12 votes

He taught a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay. Then he was fired.

3 comments

  1. [4]
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    1. kfwyre
      (edited )
      Link Parent
      This is not a swipe at you, Loire, but I feel like I can’t take two steps online without hearing “schools should teach critical thinking” being given as a cure-all for the nation’s ills. Yours is...
      • Exemplary

      This is not a swipe at you, Loire, but I feel like I can’t take two steps online without hearing “schools should teach critical thinking” being given as a cure-all for the nation’s ills. Yours is the most recent comment I’ve seen it on so I’m responding here, but this is more aimed at the idea at large.

      Three quick thoughts on teaching critical thinking in US schools:

      1. We’re trying. Honestly.
      2. We’re not starting at neutral.
      3. Even if we’re successful, I think the problems we’re seeing in our country will mostly still remain. Critical thinking skills will not correct motivated reasoning driven by prejudice.

      Because the last point is a little less self-explanatory than the first two: critical reasoning doesn’t mean we’ll all arrive at the “right” place and put aside our differences. For example, there are neo-Nazis who are very good at critical reasoning, which they use to solve the challenging “problem” of strategically sanitizing and spreading their viewpoints to recruit broader audiences to their hateful and abhorrent ideology while also dodging accountability. Their critical thinking skills don’t prevent them from doing this and in fact enhance their damage. If they were less skilled, they’d be less persuasive and effective.

      It’s true that bolstering critical thinking at large will likely have some positive effect in keeping their efforts from landing in their target audiences, but that kind of goes back to 2: we’re not starting at neutral. Good critical reasoning skills will not protect someone from neo-Nazi ideology if they are someone who wants to believe it in the first place. That’s, of course, an extreme example, but consider how this applies to a lot of other areas. We have a lot of people in this country who believe the “wrong” thing not because of bad reasoning, but because they want to. I believe that, even with good reasoning skills, they’ll likely continue that wanting.

      Perhaps we have any teachers on tildes that can speak to this but I have two significantly younger siblings of highschool age and every time I interact with them I am absolutely flabbergasted by just how ignorant they are. It destroys absolutely every illusion I had of myself having been smart at that age. They know absolutely nothing.

      This hurts my heart a little bit to read, and I do think you’re underestimating high schoolers a bit, but ultimately I totally get what you’re saying here.

      The fact of the matter is that high schoolers are kids. They’re young; they’re inexperienced; they’re often over-confident in their knowledge and understanding. They’re riding the Dunning-Kruger roller-coaster, and they’re still in the part where the carts are being towed up that first hill. They haven’t yet crested and felt the gut-check of that first free-fall.

      But, honestly, part of our responsibility as adults is believing in them anyway. Look at their strengths and foster those areas. Challenge them in areas they need growth in. I’ve graded tens of thousands of tests, projects, and essays over the course of my career. 99% of them were not outstanding on an objective level, but my job and my responsibility as a teacher is to find the ways they could be and help each individual student to see that path for their work, skillset, and person. If all you see in your siblings is ignorance, then you’re missing their individual paths to richness and fulfillment. For your sake and theirs, try to find that! Every kid deserves to have the adults in their lives helping them navigate that.

      Also, remember that us adults can be arrogant too. Part of being an adult for me has been learning all the areas where the adults in my life were actually right and I just couldn’t see that when I was younger, but part of it has been seeing where I actually was in the right. My parents and teachers weren’t infallible, and they were legitimately in the wrong on some things. It’s adults’ responsibility to prepare kids for the world, but we also have to understand that they are growing up in a different world than us. We’d do well to try to understand the world they’re living in more than forcing them to fit into ours.

      I’m not trying to moralize here or judge you or anything. Again, I get what you’re saying. Like I said, I’ve graded tens of thousands of things as a teacher and after years of seeing the same simple errors and the same cheap laziness I sometimes want to rip my hair out. I think about how hundreds of thousands more await me over the next twenty years and it makes me want to scream.

      But the trick for me is to remember that these are kids, and I’m not here to judge them, but to help them. That’s my job requirement as a teacher, but it’s also my responsibility as an adult in their lives. I owe it to them not to let my aggregate frustrations get in the way of their individual growth, and the coolest thing about kids is their incredible potential for growth. They’ve certainly already come a long way, but they still have so much ahead of them!

      17 votes
    2. skybrian
      Link Parent
      I think a reasonable approach might be to teach some of the history of racism. Here are some terrible things that happened, not so long ago. They’re illegal now. Leave current events and political...

