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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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How many teacher education schools have to keep explicitly saying that their pedagogical approach is based on liberatory theories of critical social justice before you start believing them? Like, have you made any attempt to actually engage with the theories underpinning this educational model? Or are you just defaulting to the lazy idea that “conspiracies don’t happen” and satisfying yourself with that? There’s nothing “bizarre” about taking the literal words of widely-taught educational theory textbooks seriously, and drawing the conclusion that the people putting those theories into practice actually mean them and believe in them.

How many teacher education schools have to keep explicitly saying that their pedagogical approach is based on liberatory theories of critical social justice before you start believing them

But - in every other area, """these people""" just take random things and say they're racist or liberatory. Eating twinkies? Self care. Milk is racism. More black people in television ads? Helping little black children see themselves on TV, empowerment. Having long hair is conservative. But none of those things actually are that, and deciding that phonics is conservative doesn't actually mean whole-word is based in 'liberatory theories of critical social justice', or is even bad, it might be totally random.

‘X is racist’ is just how midwit college educated women say ‘I don’t want to do x despite it being a better idea than whatever I’m doing currently’.

Or 'I don’t want you to do x despite it being a better idea than whatever you're doing currently.

Can you please link an example of this? I really need to read this in all of its glory for myself.

See my below comment in this same thread about Paolo Freire and Lucy Calkins. You can find a bunch of their work and their public statements on Google.