It was simple, and direct. It was about respecting others and the basis for good citizenship in the classroom and anywhere else. It wasn't new-fangled jargon, but time-tested and ancient religion-approved.
Did I learn this concept found in scripture in a church--no. Your blogger never wandered into a formal religious setting before the age of ten or eleven. I learned it in public school, in kindergarten. Was I indoctrinated at the tender age of five to some startling multicultural program (I mean, my school was desegregated and I understood after this simple precept how racism was wrong because obviously--how would I want to be treated?) I still absorbed a lot of my culture's dumbfuck attitudes and I'm going to be sorting out the headtrip that whiteness is for a while, yet. I wouldn't say I was indoctrinated.
Surely, not everyone who was in the same kindergarten class as me has come to my POV. We are individuals, not blank slates. We're not human Silly Putty pulling up cartoons from the Sunday funnies.
There's a saying ascribed variously to Aristotle, Francis Xavier, and B.F. Skinner to the effect that you give me a child at the age of seven, and I will show you the adult. I think this was exceptionally rendered by Rodgers and Hammerstein, hence the title of this blog post. Kids are taught racism. Or they experience it directly. They learn whether it's okay for them to bully others because they can get away with it. Or they learn they have to deal with bullying because they will not be treated fairly, even in classrooms where the Golden Rule is taught, because people say things they never fully absorb. They teach precepts they don't live. They consider identity over actions as the basis of their morality time and again. Because they were carefully taught that in their homes.
So, in the age of a moral panic about CRT (Critical Race Theory, a college-level course that is not, in fact, taught in primary schools, even if basic American History facts are) what are we to think about Fox News singling out a daycare center for indoctrinating the younglings with odd, multicultural ideas like--I mean, really, what we would simply call "The Golden Rule" if we were being totally honest? You don't bully, you include others, you share, you don't treat others badly. So simple--how is Fox News calling this a problem?
Ah, but it's an agenda. If CRT doesn't work (and the thing is sputtering as people find out what it really is) why don't conservative education activists go after "social emotional learning"? Isn't it strange as a concept? Are we telling kids how to...feel? But actually, it's about telling kids they are able to take responsibility for themselves and how they act and approach issues. They can choose to not be bullies. They can choose de-escalation. They can be empathetic and include others. They can live by the exact only quote from MLK that conservatives ever actually learn, and judge people by what they see of their character instead of their ethnicity.
Why does this bother me? Because public school has been a positive good in terms of affording kids of any socio-economic class a good start in life, and for some, has been a source of not only education, but nourishment, both physically and emotionally. Because it is regulated, because parents do have a say in elections and PTA meetings and school board appointments, because this socialization of kids among their peers and interacting with teachers trained to evaluate their needs, both in terms of their strengths and weaknesses, can make an extraordinary difference in their achieving their best possible potential, And because I see how, because of political biases, conservatives want to shut this necessary good down, and are using tactics of fear-mongering and race-baiting and moral panic to do it.
So where is this supposed to go? Possibly by making public schools more conservative, but also probably by making them discredited enough that charter schools and the classist voucher programs for private schools become more the mode of education for the kind of people who would prefer that (also well-understood by people who have looked at this long and hard as "school re-segregation by other means").
But also, there is a push to homeschooling, and I have so many reservations. I believe pedagogy is a profession, a calling, not some thing you just do because you had a kid. You can do some teaching as a parent, but you don't teach all the things. Mostly because you don't know all the things. But this is something homeschooled Highlights Magazine example of Goofus, Madison Cawthorn, seems to think is totally great, because he thinks it worked well enough for him in a Christian soldier kind of way.
And no. it didn't work well enough for him because he kind of is a serial liar with a history of abusing women. But the belief that homeschooling and even having many kids at all is about a culture war is a definite evangelical thing. And I feel my whole Karen White Lady age when I look at young Cawthorn, because he makes me want to have a chat with his parents.
Especially when he talks about raising monsters. I'm already against raising monsters right here on this blog, myself. But I worry about people who say they want to raise monsters, because it was a practice, once upon a time, in a land Madison Cawthorn had on his bucket list. Children were raised to have less empathy in Nazi Germany. And the means of fostering obedience for authority figures and eschewing empathy are present in the child abuse pedagogical schemes of the Pearls, Dobson and other Right wing evangelical demagogues.
Who could ensure that the rod is taken away from people who would spoil an entire childhood? Who ensures that children aren't made into monsters, but can be their best selves? And why was Hillary Clinton vilified so long ago for acknowledging it took a village to raise a child--and we are so stingy about education of some subjects we get back to each one teach one?
There's some clues in the politicization of all the things. Take clown shoes Ted Cruz, chiding a muppet for teaching children that getting vaccine shots is safe and they will be fine. My goodness, Big Bird has been pro-vax since me and Ted were both little babies. And it didn't fuck either of us up with some kind of indoctrination.
Although Cruz has obvious other shit in his life. He was carefully taught. He also wears clowns shoes. And by his great age should know better, and apparently doesn't. Thus I conclude my lesson.
2 comments:
Taking a rare opportunity to disagree a tiny bit with Oscar Hammerstein and, by extension, you: research indicates it's very easily taught, in line with the innate predisposition toward what they call implicit bias. If a child is not exposed to the Other at all, as in the places like West Virginia or Iowa where there aren't any persons of color at all, or the numerous places North and South where white meets Black only in the roles of subordinates (maids and drivers) or threats, they learn it more or less automatically.
That's relevant to the CRT mania because there is something, not properly called CRT (but you can call it "critical race pedagogy") that actually does exist in elementary classrooms with progressively trained teachers, in which anti-racism really is carefully taught as a counter to the automatic inculcation of white racism that otherwise tends to occur. Which is as it should be, but that's what's under attack by Christopher Rufo and the other thugs.
Taking a rare opportunity to disagree a tiny bit with Oscar Hammerstein and, by extension, you: research indicates it's very easily taught, in line with the innate predisposition toward what they call implicit bias. If a child is not exposed to the Other at all, as in the places like West Virginia or Iowa where there aren't any persons of color at all, or the numerous places North and South where white meets Black only in the roles of subordinates (maids and drivers) or threats, they learn it more or less automatically.
That's relevant to the CRT mania because there is something, not properly called CRT (but you can call it "critical race pedagogy") that actually does exist in elementary classrooms with progressively trained teachers, in which anti-racism really is carefully taught as a counter to the automatic inculcation of white racism that otherwise tends to occur. Which is as it should be, but that's what's under attack by Christopher Rufo and the other thugs.
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