Seems like that applies to pretty much any identity group, good or bad. e.g., you could easily say “nothing fuels White nationalism more than a loud group of people opposing them”. When it comes to opposition, “loud” is not a good substitute for “smart”
Agreed. Also “smart” isn’t usually enough to be effective either. To effectively dismantle extremist views, you have to help them understand how their methods are self-defeating. That requires a degree of empathetic understanding most people aren’t willing to invest. And so the cycle continues...
Agreed! It's the same with political parties: when there are 2 "teams," what are the odds that tens of millions of people believe in everything that's under one team's banner?!
My own primary and secondary school experience was that I wasn't really ready for the classics in primary and secondary school -- and I don't know if I was ready for them in college, because I didn't take any literature courses in college because I frankly hated literature by then. This wasn't because I was anti-reading -- I read a ton of modern novels. But I wasn't emotionally mature enough nor did I have a broad enough life experience to be spoken to by Dickens, Hemingway, or Dostoevsky, and I just found those books boring. (And I'm white, male, straight, and privileged as hell).
I dunno how common this is. But I always felt like we should concentrate on inculcating a love of reading in our children first, and let great literature come gradually. If that means assigning JK Rowling or whatever, then let the kids get literate, let them enjoy their books, and then let them read classics in college or on their own as adults.
That’s how I approach it with my son: he loves to write stories/comics, but he misspells every other word (he’s well below grade reading level). But I don’t ”help“ him by correcting, s as would likely happen in an institutional educational setting. Given that he lives with two college educated parents in a house full of books, he’ll pick up spelling eventually. The window that MIGHT close quickly is not of spelling, but of gaining a love of written stories. The test will follow.
My own ability to spell has gone down over time as I increasingly rely on spellcheck. Sometimes I don't even try; I just get the word close enough that it can guess what I want.
I totally agree. Nowadays, I think most teachers encourage phonetic spelling - and it's so wonderful to look at kids' stories and comics with crazy spelling
Beyond that, there really are books that kids like that are trash -- I mean, not even in terms of themes or lessons, just bad writing craft -- and ones that aren't. And maybe the ones that aren't trash also aren't Dickens or Dostoevsky, but I think it'd be really helpful for someone to sit down and say, "Okay, this story actually does some interesting things with subtext or theme (while being about adventures and dragons), while this one is just badly constructed (while being about adventures and dragons)," and created a list of books that kids could read that would ladder them towards more sophisticated understandings of literature instead of hitting that sophisticated understanding like a gigantic cliff.
not reading < reading stuff they're interested in that's poorly written < reading stuff they're interested in that's well written
So if all they'll read is trash, let them read trash. But if someone can go through a bunch of kids books that kids genuinely enjoy and find the ones that have a little more going on behind the scenes, it's valuable to put those ones in front of the kids.
I agree. Having young kids, picture books and now chapter books have become a big part of my life, sharing ones I loved with them and finding new ones that are wonderful. Both of my kids love books, and I love talking with them about them. Now that my older daughter is nearly 8, she is fully in charge of her own reading, and I am working hard to let go of my judgment about her choices!
We read Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet in sixth grade, which is insane. I think English class in middle and high school should focus on improving reading and writing skills, and assigning books that cultivate a love of reading fits perfectly with that. The study of literature should be considered akin to the study of paintings and other fine arts and take place mostly in college.
I agree. I don't think I was ready for any of it either. I think maybe TV and movies and warped perceptions of the past make people forget how "young" kids in high school really are and that a lot of them don't have the life experience to wrap their heads around certain books. Since someone brought it up in another post, I remember reading "Beloved" in high school and no one could get past one of the characters having sex with a cow in the first chapter...because we were idiots and just not developmentally ready to grasp what Morrison was trying to say about the desperation involved in someone resorting to that.
Right!1! I have retained 0% of any of the "classics" that were on the curriculum that didn't click with me, which means I basically only remember Orwell and Dostoyevski.
I can't imagine adding more classics is going to work for teens? My N=1 so clearly my thinking is super data driven. ;-)
Agree 100%. The only classics I enjoyed in high school were Poe and Dostoevsky. The rest I wasn't really able to appreciate until well into my 20s and 30s.
Your point about emotional maturity is dead on. You need more life experience and general knowledge to really pick up on the themes and social commentary present in many classic works. Hats off to the high schoolers that are able to grasp and appreciate this stuff right off the bat.
