359
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by MicroWave@lemmy.world to c/news@lemmy.world

Non-paywall link

South Carolina high school English teacher Mary Wood was reprimanded last school year for teaching a lesson on race. She began teaching it again this year.

Mary Wood walked between the desks in her AP English Language and Composition classroom, handing out copies of the book she was already punished once for teaching.

Twenty-six students, all but two of them White, looked down at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a memoir that dissects what it means to be Black in America — and which drew calls for Wood’s firing when she tried to teach it last year in her mostly White, conservative town. Wood crossed to a lectern and placed her hands on either side of a turquoise notebook, open to two pages of bullet points explaining why she wanted to teach Coates’s work.

“That book that you guys have, it deals with racism,” she said on a recent Tuesday. “It’s going to be something with which you’re unfamiliar. That you need to spend time to research to fully understand.”

Wood stared at her class. She tried to make eye contact with every teenager. Anyone, she reminded herself, might be secretly recording her — or planning to report her.

...

Plus, both teachers believed the book, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is superbly written: a master class in the deployment of rhetorical devices. There was no better way to teach children how to formulate their own arguments, they thought.

“It teaches kids a different perspective, [it] teaches kids how to write well,” Wood said in an interview. And “it’s the right thing to do.”

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] themeatbridge@lemmy.world 7 points 2 years ago

I associate activism with an agenda. Activist may or may not be dishonest, but if they are they justify is by the righteousness of their cause.

Teaching children reality in school is not an agenda.

[-] EldritchFeminity 9 points 2 years ago

An agenda is a plan or program, often ideological in nature. If your ideology is that children should be taught the truth, then acting in accordance with that ideology is following your agenda. And if you act to teach children the truth in defiance of the prevailing agenda to teach them falsehoods, then that is inherently activism following said agenda.

The concept of an agenda is not inherently good or bad. It is simply following what you believe in through pre-planned actions. Buckling your seat belt is part of an agenda. You take action in line with the ideology that a seat belt will prevent you from flying through the windshield in the case of an accident, because you believe that becoming a lump of meat on the asphalt is worse than whatever injuries you could get from wearing the seat belt. Other people may have opposing views (maybe they want to be crushed into lumps of meat, idk), and not wearing a seat belt is part of their ideology.

The belief that somebody having an agenda is inherently a bad thing is yet another part of the anti-intellectual agenda to bully people into obedience by taking words with important meanings and rendering them into useless fear mongering that can be used as a lash against anybody who dares to speak out. The same thing that happened to "woke" and "politically correct."

[-] helenslunch@feddit.nl 5 points 2 years ago

Education has no agenda?

this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
359 points (100.0% liked)

News

36118 readers
2823 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.


Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, blogs, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.


7. No duplicate posts.


If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.


All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS