I agree. Start by teaching them to ask questions about whether the schooling they’re receiving is truly worthwhile, or whether there might be a better way to deliver an education.
What you said that prompted my response:
(Emphasis added)
What?
I think almost everyone can agree that political correctness is overwhelmingly a liberal concern that is generally opposed by conservatives. There may be some conservative political correctness, but it’s overshadowed by the vast euphemism treadmill the left has constructed for a plethora of words. Political correctness is used to imply that all groups are equal, to urge better and equal treatment for marginalized groups, and other primarily liberal concerns.
I mean, if someone says the phrase “homosexual lifestyle” they’re almost certainly a right wing nutjob, and if someone mentions “a womyn of color”, they’re almost certainly a left winger.
Political correctness may not try to change facts, but it still attempts to influence students’ perception of our society in a political manner. I’m not sure that’s particularly different.
I admire an instructor that will not show only one side of the controversy. In fact, the instructor should first inform the students on the existence of the controversy, present the two (or more) sides, and let the students decide. The teacher can tell the students which side of the controversy s/he is on and why and in the end urge the students not to trust what s/he has said entirely and go verify everything for themselves with the help of the Internet or any other source of information. Some people may say it confuses little students but I know elementary pupils who enjoy questioning tenets and finding their own answers.
What I said was in reference to “falsifying the facts”.
Such as falsifying history. Another example here.
Such as trying to take the teaching of evolution out of textbooks.
Such as trying to downplay environmentalism and climate change.
It’s called lying. Totalitarian regimes did it routinely. It’s not acceptable, and there’s no excuse for it.
Political correctness is sensitivity to the feelings of others, especially the disadvantaged, that is usually beneficial; at worst, it’s sometimes annoying when it gets too extreme. Its objective is to promote fairness and emphasize the positive – hardly an ideological or self-serving objective – and I personally have no problem using a term like “challenged” in preference to “retard” or “cripple”. If you don’t think that’s “particularly different” from the examples of lying and intentional self-serving ideological mendacity that I cited above, then please look again.
From your first citation:
I disagree with you so regularly I expect we’re at odds whenever you type. Here, your snark is warranted I think.
Also to the rest, of course children think on their own, there is no alternative. Any parent really upset about indoctrination does plenty of it at home already.
ETA: @Bricker:
Yes, I saw that, but that’s not about public school curricula. And it also didn’t stop me from posting it because, aside from that, I’m not trying to make a one-sided case, claiming that the left never, ever has any interest in promoting a particular viewpoint. Of course to some degree both sides do, but what should be startling to any objective observer is the extent to which the right just shamelessly wants to manipulate the truth – and bring the manipulated, distorted result directly into the schools and into the minds of young children. Surely that’s reprehensible. This is abundantly clear in one area I’ve dealt with a lot – climate change, and obviously also on the subject of evolution.
Surely the problem is the underlying assumption that the teacher is there to promote some absolute factual truth, i.e., instruct rather than educate.
Obviously you can’t educate without also instructing, but the objective is to give the pupils the tools to arrive at a critical understanding of what they’ve been instructed in, even if that means (shock, horror!) disagreeing with the teacher - provided they can assemble appropriate evidence and argument. In which case, a teacher’s own biases can be acknowledged: provided, of course, they’re not ramming that down the pupils’ throats as the only option on offer.
The example here is dumb. A “bias and sensitivity” review is a specific thing FOR ASSESSMENTS that ensures the assessment is actually comparable across groups and assesses what they are trying to assess.
A passage about sailing, for example, may be perfectly fine for English class, but it’s a crappy choice for an assessment because most kids who aren’t on the coast won’t know many nautical terms and will get stuck on a piece of vocab-- which means you’ll end up actually testing “nautical vocabulary” rather than whatever it is the passage is trying to measure.
Likewise, it’s smart in an assessment to avoid passages about riding subways, managing hedge funds, performing Hajj, cooking with chayotes and other topics where kids are likely to get stuck at vocabulary or basic background knowledge rather than the English topic being assessed. These things are perfectly fine in the classroom, but in an assessment they will throw off the results.
The thought behind the peanut example is not “Oh no! This is offensive to kids with peanut allergies and we should never talk about peanuts!!!”
It’s "Kids with peanut allergies have been told their entire lives that peanuts are deadly poison, so using a passage about peanuts being a healthy snack might be confusing and make it difficult for this assessment to get valid results.
Would you rather we didn’t do this, and just give assessments knowing the results will likely have low validity and not be comparable across groups!
I certainly agree that if you want to limit the discussion to climate change and evolution, the right wing sins are manifest and the left is virtually blameless.
And the blindness?
