A few links on a loosely-connected theme

[conuly]

1. The US government is inviting comments on civics education. A quick glance at the negative comments should suggest what sort of response is necessary.

2. We Found the Textbooks of Senators Who Oppose The 1619 Project and Suddenly Everything Makes Sense.

3. Homeroom: I’m Concerned About Wokeness at My Child’s School

I've actually seen a few articles of this sort lately. Most of them are in the third-person, enlivened with quotes, but this one's first person. I barely even glanced at the columnist's response because I didn't care.

I don't know if these people just don't know how to write, which doesn't speak well of their own educations with "the classics", or if they're deliberately mendacious, but they all bring up that "books have been removed from the booklist" without once mentioning what those books were replaced with. It's almost like if we knew, we might have a different opinion about the removal of To Kill a Mockingbird or Huck Finn (neither of which is really suited for mandatory reading in a 5th grade class, but I digress) if we knew that they were replaced with equally "classic" books.

I'm reminded of an article I read at least a decade ago now. I posted about it at the time. It was about some high school English teachers who had looked around, realized that their students were not capable of going through the curriculum, and did a lot more independent reading on their students' levels, tailored to the kids' interests. Which is a lot harder to do than having everybody to all the same reading and all the same writing and all the same quizzes, pass or fail.

And one of the students was mentioned as having started with like Twilight and had now moved on to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

And in the comments somebody pointed at that specific student who started with Twilight, and with apparently no sense of irony whatsoever asked how we expect kids to understand the realities of the Jim Crow South if they're not all dragged through To Kill a Mockingbird in lockstep.

...yeah.

Anyway, back to the letter, quite aside from being weirdly vague about the booklist, they also give blah blah "taught to feel bad for being white" nonsense, so I'm voting that they're actually lying.

Comments

[mme_n_b]

Huck Finn? In fifth grade? Sounds like evil machinations of the APA lobby.

[conuly]

Huck Finn at least has some broad appeal to a child of that age. Mockingbird, whatever you might say about it, truly doesn't.

[kengr]

We didn't get hit with mockingbird until high school. We also got to see the movie (a lot) because the school's AV department had taped it, and teacher used it as "filler.

They also used "Brian's Song" which we were all thoroughly sick of by the dozenth time we'd seen it.

Oh yeah, as a sophmore our English/Social Studies teachere's told us that they'd wanted to put Clavell's "King Rat" on the reading list but the school board wouldn't let them.

Funny how much demand for that book theire was at the local libraries :-)

[mme_n_b]

True, but Mockingbird isn't likely to scar a kid for life, it'll just bore them. Finn vs. Mockingbird is like heroin vs cardboard. Neither one is good for a kid, precisely, but.

[oursin]

I'm just guessing here from across the pond, but it would not at all surprise me to hear that back in the day, parents were absolutely horrified that their little darlings were being exposed to To Kill A Mockingbird, which has now been sanitised by time and social change into 'classic'.

[sabotabby]

The one thing that makes me excited to teach English next year (most things fill me with dread about this) is exposing my students to new, exciting books rather than the bullshit I had to read in high school. Welcome to Grade 11 English where the number of "classic" books written by white dudes is fuckin' zero.

[conuly]

Huzzah!

Relatedly: I am so sick of the Literary Trifecta of Dystopians being Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, and 1984. I am 100% certain those books would've been less gross if written by women.

[sabotabby]

I'm going to encourage the dystopian-minded kids to read Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline, Love After the End (a collection of queer and 2S Indigenous post-apocalyptic sci-fi), or Moon of the Crusted Snow by Wab Rice.

[hudebnik]

On the "We Found the Textbooks" article... I think Mitch McConnell attended the same high school as my father, overlapping by two years.

[conuly]

What a missed opportunity to punch that asshole in the face. Mitch, I mean, not your dad.

[thewayne]

We so desperately need to get Civics back into school!

[silveradept]

Doing so might make the plebes realize that they're supposed to have a democratic republic, rather than a corporate oligarchy, and work to fix that.

[thewayne]

And then they might learn that the unions fought and got them the 40 hour/five day work week. And then where would we be!

[greghousesgf]

If someone had asked 10 year old me what my background was I wouldn't have even understood the question.

[conuly]

What's your point, exactly?

[greghousesgf]

my point is when I was that age I don't remember that even being talked about.

[conuly]

Interesting. Are you white?

[greghousesgf]

yes

[conuly]

And were most of your classmates also white with at least one American-born parent?

[greghousesgf]

Most of them were white but I don't know where their parents were born.

[conuly]

So these classmates didn't have accents, or dress in strange clothes, or eat strange foods.

