I agree with your whole post, but I’m just going to use this as a springboard so I have an excuse to further talk about ideas I’ve expressed on the SDMB before.
Literary criticism’s original sin is giving the game away: By teaching that every reading is an act of interpretation, and, therefore, all texts are open to interpretation, they kneecap Biblical literalism like a loan shark working over a crippled drunk. Once people have internalized the idea that no text is above close reading, all of the arguments against marriage equality, for example, evaporate like dry ice in a Phoenix July: Those arguments are unsupportable unless you already buy into a very specific dogma, and, once questioned, never have moral suasion ever again. They become alien, incomprehensible, once their dogmatic underpinning is kicked from under them.
It’s simple logic: The schools are teaching critical reading. They aren’t teaching that the Bible is above criticism. Therefore, they’re at risk of destroying that entire fucking way of life.
I’ve long thought it would be even better to teach kids law and legal reasoning, both to enable them to make and analyze arguments regardless of whether they believe in them and to enable them to close-read things like EULAs and fine print and holy texts and political arguments… Plus, of course, you can’t attack a law class on the grounds of it being “useless” because, well, you can ignore the law, but the law isn’t going to ignore you.
Just to add a few more things, without worrying about the edit window timing out:
The Right whines about how the Left has a “Narrative” and tries to spin that as a bad thing. Any good history course teaches that the entirety of history is narratives, that it’s impossible to understand history (or the present) without narratives, and that the best you can do is close-read the narratives to figure out what their problems are. Apply that logic to the Narratives the Right uses about, say, the Civil War, and you come away with the sneaking sensation that the victors don’t always write history.
Similarly, the Right whines about how everyone except them has an “Agenda” and tries to spin that as a bad thing. Well, here I can see where they’re coming from: An agenda is a coherent plan, a list of things to accomplish in a reasonable fashion. No wonder the Right hates this concept like poison.
UR, didn’t you post that you were once a teacher? Did you only teach issues that may appear on a job application, or were devoid of social justice aspects?
And in Colorado, in Boulder of all places, a woman teacher allegedly assaults a student for not standing for the pledge of allegiance. Even though school district rules specifically state that they can stand or sit for it.
Justice Jackson, who wrote for the majority, had an interesting quote in his decision:
Teaching about close reading and close examination of history and society only kills patriotism if that patriotism is a mean, exclusionary thing, driven more by hatred of the outside than love of the inside. A better form of patriotism understands and acknowledges true faults, celebrates victories, and works to improve the nation to remedy faults and create new victories. Being suspicious of that form of patriotism is hardly the mark of a true American.
You do realize you just attacked the basic concept of literary criticism, right? As in, the thing they taught you in literature classes? I’d expect to read this on some anti-intellectual Reddit rant, not on a board about fighting ignorance.
Analyzing literature, and doing so through various different perspectives, is just how people study literature. It’s far better than only taking in your own biases and not being able to see any other point of view than your own.
And, as one of the best districts in the state, parents expect the schools to prepare their children for challenging colleges. Do you know what you do when you analyze literature in a challenging English course - you apply marxist, feminist, post-colonial, psychoanalytic, reader response, and aesthetic lenses to literature. In other words, they are giving the students a one up on how to write an essay that will pass muster when their kids go to Macalaster or Carleton.
Edina is a public school system. As was said before, its been considered one of the best in the state for - well it was one of the best in the state when I went to school 30 years ago, and I doubt its been lower than #5 in all that time.
Its a district a friend of mine teaches in - and I heard about the Kersten piece when it went out.
But Minnesota has open enrollment - you can send your kid to any school (provided they have room and they serve their own boundries first), and there is plenty of room in the Minneapolis school system - where less than 80% of the students graduate due to issues with poverty and race.
Overall Minnesota schools are pretty good - U.S. News and World Reports ranks us at #11. It tops the list of states with the highest ACT scores when ACT scores are required (that was a requirement for a few years before we cut funding, during which our overall state ranking fell - where you only test college bound students with the ACT or SAT, scores tend to be higher). We’ve never required the SAT, we top or are near the top of that list. So being in one of the top five districts in Minnesota is pretty meaningful.
BUT Minnesota has a huge racial equity gap - especially the black white gap. There are a ton of reasons for it, but it comes through in our education gap as well as income gaps. We also have changing demographics that mean our majority white population has to make some adjustments - we have one of the highest populations of Somali immigrants, we have one of the highest populations of Hmong immigrants (and now second and even third generation Hmong). When I went to high school, I was a minority because I’m Eastern European with olivish skin and dark eyes and hair - instead of the Scandanavian blue eyed blondes that were predominate. That means that white people born and raised here who end up teaching often have unacknowledged bias that should be addressed to make sure the gap is closed.
Edina school district is also facing challenges unrelated to race. Its tax base is aging, and old people without kids don’t want to fund schools the way young people with kids want to fund them. We’ve lost a lot of our non-local funding of schools - the state and federal governments are paying less. There is an element of scapegoating happening here to hide what is really happening, which is too many demands on a system that has lost funding. If we can point to “those black kids” as being the reason that our schools aren’t performing as well as they were ten years ago, we might be able to ignore that what has really happened is that we’ve been cutting taxes and deprioritizing school funding (but we have two brand new stadiums and are building our third - enjoy US Bank Stadium for the Superbowl today folks, I look at it and see us not fixing crumbling schools).
I suspect I know a great deal more about literary criticism than you do, so no.
But that is not what the teacher I quoted is doing. She wants only one perspective - the Marxist, rad-fem left-wing “white supremacy underlies everything” perspective. Since most literature is usefully studied from a variety of perspectives, including an effort to figure out what the author intended, this is not good literary criticism. It’s political indoctrination.
These goals are laudable (if a bit ambitious for a high school class). I suppose some people react to words like Marxist, feminist, or post-colonial with shock and horror but they need not. The various approaches all fall within well-established schools of literary criticism. Teaching students to apply these theoretical frameworks to literature doesn’t imply indoctrination or whatever people fear. Rather, it equips students with tools and techniques to interpret literature from a variety of perspectives.
The syllabus includes such writers as Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, as well as Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, August Wilson, Jon Krakauer, and others. It looks like an excellent syllabus.
Do you think that repeating this claim will make it any more true? She lists six distinct perspectives she’ll teach students to analyze literature from, including two that are about as diametrically opposite as you can get (the Marxist and the aesthetic). Claiming that she’s wanting a single perspective demonstrates at best a profound ignorance of what you’d learn in an introductory lit crit course.
They can acquiesce to the indoctrination, I suppose.
Actually, yes it does. Which is my point - a teacher who said she was going to teach from a conservative, Trump-supporting POV would not get the same reaction, because then the political indoctrination would become apparent and the SDMB would react with horror. Keeping politics out of the classroom cuts both ways, or at least it should.
This approach is also stupid. Teaching lily-white Edina students to be Marxists isn’t going to close the black-white gap in Minnesota test scores. But it appears the teachers have pretty much given up on that, and have decided to pursue political indoctrination instead.
I stand proudly with you against these non-existent fantasy people who want to teach students to be Marxists. You slay these straw people and I’ll be right with you! Slay them hard!
Marxist and rad-fem and so aren’t distinct perspectives. The teacher is going to employ a range of perspectives ranging from far-left to extreme far-left.
So the claim is true, and the ignorance is yours. Edina thought it would sail thru and no one would object. Turns out it doesn’t work that way. When parents who care more about education than liberalism find out, there’s trouble.
The Edina teachers seem to have over-stepped. “How could anyone possibly object to turning out a classful of far-left agitators?” Those with a desire for education, that’s who.
