American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture
Rochelle Gutiérrez advocates “political conocimiento” [sic] while decrying that math is “white privilege.” Jaime Escalante got his “unteachable” students into AP Calculus.
You decide which is more empowering. Read my post, Math is white privilege?
I’m fighting a cold and won’t be posting until I feel better.
Being a graduate student ain’t what it used to be.
Read my post, “Free tuition, free health care, and a $30,000 stipend.”
Public school teachers have been striking over the past three weeks, and have scheduled demonstrations for today. The WSJ reports that Demand for higher wages complicate President Mauricio Macri’s efforts to curb inflation and spur economy as the opposition backs the strikes with an eye on October’s legislative elections:
In intensifying walkouts and street rallies involving five national unions, teachers are asking for higher salary increases and blasting Mr. Macri for failing to jump-start the economy and control Argentina’s relentless inflation, which reached 40% last year. The government, aiming to cap inflation at 17% this year, has discouraged cash-strapped provincial governments, which set teacher salaries, from granting more generous raises.
. . .The deepening standoff underscores the difficulties facing Mr. Macri’s pro-business government as it seeks to unwind years of free-spending populist polices by his predecessor, President Cristina Kirchner, and secure the political and popular support needed ahead of legislative elections in October. Mr. Macri needs a convincing win to push forward with his reforms.
The Journal reports that teachers in the Buenos Aires province make 43% of what teachers earn on average in other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries.
To say that I am a voracious reader is to understate my addiction. I read at least a whole novel (mostly thrillers/mysteries) every week, and I also study a number of books over periods of time.
Among the latter, I’m currently working my way through Carlos Eire’s Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650, and Huntington Cairns’s The Limits of Art: A Critic’s Anthology of Western Literature (the Best that Has Been Written and Said).
This is not light reading.
It is, however, the kind of reading I have enjoyed since very early in my life.
I am a firm believer on the benefits of a well-rounded, academically-rigorous education. You can imagine my dismay when a friend sent this article by Jane Robbins:
School Daze. Inferior Reading Standards Lead to Inferior Readers
According to Common Core, soft-core porn is preferable to Jane Austen.
Say what?
The Common Core structure not only diminishes the amount of literary study in ELA classrooms, its recommendations for what types of fiction should be read are weighted against the classics. The Common Core list of recommended texts for ELA classrooms eliminates (except for minimal Shakespeare) British literature. No Austen, no Dickens, no Stevenson. In place of great British novels it suggests soft-core pornography such as The Bluest Eye.
Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in.Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison’s virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing.
How about studying Pecola Breedlove side-by-side with Elizabeth Bennet? Would it be sacrilege to suggest that, without Jane Austen, Tony Morrison may not have happened?
Or is that too much work because it’s not as easy to fit into a narrative?
Of course, that assumes the people designing the curriculum have functioning brain cells, and are not this stupid:
Via WeaselZippers, science! has discovered that words, not just some words, but words in general, indeed, the very concept of “words”, are responsible for the oppression of women.
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image by Leonard Shlain, who claimed, among other things:
“Literacy has promoted the subjugation of women by men throughout all but the very recent history of the West…Misogyny and patriarchy rise and fall with the fortunes of the alphabetic written word.”
Teh stupid, it burns!
First off, hasn’t the idea of some sort of primeval feminist paradise, a matriarchal golden age of Goddess worship and universal peace shown to be a complete load of hooey? Second, if the literate word is so oppressive to women, then why do women dominate the writing and publishing industries? Schlain hedges his sweeping statement with the qualifier “…all but the very recent history of the West”, but if the oppression is so pervasive, there is no adequate explanation for why it should suddenly be different now. I think that Schlain has managed to get things precisely backwards: the truth is that literacy has actually *empowered* women and liberated them, because facility with words does not depend upon physical strength or agility, which favors males.
When my son (who is an avid reader) was growing up, I followed the guidelines in The Educated Child: A Parents Guide From Preschool Through Eighth Grade. I suggest you do, too; You can not leave your child’s education to the whims of the public school system.
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Slightly off-topic, the Robbins article has a photo from this scene in Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility:
That’s the late Alan Rickman reading
“For whatsoever from one place doth fall,
Is with the tide unto an other brought:
For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.”
from Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queen.
Chew on that, Common Core.
The headline: White, straight, able-bodied man? You can’t attend equality summit: Lecturers’ union members must declare their ‘protected characteristic’ when applying to attend. As in, University and College lecturers.
Poor Plato would be spinning in his grave at the Academy.
Read my post, “Equality summit” bans straight, white, abled-bodied men . . . for the sake of diversity
At the Watchers’ Council,
Every week on Monday morning , the Council and our invited guests weigh in at the Watcher’s Forum, short takes on a major issue of the day, the culture, or daily living. This week’s question:Does Education Need Reform?
Fausta’s Blog : Yes, education thoroughly needs reform.
All schools must be answerable to the parents, who should have freedom to choose what schools they want for their children.
Elementary schooling is most important in a child’s development. For instance, substantial research on the brain’s neuroplasticity shows the importance of learning cursive handwriting during childhood. My experience is that few elementary school teachers are even aware of such research – and teaching cursive is a long, hard process which is not favored by the “teach for the test” environment.
In today’s society, schools are called to do many functions that parents should. At the same time, most teachers’ colleges favor a politically-correct approach of “everybody gets a trophy” instead of focusing on a sense of the value of virtue, a work ethic, and thorough respect and familiarity with the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights, all of which are American values.
As the mother of a boy, I can attest to the fact that most schools – public and private – are oriented to teaching in a way that does not foster the way male students learn. Luckily we were able to place my son in an all-boy’s school that encouraged hands-on learning, and where recess was never cancelled (in fact, the youngest grades had two brief recesses in the morning). He graduated from college with honors.
Current curricula is affected by the latest trends. I remember when the local school board proposed to change (at great expense to the taxpayer) the math curriculum years ago. My husband asked “were any studies done comparing the new plan’s effectiveness to the current one?” Not one member of the board had even thought of such a study. Now we have Common Core, with murky math exercises that I cannot understand even after having completed nine semesters of college and graduate school statistics, calculus, and economics.
I also believe that one of the most important things a good educator can have is a sense of the value of learning-from-failure, which goes hand-in-hand with understanding the value of healthy competition. It is tragic that the present educational environment can not comprehend either. As ever, it falls to us parents to make sure our children do.
Maggie’s Notebook : We first need the will to change education. To do that we need parents insisting on it and finding a way to sacrifice whatever is necessary to put their children in good schools when their public school is failing. Most importantly, we need teachers willing to stand up for truthful text books and honest methods of teaching, grading and passing pupils. Today’s teachers come out of their own education taught to hate and be victims. We are on a merry-gro-round. When our kids fall off, the merry-go-round continues to spin.
How do we get truth into textbooks? The only answer I have is that educators and parents must insist on it. If we find a way to provide truthful civics and history textbooks, then can our children CANNOT pass the SAT, aligned to Common Core, and testing is not going away anytime soon. For decades, Liberals have tried to bring racism and victimization into everyday life so that every school child is turned into that community’s organizer.
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The times, they have been a-changin’: Leave your “safe space” and go read my rant, In Loco Parentis.
The exceptionally smart Ronald Nelson makes the right decision: read my article on Why the University of Alabama won over the Ivy League
