American Studies making fun of, among other things, The Scarlet Letter. If you’ve read it recently (and if you retain the sense of humor of a teenager) you might have noticed how frequently the word “bosom” appears in that book.
Our American Studies teachers (one English teacher, one history teacher) thought it was a great idea and encouraged us. See? Subversive!
Granted, it isn’t necessary, but if you listen to or read critical theorists theorizing, I think you’ll find that there is nonetheless a lot of Marxist influence there. Along the lines of yours, here’s an analogy I think is closer, though far from perfect: Calling oneself an evangelical Christian, and evaluating political ideas from a typical current American conservative Christian perspective, doesn’t necessarily imply any connection at all with the socio-political-economic ideas we understand to have been held by Christ. But in most contexts, calling such persons “Christians” makes sense anyway.
Your analogy is not applicable to the topic, unless you can present evidence that anyone practicing critical theory has called themselves a Marxist. I doubt you can do that for more than a small handful of people, if that many.
And in your analogy, yes, there is more than an implication that the ideas of Christ are connected, since the person has espoused a belief in those ideas. And calling them Christians makes sense because that’s what they call themselves and that’s what they are.
Unless you can present evidence that it is relevant to the OP whether anyone practicing critical theory has called themselves a Marxist, take it to a new thread.
You brought the subject up. I asked for clarification and cites, and you admitted that you couldn’t back up your assertions, that they were only your opinions, then you kept trying to justify and rationalize your assertions. Then you used a poor analogy to try and bolster your position.
Now you try and be dismissive because you got called on your biases and opinions.
The answer is “no”. The OP gives too much credit to the public education system. Schools and Board of Educations are run by dumb beaurocrats. Not “dumb” in the sense that they are any more stupid or less educated than the general population. Dumb in the sense that they do not come up with nuanced and intricate plans to further hidden agendas. If a book or a film or a T-shirt is deemed too “controvertial” or “subversive”, they simply ban it from the school premises. They don’t come up with bizarre conspiracies to trick the students into thinking it’s suddenly “uncool”.
In the twenty years that I taught high school, I have known one Communist. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was as subversive as she got.
Our textbooks are influenced by what meets with the approval of the State of Texas. I don’t live in Texas, but they order so many textbooks that publishers tone down their books to meet with the approval of Texas and perhaps California or another state. So the textbooks are not too rowdy or Texas won’t buy them.
By law teachers can’t require public school students to buy anything. So we depend on what we are given.
I fully confess to having put a leftist slant on the writings of Henry David Thoreau.
In our area our schools are overrun with Christian fundamentalists who have been known to walk all over students’ and colleagues’ rights. Maybe it has improved lately, but I doubt it.
Another thing not being brought up is that the vast majority of teens aren’t going to discover this “subversive” literature on their own anyway. So what would be the point in subverting the subversive stuff?
Teens that read go for the Twilight books or the Percy Jackson series or the latest teenagers having lots of sex books or some other bit of pulpy trash. And there’s nothing wrong with that, people don’t like to admit it, but literature has always revolved around pulpy trash.
Sure, there’s a handful of kids that would have discovered this stuff on their own. But these are also the kids that will still see the subversive message if it becomes required reading.
I hear this all the time, but how true is this? And the thing is, as you say, California also requires textbooks to meet its standards, and they are very different from Texas. So at the very least, other states can choose between the Texas and the California versions. I can assure you that California will not accept toned down versions.
I remember reading Animal Farm and 1984 in English Lit class in high school and the teacher explaining that they were examples of “Orwell’s hatred of Socialism and Communism,” something that didn’t make much sense to me, someone who had already read *Homage to Catalonia *and The Lion and the Unicorn (both books about Orwell’s commitment to Socialism). I’m not overly fond of how Orwell is presented as a stanch anti-Communist in American schools when he obviously was at least sympathetic to its stated goals.
With NCLB, do you really think that teachers are given a choice of what to teach? A teacher is given a list of standards to follow and there is no room or time for anything else. I highly doubt that any author covers enough of the standards to be used in most classrooms these days. I would guess that excerpts are used more than anything else. Excerpts that show imagery, irony, etc. Why read the entire book when an excerpt covers the standard and then you move on? Remember, these kids also had to deal with Whole Language! Poor guys probably now have the worst education in history.
The American Textbook Council is an independent research organization based in New York. A news report from them said that what California adopts today will be sold across the nation tomorrow.
The article describes a clash that went on between groups who claimed to represent the Hindu American mainstream and many other Hindu Americans and scholars who say that the first groups are linked to right wing nationalist Hindu movements in India.
New history textbooks were going to be adapted for the sixth grade in California. To its credit, California is trying to rid its textbooks of any cultural bias. They also want to be very careful about not rewriting real historic facts. The so called right-wing groups wanted some changes to be made so that Hindu children would not be humiliated by the darkness of the caste system and the mistreatment of women in Indian’s history.
The scholarly group objected to inaccurate portrayals of India’s history and fought the changes.
Coincidentally or not, the groups that wanted the changes were from Texas. Most changes were denied.
California was pleased that eleven publishers offered history and social studies textbooks and supplementary materials for sixth grade. Nine of these publishers were approved for use with sixth-grade classes in California.
Although the number of publishers is still limited, I am very pleased with what I have read about California’s attitude toward textbook integrity. Thanks for the provocative question that sent me scrambling to update my views on California. Ingnorance fought!
It is close to textbook adoption time again for the sixth grade. It will be interesting to see if this cobra sleeps.