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Very young, elementary-age (5 to 12 years old) public school students should be taught about racism, sexism, sexual orientation, xenophobia, and class conflict. They should be forbidden to express anything that a teacher or administrator deems racist, sexist, homophobic, "anti-immigrant" or "classist" (looking down on people with less money.) In addition, schools should promote special programs to celebrate diversity, love and inclusion of others, and social justice.
The time for debate is over. The decision has already been made. Children have been enlisted in the great causes of the day and are in the forefront of the struggle.
In NY they've already been employed to fight for higher teacher pay, better teacher benefits. They are forming ranks, locked tight against efforts to test them or discipline them.
What is the use of reading or arithmetic when centuries of them haven't eliminated sex or race or class?
Schools have become more of an institution of social reprogramming instead of an institution of learning, these are left up to the teachers and administrators of the school districts following federal guide lines which are very subjective. The school system has taken it up on themselves the teach the children social behaviors to where the family unit has failed to do so, and the education system is failing at this also. This creates a conflict between the values of the teacher and the values of the family unit, then the child is left trying to figure who's values are more important.
Very young, elementary-age (5 to 12 years old) public school students should be taught about racism, sexism, sexual orientation, xenophobia, and class conflict. They should be forbidden to express anything that a teacher or administrator deems racist, sexist, homophobic, "anti-immigrant" or "classist" (looking down on people with less money.) In addition, schools should promote special programs to celebrate diversity, love and inclusion of others, and social justice.
Elementary school kids need to be taught about racism, sexism, sexual orientation, xenophobia, and class conflict in an age-appropriate way. They should learn about the negative parts of US history as well as the positive ones, but not all things at all ages. You can explain to very young kids, for instance, why it was a big deal that Jackie Robinson played baseball or why workers would go on strike.
But I might wait until they were in middle school before a civics course talked about gay marriage, or what the development of "the pill" meant for American women, because that is the age when kids naturally want to know about sex and it makes sense to tie that curiosity, when relevant, into history or literature.
As to your last sentence, schools should demonstrate "diversity, love and inclusion of others, and social justice" wherever possible through their everyday actions and practices, instead of "teaching" it through special programs. Young kids will figure out that these are positive attributes when they see the adults around them putting them into practice instead of just talking about them.
My own position is that gay rights, civil rights, etc., are important, but even more important is a childhood free of adult controversy.
I think 1) the role of the family in inculcating moral values and 2) the innocence of childhood are in danger of being replaced by government sponsored social engineering. Not only is this unseemly, it won't work in the long run because being told what to think and value never works. People have to make up their own minds. If I had schools trying to tell me I had to like or love something, I certainly would not like or love it. I would probably hate it.
I remember this issue coming up in a high school history class many years ago. I was asked to take a position on apartheid in South Africa. I argued for greater tolerance by whites. That wasn't enough for my teacher, who seemed to think that people should be required to love each other. It doesn't work that way. Our likes and dislikes just are, and if they change it must be because we choose to change, not because someone told us to.
Many years of social engineering in the public schools have produced several generations that seem to shy away from critical thinking outside of work and other manipulative tasks that lead to material self-enrichment. A classic example is the typical response to Fox News, which is almost always dismissive. But when you ask the disdainful person if they watch Fox enough to give examples of what they are talking about, they don't say anything.
A democratic republic cannot long survive a populace that turns off its collective mind after years of conditioning by those who proselytize instead of educating.
So what is the answer? Schools should educate, not indoctinate. They should teach reading, writing, arithmetic, history, art, music and athletics. Beyond this, they should require students to treat each other with civility. And they should have the ability to discipline students in order to back this up. Furthermore, teachers should be role models that students can respect. That even comes down to the way they dress. In my day, female teachers wore skirts and male teachers wore jackets and ties. I know this sounds silly, but it really isn't. Parents could also start looking and acting like adults. It couldn't hurt.
Last edited by dechatelet; 04-13-2015 at 11:45 PM..
My own position is that gay rights, civil rights, etc., are important, but even more important is a childhood free of adult controversy.
I remember this issue coming up in a high school history class many years ago. I was asked to take a position on apartheid in South Africa. I argued for greater tolerance by whites. That wasn't enough for my teacher, who seemed to think that people should be required to love each other. It doesn't work that way. Our likes and dislikes just are, and if they change it must be because we choose to change, not because someone told us to.
I had forgotten about that! The very first book in our first year HS English class was "Cry the Beloved Country", a novel about apartheid. Being only 14 and more interested in girls than life, I never thought about it then.
But looking back, even a couple of years later, I wondered why we should have spent so much, instead of no, time on something going on in a place thousands of miles from our own experiences in a country with which we shared no heritage, to which we would never have first hand exposure, and which could never effect our lives if we all lived to be 100. As a step to building our lives or expanding our imagined experiences, it was a complete waste. We had no connection to it, no internal voice saying that is us the way Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn said that is us. It was completely foreign. Our only response could have been and was a polyester empathy that, having been satisfied by a few sighs, was gone, forgotten and unrecoverable.
Looking back from even farther, I see this as the first sign that the school system had lost it way, had turned down the wrong road: one headed over a cliff. Even when it went over, even that is now a long time ago.
My own position is that gay rights, civil rights, etc., are important, but even more important is a childhood free of adult controversy.
