Ditto that!
All existing cultures-even “progressive” ones are epistemically closed to a certain extent. Talk to a random group of people in say Amherst about the virtues of the Trump candidacy and the results should be obvious. And the goal of social change ought to IMO be about evolving from the existing cultural framework not breaking it down-hence the success of the supporters of homosexual marriage. Simply destroying for the sake of destroying as certain cultural radicals are perceived as only bring about social chaos and reactionary backlash, with the radical shift to capitalism in post-Soviet Russia being the most extreme example. As for postmodernism how much have men like Marcuse or Foucault or the Cyborg Manifesto have done to improve the lot of oppressed groups?
As for school busing (alluded to by the mention of Louisa Day Hicks), it’s clear in retrospect that it was a disastrous policy of forced social engineering that only served to increase white flight from urban areas and especially from urban public school districts while fostering the rise of backlash, reactionary populism.
While most of the opposition to Common Core is of the Bircherite variety, there appears to be a significant progressive opposition to CC from many teacher’s unions. Since I graduated high school right before the advent of Common Core, I can’t comment too much on the matter.
. . . would not be an instance of epistemic closure, which does not mean what you seem to think it does. :rolleyes:
But only perceived so by closed-minded idiots.
What’s postmodernism got to do with this? The backlash is against simple modernism.
E.g., James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me is in no way “postmodern.”
And when I brought “epistemology” into it I was referring to science and critical thinking, not postmodern deconstructionism or whatever. It’s the science and critical thinking that is so hard for cultural conservatives to swallow. The kind of postmodernism that questions the truth-value even of science is relevant only to academics and means nothing at all to politics or culture.
The is the concept of conservatism of my childhood. As sympathetic I am to it now, I must admit that it had not worked out well for people of color in Mississippi in the hundred or so years since the Civil War.
Sometimes dismantling an existing cultural framework is necessary.