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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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I find the autonomy listed a bit misleading for a couple reasons. First, they know exactly what kind of teacher is going to sign up for teaching this course. But more importantly they control the fundamental curriculum with the test design. AP teachers teach to the test, they'd be failing their students their valuable college credit if they didn't. We can pretend like the teachers get to pick the curriculum all we want but if critical theory is on the test critical theory will be taught, simple as that.

But you are confusing content and curriculum. Yes, it will be taught, but as I noted, Florida law explicitly allows it to be taught, as long as it is done objectively. In fact, perhaps the best way to learn about a topic is to criticize it.

Are there any course designs you would consider objectionable by this standard? AP race an IQ? AP Based altrightism? Especially if by teaching demographics data you know that nineteen out of twenty classrooms will be run by a rabid partisan of whichever side you oppose and the test at the end is designed by people you oppose.

I wouldn't be here if I didn't agree with the basic premise of your objection, that exposure to repugnant ideas is good and I'm even sympathetic to high school students getting a dose of this, but I think this is a maximally bad environment for it.

Well, as I think I made clear, any course that is taught with the purpose of pushing a political viewpoint is objectionable.

nineteen out of twenty classrooms will be run by a rabid partisan of whichever side you oppose ... the test at the end is designed by people you oppose

You are making a lot of assumptions there, I must say. Did you even look at the course description? The material that Florida has identified as objectionable are about four of 92 topics.

More importantly, your claim is not Florida's claim. Florida's claim was NOT that "the course seems OK as written, but will be implemented in a biased way." Rather, it was that the course** as written** is biased, which is a claim based on a misunderstanding (perhaps intentional, but perhaps not) on how AP classes work.

The material that Florida has identified as objectionable are about four of 92 topics.

"It's ok officer, for 90% of my drive I wasn't doing 30 over the speed limit"

You must be a big fan of banning gas stoves.

You must be a big fan of devoting 5% of biology class to Intelligent Design.

Nice try, but as it happens I have long advocated for including a unit in intro to biology that presents students with intelligent design and asks them to assess the evidence for and against it. As well as evidence for and against evolution by natural selection, and everything in between.

I wouldn't really be against a "teach the controversy" approach to X-Studies classes either, but I'm not going to let the perfect get in the way of the good.

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