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

[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.