New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 26
Education is being stolen from our kids and our society. In fact, for the most part, it has been stolen already. The way it’s being and been done is through using something that is known as the “generative themes” approach, which derives from the work of the Marxist educator Paulo Freire. Generative themes are supposed to generate particular kinds of political conversations in the context of presenting some other kind of educational lesson. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay shares (with permission) Jennifer McWilliams’s example of a seemingly benign and innocuous second-grade word problem in mathematics class to show how a simple subtraction lesson can be turned into any number of political conversations about poverty, race, sex, gender, sexuality, family, parental authority, and environmental issues or climate change by a manipulative teacher-activist using the Freirean generative themes approach. This is what we are up against. This needs to stop.
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4 comments
I hear a lot from conservative thought leaders that “this” happens.
I hear that teachers are indoctrinated in these methods at university.
We know things like this happen… but how often? Are they rogue teachers? Just in big, leftist, union controlled Democrat socialists cities? Everywhere? Some teachers? All teachers?
How do parents, teachers, and BOEs prevent this? What policies can we put in place to keep the focus on academics? What are the policy solutions?
I found an example today on X. It came from a teacher in California.
“ In 11th grade U.S. History we teach from the Civil War to present. But what if the pandemic rendered most from NOT learning much of the first half of our history? Today walking them through 1790 to 1850, focusing on “racial/plantation slavery”. “
The teacher includes a sample of the ‘talking points’ he wants to get across. They are political and stem from the view of the oppressed. Nothing about the Federal Period, War of 1812 or any other development between 1790-1850. This is strictly about the *gangs* of Plantation Slavery.
I saved the receipts so thoughtfully included.
So, they are going to spend the bulk of the time allotted to discussing US History after the Civil War, they are going to reinforce political talking points that the teacher *thoughtfully* included with the example. The amount of time being spent to
Though this example stretches my credulity a bit, I can well imagine that discussions like this are happening in classrooms where it isn’t even appropriate.
In my high school (early 1970s) we read a lot of somewhat edgy material in English class and I wrote papers on some unusual material in History. But the social justice orientation was totally absent. I thought I was being an intellectual liberal, and so did my teachers. But we thought all we were doing was delving into topics that more conservative people just didn’t want to talk about.
Meanwhile, we had just come out of the Kent State shootings and we were on the cusp of an inflationary spike followed by a recession. On top of that we were ending the war in Vietnam. Then came the Church Committee hearings. At the time these were not big discussion subjects and home or at school. I didn’t see the significance of many of these events until much later.
But the point is, we didn’t talk about it in school. For most of my peers, high school was about lining up your ducks to get into college. I didn’t even think about or realize that there were a lot of kids who would not be able to do that, even if they were intellectually gifted.
Now, school seems to be about lining up your ducks to get into the corporate world of the future. It is very ironic to me that the neo-Marxist social justice warriors and the “new” corporate leaders are having a hug fest right now. I wonder how long it will last.
I think there is still a lot of variation among schools, particularly at the elementary level. I know a little ten year old who goes to school in a northern East Bay suburb. She doesn’t mention any social justice issues and seems more immersed in popular culture, the question of what death really is, and what is “cool.” She is an avid Roblox player and her best friend is, too. They like Chuck E Cheese and Six Flags. Will these be future social justice warriors? I don’t think so. They will be office workers at UC Berkeley, Google, or some other mainstream corporation. They don’t care about social justice, though it might “make sense” to them, as their intellectual curiosity is shot to hell.
The raw malevolence of these people is truly stunning!