I think 1) the role of the family in inculcating moral values and 2) the innocence of childhood are in danger of being replaced by government sponsored social engineering. Not only is this unseemly, it won't work in the long run because being told what to think and value never works. People have to make up their own minds. If I had schools trying to tell me I had to like or love something, I certainly would not like or love it. I would probably hate it.
I remember this issue coming up in a high school history class many years ago. I was asked to take a position on apartheid in South Africa. I argued for greater tolerance by whites. That wasn't enough for my teacher, who seemed to think that people should be required to love each other. It doesn't work that way. Our likes and dislikes just are, and if they change it must be because we choose to change, not because someone told us to.
Many years of social engineering in the public schools have produced several generations that seem to shy away from critical thinking outside of work and other manipulative tasks that lead to material self-enrichment. A classic example is the typical response to Fox News, which is almost always dismissive. But when you ask the disdainful person if they watch Fox enough to give examples of what they are talking about, they don't say anything.
A democratic republic cannot long survive a populace that turns off its collective mind after years of conditioning by those who proselytize instead of educating.
So what is the answer? Schools should educate, not indoctinate. They should teach reading, writing, arithmetic, history, art, music and athletics. Beyond this, they should require students to treat each other with civility. And they should have the ability to discipline students in order to back this up. Furthermore, teachers should be role models that students can respect. That even comes down to the way they dress. In my day, female teachers wore skirts and male teachers wore jackets and ties. I know this sounds silly, but it really isn't. Parents could also start looking and acting like adults. It couldn't hurt.
Those are very good points
A school should be teaching the kids the basics of life and how to work in society. Kids should have a working fundamental understanding of language, mathematics, US and world History, Science, Nature, Health, diet and how to stay fit.
Values and Morals should be taught by the family unit but sadly that is taking a back seat to TV, the internet, and the cell phone addiction. There are way too many kids raising themselves and growing up too fast.
Many of these kids have zero social skills outside their little cliques and many have zero coping skills.
There has been posts here on citydata about teachers filling up those young minds with very biased thinking. The latest was a teacher had her third grade class writing letters to a convicted Cop Killer.
I have also heard that universities are becoming more and more liberal in their attempt to celebrate diversity. This is all good but all sides of the conversation need to be considered.
Dechatelet said it best "Schools should educate, not indoctinate"
Elementary school kids need to be taught about racism, sexism, sexual orientation, xenophobia, and class conflict in an age-appropriate way. They should learn about the negative parts of US history as well as the positive ones, but not all things at all ages. You can explain to very young kids, for instance, why it was a big deal that Jackie Robinson played baseball or why workers would go on strike.
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So how in the heck do you write a set of lessons (or teach them) in a truly unbiased fashion?
The westward expansion in the US for example, could definitely include learning more about indigenous people and their cultures (and mistreatment by the Army, settlers, blah blah), but a really balanced view would show how their own expansions ran roughshod over each other. Add in a heaping helping of how they treated captives, women, and the like, and you end up with protest groups outside of the school.
Maybe the thing to do is to get a Chinese scholar, who has no interest one way or the other, to write the books.
......snip snip...
A democratic republic cannot long survive a populace that turns off its collective mind after years of conditioning by those who proselytize instead of educating.
So what is the answer? Schools should educate, not indoctinate. They should teach reading, writing, arithmetic, history, art, music and athletics. Beyond this, they should require students to treat each other with civility. And they should have the ability to discipline students in order to back this up. Furthermore, teachers should be role models that students can respect. That even comes down to the way they dress. In my day, female teachers wore skirts and male teachers wore jackets and ties. I know this sounds silly, but it really isn't. Parents could also start looking and acting like adults. It couldn't hurt.
Killer post.
The thing is, there aren't enough hours in the day to merely educate someone, much less do the Social Justice Warriors routine.
If you drop everything but, let's say, history, you still have the problem of how to present that.
I had forgotten about that! The very first book in our first year HS English class was "Cry the Beloved Country", a novel about apartheid. Being only 14 and more interested in girls than life, I never thought about it then.
But looking back, even a couple of years later, I wondered why we should have spent so much, instead of no, time on something going on in a place thousands of miles from our own experiences in a country with which we shared no heritage, to which we would never have first hand exposure, and which could never effect our lives if we all lived to be 100.
The whole point of education is to tell you about things you don't know and haven't experienced, not the things you already know about. Otherwise it isn't education, is it?
As a step to building our lives or expanding our imagined experiences, it was a complete waste. We had no connection to it, no internal voice saying that is us the way Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn said that is us. It was completely foreign. Our only response could have been and was a polyester empathy that, having been satisfied by a few sighs, was gone, forgotten and unrecoverable.
If your teacher could not do even a simple "compare and contrast" lesson between apartheid and Jim Crow in the U.S. --how they started, endured, and ended, what literature they spawned, what lessons could be learned from the people under both systems, and the like -- you simply had a very, VERY bad teacher.
Looking back from even farther, I see this as the first sign that the school system had lost it way, had turned down the wrong road: one headed over a cliff. Even when it went over, even that is now a long time ago.
School is for expanding your horizons, even if you're only 14. This is an interconnected world now, even more so now, I imagine, than even when you were a teenager. Your school wasn't losing its way, it was trying to teach kids something about the world they would grow up in.
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