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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34561 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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These objections seem to be be an attempt to divert from the actual motive /reason, being that people do not want courses which single out African Americans, although European History already exists. Maybe rebrand it as "African History", which does not exist as an AP subject? There are no good answers it seems. My own opinion is just lump all ethnicities/races into a single course(s), without any obvious preference/favoritism. I don't think it's that big if a deal.

Banish from your mind the notion that this course teaches history. I linked below to an African American Studies scholar who freely admits as much. The course is not about history. It's about "learning how to think" and "viewing things through a critical lens".

I'm really struggling to come up with anything that would be an apple to apples comparison to a course we'd be broadly familiar with. But these "XYZ Studies" degrees really are their own special thing. I can't think of a single other curriculum that isn't about teaching subject matter per say, and is instead about deconstructing, recontextualizing, or specifically countering other course work or cultural forces. Like a "math" class that attempts undermine your belief in validity mathematics.

The course is not about history. It's about "learning how to think" and "viewing things through a critical lens".

Those are not mutually exclusive. The CA history standards, for example, include both content standards and historical thinking and analysis standards. I assume other states do as well. And AP World, AP European and AP US History all include historical analysis and thinking as purposes of the course.

viewing things through a critical lens

I have come to the opinion that critical is a terrible word choice (but possibly deliberately so). The different meanings of "heralded to critical acclaim", "critical decision to save the world", "in critical condition", and "overly critical diatribe" are so disparate that despite years of supposed education, I'm not sure which "critical thinking" refers to.

Naively, we should be teaching students to fairly evaluate ideas, and to make important decisions. But sometimes it seems like people lean into the criticism aspect to justify nihilism and tearing down everything without any thought to improving the human condition.

But sometimes it seems like people lean into the criticism aspect to justify nihilism and tearing down everything without any thought to improving the human condition.

Political as well as social revolutionaries often seek to destroy and delegitimize the dominant framework because chaos and confusion are fertile soil for planting the seeds of a new framework. That's the implicit goal of efforts to "attack structural whiteness" or whatever. Once "whiteness" has been made radioactive and repellent enough, activists can offer their CRT framework as a path to redemption for those benighted souls who had been ignorant enough to use the old framework to understand the world.

You can see this strategy play out in every leftist movement since the French Revolution. It's a good one, the right seems to have no defense against it.

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