If you dig into the author of that hatchet job on the Edina Schools, it’s written by a rather ultra-conservative woman named Katherine Kersten. She also is against gay marriage. She was a founding member of The Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minnesota. She writes opinion pieces, not news articles. She cherry picked statistics for the article which originally was written for and appeared as an article for the Center for American Experiment.
From a 2010 Minnesota writer.
I could quote many more opinions of her deficiencies, but conservatives wouldn’t care. They just continue to drink the Cool Aid.
You mean the OP in which the teacher says that she intends to teach students how to apply “marxist, feminist, post-colonial, psychoanalytic, reader response, and aesthetic lenses to literature”? Or is there another quote I missed in which a teacher wants students to be marxist?
Because I stand right beside you against any public school teachers who want to teach kids to be marxists. That sounds really bad.
Teaching various perspectives on how to analyze literature seems just fine to me, though. Learning different perspectives is essential to critical thinking, even when those perspectives are as radical as “psychoanalytic, reader response, and aesthetic”.
Am I taking crazy pills? Shodan you are arguing against a definition of Marxist literary criticism that is simply wrong. This isn’t a matter of opinion or debate. Your definition of the phrase is incorrect. It’s certainly valid to have issues with Marxist criticism - a lot of the attempts I’ve seen at it seem like serious reaching - but not to redefine it to make it easier to argue against.
Well, no. There is no established “Trump-supporting” school of literary criticism (yet) so it would be nonsensical for any teacher to include such an approach. But more importantly, there is absolutely no indication that the teacher is trying to indoctrinate students into any sort of ideology. It is entirely possible (indeed, essential to any decent education) to understand and apply a variety of perspectives to literary and historical texts. These interpretations may contradict each other. Or they may complement each other. But the approaches listed in this syllabus are entirely valid ways to view literature. I don’t see anything even remotely controversial about that.
First, Marxist and feminism (not rad-fem–that’s just some misleading snark you engaged in, altering the description for reasons you doubtless consider ethical and honorable) aren’t the same thing. But sure, they’ve got some similarities, and to someone who doesn’t know much about them, they’re the same, like house music and industrial music are the same, or baseball and cricket are the same.
But your claim is that it was a single perspective. Let’s be clear: are you seriously, no-bullshit claiming that the psychoanalytic lens is the same as the Marxist lens? that the fucking aesthetic lens is a Marxist perspective?
Because you might think that baseball and cricket are the same, not knowing much about sports; but this is like claiming that baseball and waltzing are the same.
Sometimes, Shodan, you need to take a deep breath, reread what you wrote, and sheepishly admit you fucked up.
I have almost drowned in the waters off South Padre Island, assumed dead by my compatriots, until I washed up miles down the beach.
I have survived in the belly of a submarine, merged, metal-to-metal, to a 50,000 ton Turkish freighter, after a collision in the Persian Gulf.
I have been accosted in the middle of the night on the streets of Copan, Honduras, by three youths armed with beer bottles and stones, and successfully fought them off, alone and unarmed.
I have faced off alone before dawn against a pair of charging, growling rottweilers, and sent them fleeing, by the power of my voice alone.
If that’s your point, it’s completely undercut by the lack of SDMB threads complaining about JROTC courses across our country, many if not most of which are taught from a highly conservative perspective. [edit: and I’m certain that many of them explicitly praise Trump–but it’s true that they probably don’t say they’re going to teach from “a conservative, Trump-supporting POV,” because they instead just teach that POV as though it’s the only rational one. So take that victory if you need it.]
This whining about libruls in education is a not-so-subtle avenue of attack on public education. It’s transparently foolish, but since its service isn’t so much to reduce liberal propaganda as it is to undermine a key government function, the transparency isn’t such a problem.
Indeed, as would any of the romantics, as would Karl Marx himself. It’s such a ridiculous idea–“This restaurant that serves pizza and sushi and quinoa and corn dogs only serves one thing”–that I’m having trouble believing someone could say it seriously, unless they’d never heard of any of those foods before.
Wealthy, conservative suburb attempts to improve the effect of socioeconomic status on achievement while still preparing the vast majority of their students for elite universities and offering top tier athletic and other extracurricular activities.
The usual suspects claim this to be a bad thing, because one teacher used a word like “Marxist” in a syllabus, and cry that conservative voices are silenced because they’re conservative. No, those conservative voices are ridiculed because they’re fucking morons, and the morons are the intelligent half of the mating partnership. The people objecting aren’t even affected by the decisions, which have overwhelming support by the residents of the area.
And Katherine Kersten is a hack that deserves nothing less than Breitbart-level derision.
Or - and I know this is a bit of a stretch, but just hear me out - they’re upset that they’re being attacked in a dishonest manner by someone who exaggerates and misrepresents their work in order to turn people against them. Seriously, this is like wondering why trump voters get so irritated when they read articles calling them nazis and racists - “Gosh, it must be because they don’t want to be found out!” No, it’s because being slandered and libeled sucks, and most people do not react kindly to it! This is absurdly uncharitable.
Y’know what I noticed about this story? The professor said something that was out of line, everyone agrees it was out of line, and there was immediate and justified backlash.
Oh, and for someone who is allegedly an “SJW”, this guy sure is racist:
While presenting his opinion on the quality of the military, Salcido also invoked what appeared to be stereotypes in reference to people in the Middle East and Asia.
“We haven’t been able to beat these guys wearing freaking robes and chanclas [flip-flops] for 15 years,” he said. “We couldn’t beat the Vietnamese – they’re a bunch of people this freaking big throwing rice at us.”
I focused on preparing my students for the workplace. If an issue in science also affected social issues we would address those or if some of my students came to me with concerns I would address those.
Some examples I can think of were recycling, renewable resources, alternatives to fossil fuels, and pollution. On social issues since I was a white teacher in a mostly black school they felt comfortable asking me questions. For example they once asked me if I would vote for Jesse Jackson for president and I said no, then explained that I would change my answer to yes if he first was elected to another position like say congress and showed his ability in that position.
How can you say this is NOT indoctrination? How can you teach students to look at a piece of literature and analyze it thru the lens of Marxism and feminism if you dont first embrace the values?
Compassion is an adaptively evolved trait shared by almost all mammals.
As Feminism is primary about equal rights, are you asking that public schools should teach that men and women are not equal? I doubt that is your intended message but that is what this argument translates to.
Maybe one teacher pushing marxism and feminism would be something to brush off but if you look at what else is going on, like the above mentioned “training” new staff must go thru, I really see something there.
Yeah, maybe the writer is a conservative but so what? Ever heard the phrase “even a broken clock is correct twice a day”. So that doesnt mean she hasnt uncovered something here.
Easily. You do not need to be a Marxist to examine the conflicts in a work of literature as being class driven. You do not need to be a Feminist to view the conflicts as being driven by gender roles.
Compared to the Eugenicist, nationalist indoctrination of post Red-Scare America?
Why are your preferred ideas more equal for indoctrination? Note I am not calling you either of the previous terms, but that is the lens of the text books I was provided.
I have no problem with equal rights. I have always done my best to treat everyone the same and teach my sons the same.
But when they push that the evil white man is to blame for everything thats wrong, yes I have a problem with that. It’s an insult not just to me, but to my sons, my father, and my grandfather.