Because then they might be skeptical about things they ought not to be. Suggest that a teacher should teach kids to be skeptical about anthropogenic global warming, or gay marriage, and see how far you get.
Regards,
Shodan
I don’t know. I wasn’t on the panel, and I’m not saying they are all saints.
But presenting this particular type of review as PC policing is an actual lie, and the author knows that perfectly well.
The “bias” being addressed is “bias” as its used in statistics,-- as in “an external factors that can leads to invalid results”, and reducing it is not about protecting precious feelings, but rather about making sure we don’t waste millions of dollars giving a reading test that doesn’t accurately measure reading and can’t be compared across groups for use in data-driven decision making. The alternative to this is not less PC, but rather Invalid data that is worthless to decision making.
Other things may be going on, I’m sure they are. But this narrative is a purposeful lie intended to spin a normal and basically necessary assessment practice as something else. She’s relying on your unfamiliarity with assessment creation to confuse you into being outraged. Please be smarter than this.
I can get worked up about subjects, too, but when on earth would you have TIME for this?
A course on American Government would have to cover such a broad range of facts that I cannot imagine why you’d have a lot of time to rant about a personal opinion. The United States government is almost two and a half centuries old and is based in part on systems of law and governance that date back to before people spoke recognizable English.
I admit I am baffled as to when teachers have all this time to dwell on political matters. My recollection of school is that we were extremely busy learning how to deal with facts and learning how to apply skills.
That’s fine, but what’s a controversy? You aren’t even going to get people to agree on what constitutes “controversial.”
Some things are obvious; the fact that the square root of 25 is 5 is not a matter of controversy. Some are obvious the other way; whether area bombing in the Second World War was justifiable or not is still a matter of debate among historians.
But let me ask you this; is the efficacy of vaccinations a controversy? There is in fact a raging debate going on, but one side is right and the other is wrong. Ignorance and dishonesty are not points of view. Many, however, will disagree with me and call me a “sheep” and a tool of Big Pharma, so do you teach that controversy?
It’s fine to say you should present controversy, but kids are in school maybe 1100 hours a year, tops. You just don’t have the time to go into every controversy, and not everything that is controversial has two sides deserving of a hearing.
I am reminded of P.J. O’Rourke’s tale of revisiting his alma mater and talking with the student newspaper staff, who were passionately debating amongst themselves whether to print a letter to the editor from a white supremacist jerk that was full of hate speech, with one side saying they had to print the letter to support the jerk’s right to express himself and the other saying it would violate their editorial principles. O’Rourke wrote, with obvious bewilderment, “It never occurred to them to just throw it away because it was a piece of shit.” Some opinions are just a piece of shit and should be thrown away… but it is itself controversial as to which ones they are.
Or gravity! Why aren’t we teaching them to be skeptical about gravity! Or vaccines, or evolution! Teach the controversy, man!
As for gay marriage, as I said earlier, I describe both sides to my kids, as best I can. I DO want them to think for themselves about gay marriage. I’m pretty confident about what reasonable people will conclude, in the same way that teachers in the 1970s undoubtedly taught kids about interracial marriage, and look how that turned out.
Along with other facets of critical thinking and how to evaluate claims (especially regarding consumer awareness, with emphasis on health) this should be mandatory starting at the elementary school level.
Reinforcing these skills in a stand-alone course would also be useful.
“Some people believe in evolution. Some don’t. We don’t have time to review the evidence for and against, so you just decide.”
“Back before the Age of Technology, a Frenchman with the Froggy name ‘Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier’ decided CO2 would heat the Earth. Half of Americans today think he was just another froggy crackpot. You decide.”
“A*(B + C) = AB + AC ? Sounds pretty fishy. You decide.”
Teaching critical thinking? Good idea. But in today’s real world to teach that every blog-post is a special God-sent snowflake would be a step backward.
I’ll throw out a real life example for people to react to.
My daughter’s third grade teacher (25 years old, first full time teaching job) started the year wearing a “War is expensive, peace is priceless” button every day. Naturally my daughter and a couple of other kids started asking her about it. Apparently she is an almost absolute pacifist.
In February their social studies unit was all about the civil rights movement. No real controversy there. Slavery, segregation, discrimination, disenfranchisement all bad, bad, bad. Nonviolent resistance good, police brutality bad.
Then came the unit on the Civil War. Nine year olds don’t forget anything. One of the kids asked her if war was absolutely bad, how was Lincoln supposed to free the slaves? At least my daughter couldn’t make head or tails of her answer. Now the teacher has a button with a picture of her dog on it. I guess she learned her lesson.
I imagine it’s an even more difficult balancing act in high school.
That some things are a little complex for third graders?
(ISTM there’s no problem there; the Civil war was astoundingly expensive. But I get that a young teacher might have struggled with the issue.)