MESSAGE
| DATE | 2020-08-02 |
| FROM | aviva
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [Hangout - NYLXS] fre(e) the mind
|
On 7/30/20 1:43 PM, Ruben Safir wrote:
> nypost.com
> Teaching marginalized kids taught me orderly classrooms, Western canon
> keys to liberation
> By Sohrab Ahmari
> 5-6 minutes
>
> The worst campus ideas are sweeping America.
>
> In 2005, I graduated college with a degree in philosophy and a head
> brimming with critical theory, the strange brew of American and
> Continental-European ideas that has intoxicated campus humanities
> departments since at least the 1980s and is now bathing the whole
> country.
>
> Funny enough, it was teaching kids in a poor, majority-minority school
> district on the US-Mexico border that disabused me of my theory-imbued
> views.
>
> At the time, I was 20 years old, self-righteous and half-erudite (which
> is worse than being illiterate). Having read my Michel Foucault and my
> Judith Butler, I regarded moral order, beauty, human nature, even truth
> itself as the impositions of power specifically white, male,
> heteronormative, colonialist power.
>
> Certain books had been deemed classics and placed on a pedestal called
> the Western canon a pedestal that rested on the backs of the
> marginalized. Even correct grammar and spelling were discursive
> practices used to discipline and control the powerless of the earth.
>
> The right thing to do, then, was to question or subvert the Western
> canon and to disrupt the oppressive structures baked into language
> itself. (I held all this to be true, even though, as an immigrant from
> Iran, I had worked hard to master English.)
>
> If these notions sound familiar, its because theyve lately made it into
> the mainstream of American life. But at the time, they were still
> largely confined to the English faculty lounge, as well as various
> grievance-studies disciplines (gender studies, queer studies, fat
> studies, etc.).
>
> But how exactly was I supposed to apply them in real life?
>
> Well, as Bill Murrays character in Lost in Translation says, Philosophy?
> Theres a buck in that racket. Not quite prepared to pursue a PhD in
> critical theory, I decided to join Teach for America, the corps of
> recent college grads who are dispatched as educators to some of the most
> underserved K-12 classrooms across the country.
>
> My TFA assignment took me to Brownsville, Texas, in the Rio Grande
> Valley region.
>
> The student body at the school that hired me was almost entirely
> Hispanic. The vast majority received free or reduced-price lunches. Many
> came from migrant families that only spent part of the year in Texas.
> For some, potable water was a distant luxury.
>
> And guess what? Their families emphatically wanted them to learn
> English.
>
> Like any rookie, lefty-minded teacher, I festooned my classroom with
> posters of Muhammad Ali and resistance-y slogans. But that wasnt enough.
> For these kids to have any chance to succeed, much less liberate
> themselves, they had to learn. It wouldnt have made sense to deny them
> the knowledge Id picked up further north in the name of a perverse
> theory of justice cooked up by some Berkeley theorist.
>
> Do you know what would have happened if Id told my Mexican-American
> students moms, You know, ladies, Im not teaching your children grammar,
> because grammar is an integral part of the white, phallocentric
> structures of oppression that keep you and your community down?
>
> They wouldve slapped me with their purses and called me a pendejo and
> rightly so.
>
> The same would have gone for the notion, bizarrely gaining currency
> these days, that the yearning for order and even abstract reasoning as
> such are white, colonial constructs.
>
> I watched the best of my fellow teachers run tight ships, with clear
> expectations for behavior, systems of reward and punishment and a
> general ethic of uprightness pervading their classrooms. And, again,
> guess what? The kids, and their parents, appreciated such efforts
> enormously.
>
> (By the way, imagine a white activist in the 1960s telling Dr. Martin
> Luther King who delivered some of the most stirring and finely crafted
> oratory in US history that correct grammar really isnt meant for
> members of his race.)
>
> The position that minority children deserve to wallow in classroom
> disorder or incorrect English is itself downright racist. The truth
> shall set you free, the Good Book says, but for children to know the
> truth, they must first have the benefit of orderly environments. Thats
> true for kids of any race.
>
> Thanks to those kids and their parents, I matured intellectually. Little
> did I know that a decade and a half later, the ideas I happily discarded
> would be widely celebrated as a force for liberating the marginalized.
>
> Sohrab Ahmari is The Posts op-ed editor. His next book, The Unbroken
> Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos, is due
> out in Spring 2021. Twitter: -at-SohrabAhmari
>
EXCELLENT READ. I am sharing this with my entire adsministration. I am
sure they will love this.
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