Put yourself in another person's shoes. Your experience is your experience. If you had been a minority in a majority-white, majority-native-born classroom, it is very likely you would have had a different experience.

[greghousesgf]

I'm sure my experience would have been very different if that were the case.
Actually some of them did have accents, and I was the kid whose clothes were considered strange, plus I ate a lot of different foods from around the world because my parents had lived in a few different countries.

[conuly]

Which is all very interesting, but you do understand why that link brings this up, yes?

[greghousesgf]

Certainly I understand it.

[conuly]

So, again, I have to ask - what was your point?

I like you. And I think of you as a friend. But you do this, like, a lot. You make responses that sort of dance around the topic but actually have nothing to do with the topic. And that's super frustrating because it doesn't give anybody much to respond back to - or, worse, because the obvious read of your comment is something probably a lot different from what you think you intend.

So how does your comment have anything to do with the topic of this post? I know how your comment relates to you and your life experience but since that wasn't what this post is about, why did you make it?

[greghousesgf]

I was only saying that when I was 10 I would not have understood a lot of cultural significance that was going on. I was very sheltered in some ways at that age.
I feel I don't have much to contribute here anymore anyway.

[potofsoup]

I left a comment! Thank you for the links!

[silveradept]

I wouldn't be surprised if they were actually lying, but having seen the various eruptions around the change of name to the Astounding Award for the Hugo ceremonies, the change of name to the Children's Literature Lifetime Achievement award from the American Library Association, and the general uproar about the removal of Seuss books (or other racist materials) from classrooms and libraries, if they are being genuine, the argument seems to be mostly "I was super comfortable in my not having to think about the colonial and enslaving history of the United States, and by doing this, you're making me think and have to answer uncomfortable questions. Stop that."

Which, hah, you have a child, foole. Uncomfortable questions and rethinking the way you were raised are part of the package.

[swingandswirl]

While I understand why DW does not have a Like button, times like this I am woeful about the lack.

Which is to say, yep, this, exactly. Heaven forfend these (presumably white) folk have to be even a little uncomfortable. That's much worse than kids getting better representation, books they enjoy, and even becoming less -ist than their parents.

[silveradept]

Almost universally white on these issues, and if you ask them, they'll say they're fine with those kinds of books being available (somewhere else that is not their school, school library, or public library where their darling white children might see or read them), but we can't be pushing an agenda on them. (Pay no attention to the agenda already being pushed because reifying a racist, white supremacist, cissexist, heterosexist history is the unmarked and often intentional default, by God, and if it was good enough for me, it is good enough for my children, and therefore the best for all children.)

Meanwhile, time marches on, and children are observing the world with their own eyes and trying to find the materials that reflect what they observe back to them and tell them they are sane and seeing the world correctly.

[conuly]

They will also say that it's insulting to nonwhite kids to suggest that they can't identify with books about characters who don't look like them, after all, they had no problem reading Dickens or Twain even though they, personally, are not a Dickens character trapped in a Twain novel.

The hypocrisy astounds.

[silveradept]

If that is the argument, given how much publishing puts out in picture books that are about white people and inanimate objects or fantastical creatures, the problem isn't that nonwhite kids have no practice at identifying Wyeth characters who don't look like them, it's that they have too much practice and the white kids need to develop their abilities instead. And on contemporary situations, not white-filtered tales of the long past.

[conuly]

1. Oh yeah.

2. Don't forget, most of those nonhuman protagonists still manage to be coded as white, non-immigrants.

[silveradept]

I had forgotten that, thank you for the reminder. Even the nonhumans still reflect white values and societal norms, unless they're supposed to be nonwhite stand-ins, and then we get beautiful pale wise elves and swarthy guttural primitive orcs.

I can certainly see people raising the lid on that box, seeing everything inside, and slamming it back down in fear of what will happen to their world if they let it all out. But it is going to get out, and waiting until it explodes isn't going to help anyone.

[swingandswirl]

It is so bizarre to me that the US doesn't have civics education as standard, but then again I'm coming to realise that the US does not have a lot of shit I take for granted that a civilised country should have or aspire to, so.

Re: books, I'm so glad more and more schools are pushing to replace classics with more relevant books, especially ones not by dead white dudes. I was lucky, I had a really cool selection of books in high school - Pride and Prejudice and an Indian novel called Paraja, among others, but if I wasn't already a reader? It wouldn't have done much to make me like the concept, since they were mostly dead white dude classics I needed more life experience than I had at 16 to appreciate.

[conuly]

Many states do have civics education. Many states are also a bit confused over the distinction between civics and patriotism.

It's important to remember that American education is very, very decentralized. We're the third biggest nation in the world by area, and also the third most populous. Things vary a lot by location.