      I think a reasonable approach might be to teach some of the history of racism. Here are some terrible things that happened, not so long ago. They’re illegal now. Leave current events and political implications for another time.

      In particular, I remember a high school English teacher who spent a few weeks teaching about the Holocaust. (Presumably due to having a special interest, since it seems like it would normally be taught in a history class?) It was depressing, but at least after you got through it you wouldn’t be ignorant about it.

      Regarding teaching ethics to children, there was a poem I shared that seems relevant.

      8 votes
    3. TemulentTeatotaler
      Link Parent
      I can't remember the exact phrasing, but I remember hearing an activist criticize the term "white privilege" in lieu of something like "[black] disadvantage". In their view it put the majority...

      I can't remember the exact phrasing, but I remember hearing an activist criticize the term "white privilege" in lieu of something like "[black] disadvantage". In their view it put the majority that was being appealed to on the defensive and distracted from the suffering of the disadvantaged community. It framed it as taking something away instead of helping people.

      Not that semiotics or political messaging isn't a nightmare. I've also listened to a pretty thoughtful explanation for why "defund the police" was chosen compared to alternatives, but as soon as that gets into the wild it gets warped and out of control.

      you can't teach critical thinking in a semester.

      Personally, I had a lot of lessons from school or life that I didn't digest for years. Ones that I wouldn't have learned without having the exposure that I didn't understand at the time.

      The popularization of "X to Y pipeline" is an overly-simplified way of pointing out that no one got to where they are overnight. The important question is whether students improved their critical thinking, or at least had the groundwork laid.

      Another thing that might get overlooked is that a lot of cognition, norms, values, etc. are outsourced to our community. Maybe your siblings won't ever think about these sorts of things in the same way an embarassing number of adults don't have basic math skills, financial literacy, or know how the seasons work.

      The "lesson" might come in the form of a friend that knows how to communicate issues to you, who you trust. The health of a democracy may be more a function of some threshold of citizenry that are informed and care.

      Without critical thinking ability what you tell these students is either absorbed literally and unconditionally or ignored unconditionally.

      Or it could backfire and add a few more edgelords "ironically" posting holocaust denier talking points and joining the Identitarians.

      I don't have a great background in psychology, but there are a lot of quirks and ways things can backfire. I remember seeing that charities were less successful in getting donations when they had more than one hungry child on their pamphlets, and iirc that generalized to compassion fatigue. You might be right that presenting kids with a massive and intractable problem isn't a good approach.

      It does sound like you're discounting the school's discussion about the topic, or that there may be a complicated, conflicted lesson taught. It could be indoctrination, but it doesn't have to be, and I would be surprised if there wasn't a lot of pushback against the ideas in the mentioned school.

      Teaching that certain citizens are inherently unequal to others based on race and sex is also anathema to a modern democracy

      Too off topic for the thread, but U.S. democracy is inherently biased, and biased in ways that correspond to demographics. Small states, rural areas, and contended areas matter more.

      Children, even those of highschool age, do not have the critical thinking ability to understand the nuances of white privilege

      There might be nuance that goes over their head, but good teaching should be able to make the concepts accessible, or at least lay the groundwork.

      Some things are strictly historical record, like @skybrian mentioned. You can't have an informed opinion on the current state of society if you don't know about things like redlining or the reality of enough gas stations refusing black patrons to make civil rights a matter of interstate commerce.

      That sort of thing can be hard to synthesize into anything resembling morals, but some of the core concepts are extremely basic when you pull them away from that context.

      Take something like the influence of inherited wealth. Do you think kids wouldn't understand what a game they played would be like if the winner of the last round got to start the next round with a fraction of their lead? Would they be in favor of win-more mechanics, or catch-up mechanics?


      It's a lot easier to identify a problem than it is to know how to fix it. A primary/election being won by someone that lied on national news about sending investigators to Hawaii who found "things you wouldn't believe" about Obama being a Kenyan and pardoned Arpaio is a good reason to think a problem exists.

      I think well-intentioned failure has to be accepted as the cost of progress, including views like yours on when you feel things aren't working. Implicit association tests are arguably something that had promise for trying to tackle bias, they may have required a significant amount of academic effort to evaluate, and their usefulness may have failed to live up to expectations (or need refinement).

      (sorry, rushing the reply a bit)

      8 votes