- Update 11/25/09 - What this post spotlights has become a hot issue at the University of Minnesota. Read about it here.
- (Original post) - In perusing some reader comments on quite a different subject, a person recommended Sol Stern's Spring 2006 City Journal article, "The Ed Schools' Latest -and Worse- Humbug." It's a long article, aptly subtitled: "Teaching for “social justice” is a cruel hoax on disadvantaged kids." I gladly confess that I read every word of the essay. Through this and other materials, I am slowly becoming aware of what is taking place in educational departments in universities throughout the United States. It's actually quite shocking.
The article I am referencing begins with a discussion of Bill Ayer's influence on educational practice (note: this was written before Barack Obama became linked in the public mind with Ayers), and ends with words surveying the dismal wreckage wrought by "social justice" emphases in poor neighborhoods in the United States. I can't do justice to the article in this short space. If anyone wishes to regard me as some unreasonable hidebound conservative, okay, but you had better read the article first.
Below are a few excerpts towards the end of the article:
It cannot be repeated often enough: ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have bad consequences. The Freirian theories that carry over to social justice teaching are incapable of “liberating” the children of America’s so-called oppressed. As E. D. Hirsch has exhaustively shown, the scientific evidence about which classroom methods produce the best results for poor children point conclusively to the very methods that the critical pedagogy and social justice theorists denounce as oppressive and racist. By contrast, not one shred of hard evidence
suggests that the pedagogy behind teaching for social justice works to lift the academic achievement of poor and minority students.
Social justice teaching is a frivolous waste of precious school hours, grievously harmful to poor children, who start out with a disadvantage. School is the only place where they are likely to obtain the academic knowledge that could make up for the educational deprivation they suffer in their homes. The last thing they need is a wild-eyed experiment in education through social action.
So why do education professors who claim to care for the poor continue to agitate for instruction that holds back poor children? Either the professors are stupid (possible), or (more likely) they care more about their own anti-American, anticapitalist agendas than they do about the actual education of children. The literature of social justice education is obsessed with the allegedly “dark” side of American political, social, and economic life. Thus in a book about teaching for social justice, Arizona State University ed prof Carole Edelsky whines that she “thinks a lot about dark times—the Dark Ages, the Inquisition, the period of the Third Reich, the McCarthy years. Times when certain knowledge was banned and certain knowers were banished, persecuted, incarcerated, even killed.” In one essay alone Maxine Greene writes that “We live after all in dark times,” that this is a “peculiar and menacing time,” and that “These are dark and shadowed times.” A collection of essays edited by Bill Ayers and dedicated to Greene is called A Light in Dark Times: Maxine Greene and the Unfinished Conversation. In their ideologically induced paranoia about America, the radical education theorists, like most ideologues, cannot see what is right in front of their Aeyes—that America and democratic capitalism are actually doing very well, thank you, but that the children of the minority poor are getting a lousy education because of the education establishment, and that teaching for social justice provides no solutions.
Unfortunately, there is little chance that the hegemony of social justice teaching in the education schools can be challenged from within that hopelessly closed thought world. That being the case, elected officials will have to address the issue. After all, state legislatures are constitutionally empowered to regulate and oversee almost every aspect of K–12 education, including curriculum and the professional standards for teachers. At the very least, legislatures should be holding hearings to determine the extent to which the radical ideology of the education professors is leading to political indoctrination in public school classrooms and undermining the rights of all children to a solid academic and politics-free education.
They then ought to do something the critical pedagogy theorists accuse them of doing anyhow—reestablishing the hegemony of our open democratic society in the classroom. Bill Ayers has the academic freedom to say and write anything he wants about America and its schools. But academic freedom protects neither him nor the teachers he trains when they bring their leftist version of social justice into the schools. Legislators should ask their state education boards to write a new set of guidelines that discourage teaching for social justice and social justice schools and that forbid teachers from indoctrinating students with their own politics, whether left or right. This ought to be the teacher’s Hippocratic Oath: to do no harm.
-- After getting ready to put up this post, I came across Ed Morrissey's short post on what is going on at the University of Minnesota. Apparently at the University of Minnesota, the biggest priorities in elementary education aren’t illiteracy and scientific ignorance but “heteronormativity”, “hegemonic masculinity, and “internalized oppression”? A prospective teacher had better fall into line "or else.." As the quote in the article states, "Anyone familiar with the reeducation camps of China’s Cultural Revolution will recognize the modus operandi."