Sunday, December 20, 2009

Can you teach Social Justice...

... if you shun subject matter content? This is what Joanne Jacobs and also Robert Pondiscio are asking, regarding the recent controversy at University of Minnesota’s Education school which pits the American Dream against Social Justice as the 'right' reductionist propositions. The U of M's Teacher Education Redesign Initiative's Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group had submitted its report, where we read:

"The story of the United States is often told in terms of the American Dream. Historian James Truslow Adams is thought to have coined the phrase 'American Dream' in 1931, in his book, The Epic of America. Adams wrote that the American Dream is:

'...That dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability and achievement ...It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.'

The Education Redesign report continues:

"Future teachers will understand that despite an ideal about what is considered common culture in the United States, that many groups are typically not included within this celebrated cultural identity and more often than not, many students with multi-generational histories in the United States are routinely perceived to be new immigrants or foreign. That such exclusion is frequently a result of dissimilarities in power and influence."

I can't help but notice that the group titulature, Teacher Education Redesign, sounds awfully close to Teacher Reeducation. If the U of M Education School would be open for some mid XXth Century Eastern European History, with its Reeducation Brigades imposed at the point of bayonets, they would understand why this might be a problem.

Get your history on, or we're condemned to repeat it, right? King Philip's War, the Native American genocide, the French and Indian War, the plight of Blacks and Native Americans in the Revolutionary War, 1812, the conquest of Mexico, the Civil War, the Progressive Era post Reconstruction. All good places to visit. All good excuses to put restless teacher minds to use, especially since these subjects are cursively dismissed in grade and middle schools around the country. Right?

But that would have broken a tenet of school education - that history and content matter are imposing and oppressive. Why bother understanding things of old. Instead, the Education Redesign group will spoon feed future teachers to "make use" in their analysis of the "myth of meritocracy in the United States", the history of white racism "with special focus on current colorblind ideology", and the "history of demands for assimilation to white, middle-class, Christian meanings and values".

Curious Social Justice, this one, pitted against meritocracy. Forget that cultural identity and individual differences are hollow if still rested on the old creed of innate limitations. And forget the deeply religious XXth Century American who said:

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream...

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