The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 58
Critical Education Theory Series, Part 1
Over the last fifty years, a monumental change in the North American education systems has been taking place. The name for that change is “the Critical Turn in Education,” which is, in brief, how Critical Theory has crept into education and education theory (pedagogy) and slowly perverted it from within. The madness in today’s schools, then, is not some unhappy accident of the last year or even decade but the product of a dedicated march into the schooling institutions by Marxist, neo-Marxist, and Identity Marxist Theorists who have all but completely colonized it. This needs attention. Over the coming weeks and months, James Lindsay will be taking his listeners here on the New Discourses Podcast through the Critical Turn in Education so that they can know how and why these terrible changes have been implemented. In this first episode in this wide-ranging series, Lindsay dives into the new commitments Critical Pedagogy demands of teachers and students in the new Regime. Join James as he reads through a summary by Critical Education Theorist Michael Apple to learn exactly what these are.
Critical Education Theory Series:
Part 2: How Education Turned Critical
Part 3: Paulo Freire’s Politics of Education and a New Hope
Part 4: Paulo Freire’s Prophetic Vision for Education
Part 5: Critical Education: What Is Culturally Relevant Pedagogy?
Part 6: Critical Education: Transformative Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)
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9 comments
I agree that universities probably need to have their funding reduced – particularly the most infected departments. Not just because of the woke problem, but also because credential inflation is pushing a lot of people to spend time in these institutions that they could spend better elsewhere. Also, to deal with the woke problem, research funders need to be discerning, and make sure they fund research that produces real knowledge, not activism.
I don’t think it’s quite accurate to say what’s going on is completely analogous to the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Of course it feels like that sometimes, but one difference is the Chinese Cultural Revolution came from the very top. The one in the West has come from activists, academics and corporate media, rather than top-level politicians.
Small point but it is not correct to say Kepler based his work off Newton’s. He derived his laws of planetary motion from empirical data, without having Newton’s Laws to guide him, which I think makes it even more impressive. There was a poster in my university’s maths department explaining how it took him 19 attempts to figure out the shape of planetary orbits.
A commenter wrote: “…research funders need to be discerning, and make sure they fund research that produces real knowledge, not activism.”
You make a very logical and rational point. One that any normal person would make. But we are no longer living in normal times.
What if research funders WANT to fund “activism” and not real knowledge? THIS is the problem: the deliberate decrease of real knowledge replaced by the cunning increase of “activism”.
Funders’ choices are not accidental or misinformed; they know exactly what they’re doing and why. Read “Neo-Feudalism” by Joel Kotkin for starters to understand why they’re doing it (clue: total and perpetual power, wealth, status and control in the hands of an oligarchical global elite ruling class who need a private army of willing quisling servant lackeys culled from university “activists”).
Universities as the site of real knowledge ended in the 20th century. In the 21st, universities are nomenklatura replacement factories that indoctrinate servant-lackeys for the ruling class. This is the sole function of the 21st century university. Middle class parents desperately pay $100,000 to ensure their kids remain in or ascend to the Elysium of this servant class rather than return to or descend into the abyss of the Chaos sub-class of masses, serfs and deplorables.
The Iron Heel has returned (it never went away; it only hid) and the universities are its new matrix. Huxley’s velvet revolution consolidated its absolute power by tech-lobotomizing any opposition. Now we are all sheeple chewing the plugged-in cud of our soma while placidly sheepwalking into our new captivity pens to the sound of our flaccid online bleats of impotent protest. Hark, the bleat of your captive’s heart is the death rattle of 20th century real knowledge.
I’m specifically talking about government funding bodies, which I would say need intervention from above to stop this stuff.
The university I am at currently does seem to do real knowledge production. Perhaps it is worse in some places than others. I am not in the US, where I am parents aren’t spending $100K for their kids’ tertiary studies.
JS. Wow that last paragraph is so bleak!
I am just an ignorant pauper in the larger scheme of things, but several years ago even (way before 2020, BLM’s destructive activism, and hearing of “The Great Reset”) I was trying to think of a term that seemed to describe what was coming down the pike, so to speak. I started using the term, “Neo-Feudalism” on my own.
A lot of people don’t want to be opressed. and simply be “sheeple.”
Truth is bleak. Identarian Utopianism is bleaker. Totalitaria is bleakest of all.
Hence: Sheeples’ soma = magical-thinking coma.
Sheeple “escape” from bleak by pretending the Globalist noose around their throat is a shiny necklace — and it is — it’s Winnie Mandela’s* necklace of burning rubber tires places over their conquered heads.
Facing REALITY no matter how ugly is the only way to confront bleak and move forward with eyes wide open. Sheeple live with eyes wide shut. Black pilling is the first step towards true dissent!
Watch this bleak 2009 documentary on one of the primary tentacles of the Totalitaria that now rules the world. This was 13 years ago — the UN is MUCH worse now.
https://archive.org/details/U.N.Me_Ami.Horovitz
I became black pilled in the 1980s after witnessing images of one of the most horrific events I ever saw on the evening tv news. These incomprehensible Ur-atrocities are summed up in a 2018 BBC article on Winnie Mandela (who had Western Left-Progressives’ self-righteous support as a communist saint — pop songs were written about her — until these horrors were seen by the world) :
“‘With our boxes of matches and our necklaces we will liberate this country.’
The comment, at a rally in Johannesburg, signalled that Mrs… [Winnie] Mandela had endorsed the brutal method of “necklacing” – putting a tyre around suspected collaborators, dousing them with petrol, and burning them alive. It caused shock around the world, and tainted the image of the ANC [African National Congress].”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-43627974
(watch the opening scenes of the 2002 zombie movie ’28 Days Later’ to see brief clips of real news footage of ‘necklacing’ — these images were shown on the world’s regular television news until such reports were censored for contradicting the leftist “woke” narrative of the day in the 1980s)
First comes the red pill. Then comes the black pill. Then comes the possibility of freedom.
The Trouble with Ed Schools began long before then.
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2706&dat=19600810&id=5QJgAAAAIBAJ&sjid=px4NAAAAIBAJ&pg=943,5403383
https://quillette.com/2020/08/12/look-whos-talking-about-educational-equity/
https://www.commentary.org/articles/edgar-friedenberg/the-miseducation-of-american-teachers-by-james-d-koerner/
The Trouble with Ed Schools goes back to their very foundations in the early 20th Century as Jay Schalin explains.
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2019/02/schools-of-education/
https://janetakesonhistory.org/2020/07/24/the-not-so-good-old-days-in-education/
Not to mention Lyell Asher.
https://quillette.com/2020/08/12/look-whos-talking-about-educational-equity/
I’m surprised you don’t talk about multicultural education more. It founder from 1970 James Banks was the personal mentor of Robin DiAngelo and personally wrote the preface to “Is Everyone Really Equal?”!
Yes. LaRaza, and Mecha started up in the LA area back in the 70’s.