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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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When I search on Google Scholar for that quote, I find only the source you link. Ditto when I search for the two phrases, “all education is political” “teaching is never a neutral act”. So, basically no one is publishing that quote.

I directly linked three books from academic presses from the last two years, an academic blog, an academic tweet, and an academic paper, and I only furnished a sampling of what I found because it just seemed silly to keep going after finding so many examples. That's a far, far cry from "basically no one."

What people ARE doing is paraphrasing Freire

The numerous, recent sources I already cited literally directly quote him, often giving a page number (usually, 19) for the quote. Are you... engaged in performance art here? Duplicating the phenomenon about which I am complaining?

So, when instead of searching on Google Scholar I instead search for the exact quote in regular old google, I get 19 hits, one of which is you. When I search for “all education is political" "teaching is never a neutral act” freire, I get 91 hits, including you. That is pretty much "basically no one." As others have noted, you are complaining about lazy quotations, an unfortunately very common phenomenon, but one which in this case at least has the merit of accurately representing the views of the cited author.

  • -12

I really admire how smoothly you were able to combine the implication "basically no one is doing this, who cares" with the implication "this happens all the time, who cares" in this comment. If that move hasn't got a fancy name like "motte and bailey doctrine" or "apophasia," then it should, and if it does have a name, I would like to learn it.

Well, if you can't understand the difference between an empirical claim about a general phenomenon and and empirical claim about a specific phenomenon, then I can't help you.

But to be more explicit, your post seems to me to be little more than "boo outgroup", and 1) your evidence that your outgroup is doing what you claim is incredibly weak; and 2) you have no evidence that what that handful of outgroup members has done is unique to your outgroup, so, yes, who cares?

And to be completely clear, those who cite Freire seem to me to almost always be full of shit. Especially some former colleagues of mine who literally argued that the fact that "teaching is inevitably political" gave them license to push their political views in class, when of course it actually means that they had a responsibility to present students with views they disagreed with.

  • -13

But to be more explicit, your post seems to me to be little more than "boo outgroup"

The "more" is really the important part, though. I admit these people are in my "outgroup" but the point was the sloppy scholarship (and my disbelief), not the outgroup per se.

your evidence that your outgroup is doing what you claim is incredibly weak

My evidence that the individual scholars I am directly complaining about are doing exactly what I am complaining about seems pretty ironclad to me, to the point where I doubt it could possibly be so straightforward, to the point where I asked a bunch of Internet strangers if they could maybe check the Portugese for me because surely these scholars aren't that stupid but--yes, these scholars are apparently at least that stupid. To the point where @netstack immediately identified a separate case of this same phenomenon happening in other articles referencing Freire.

you have no evidence that what that handful of outgroup members has done is unique to your outgroup, so, yes, who cares?

I care, as I believe I stated in my original comment. It's offensive to me, as a professional, when other professionals do shoddy work, especially when it costs me time. If that's not enough for you, like, okay! You should go talk to someone who counts in your eyes, instead of telling me that I shouldn't care about things that I care about.

And to be completely clear, those who cite Freire seem to me to almost always be full of shit.

This is how I feel about all critical theorists, but surely it helps matters to present the occasional clear case of academic malfeasance. I don't regard them to be full of shit because reasons, I regard them to be full of shit because look here are dozens of examples of easily-identified shitty scholarship on just one quotation.

For what it’s worth, I do think this sort of OP pushes the boundaries of

Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?'

“Boo outgroup” isn’t a rule. It works as a report category, though, because it requires toeing a number of others. Being a bit uncharitable or a bit general or a bit angry at Those People is normal. Feeling all of those at once is a recipe for less-than-clear thinking. It’s also a good way to get other people to make the same generalizations.

So I sympathize with @Gdanning. Your OP got my hackles raised. I made my response anyway because, well, the object level really was dumb. Not terribly surprising (per the gwern link), but dumb, and therefore a good distraction.

I maintain that, if posting like that were normalized, this community would be much worse-off.

This is all strange internet stuff, you've contradicted your own stance.

I don’t follow. Are you saying I’m outgroup-booing?

You supported the op in your comments, even seemed to be enjoying the process, then turned around right at the end following the other comments. This is inconsistent behavior and reads strangely.

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