Absolutely. I recall being bored to tears in high school with "Silas Marner" and was put off George Elliot for years. Just in recent years, I picked up Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda and enjoyed them immensely. (I still won't touch Silas Marner.) I love reading now, but to do that I had to overcome the burden of pre-college education, too much of which was "classics," or "good for me."
I really don't care what they assign kids to read in school as long as the aim is to engage them, fire their imagination, spark intelligent, reasoned (and not rigidly ideological) debate and, one hopes, instill a lifelong love of reading, whether or not the classics ever become a part of that.
I'm pretty anti-woke as well, and I have been on this train for awhile. I saw a lot of my peers in high school lose interest in literature when we started reading greek classics and Shakespeare in freshman English. Not that these works don't have value, but getting through them is a struggle at that age. It would have been great to read modern books earlier on that were more topical, entertaining, and relevant to our lives.
That being said, the wokies aren't going to take your advice. Using the extreme and nutty language about decolonizing and white supremacy is an end in itself as moral grandstanding is key component of the advocacy.
The last sentence is perfectly put. I grew up in an evangelical christian bubble. The incentives there was often to performitavely display the quality of one's faith more than actually improve the quality of it. The point here often seems to be to advertise one's wokeness more than thoughtfully engage with the ideas behind it. The lack of real data that Matt cites points to a real truth here: data doesn't matter. Performance does.
We have a schism on the left (maybe it's been there for years and it was less easy to see when we all agreed that the orange guy was the really big problem) between woke progressives (who tend to get slagged on in these comment threads) and progressives who would like to see things fixed and think wokeness has gotten performative and silly.
Matt's anti-woke critique usually comes in two flavors:
- The woke thing doesn't actually produce the outcomes that anyone wants and
- The woke thing will never happen because conservatives exist and the sales pitch gives them hives.
What's interesting about changes to the reading curriculum is that it shows a potential casualty of the internal left civil war: if the woke folk come up with an idea that's actually useful and dress it up in rhetoric, the idea is going to be a casualty of the polarized argument.
My take-away is that a lot of nuance and care is needed in these discussions to not throw out the occasional baby with gallons of bathwater.
Oh absolutely. To be clear - I completely agree with your point. We should be willing to look at the proposals that have evidence backing them and decide if they make sense. Matt's point is the correct one, saying "kids should be shown content that they relate to" makes a ton of sense and all but the most obscene cultural conservative would object. Saying "we need to dismantle white supremacy in schools" makes everyone to the right of the che guevara say "what the fuck are you talking about?"
One thing that I think is remarkably disingenuous in this thread is boiling broader social and cultural justice movements down to the language they use. Yeah, as someone who graduated from an ivy-adjacent school less than two years ago I'm well aware that the euphemism olympics can be tiring. But it's really not the point and I think most people here know that it's not the point but it's way easier to attack entire movements (i.e. in education pushing for CRP) by making fun of them for making people say their pronouns instead of constructively engaging with arguments about how we educate young people.
In my experience, the logic underlying the language is rarely explicated. The vast majority of people seem content say "decolonize American education!" and let the term "decolonize" do all of the rhetorical work.
that's more a function of how it's covered than what they're actually saying. It's way easy for Matt to joke about people saying to decolonize education than to write a policy article about what that means. My school district has a contract with UCLA to provide professional development which does lead to a lot of the "woke" language but it's not intellectually honest to argue there's not an underlying philosophy. I'm not on-board with everything, but we should generally give people the benefit of believing they honestly believe what they say they do and trying to listen to them. That rarely happens among the part of the left that Matt and a few others belong to that would probably be described as sophisticated pragmatic progressives. There's almost more of an inclination to give figures on the right, who I think far more frequently operate in bad faith, more of the benefit of the doubt than those on the cultural left.
I'm sure there is reasoning behind phrases like "decolonize American education." I'm saying that this reasoning is seemingly never made transparent. I honestly wonder if some supporters of these ideas don't know the deeper reasoning themselves?
Also, I read through the top 5 google results. Apart from one reference to a controversial statue, I did not come across a single concrete example of colonization in US education. I also did not come across a general definition of colonization that seemed to apply to our classrooms.
I can barely make out an analogy between the classrooms of colonized India and modern US classrooms. But this analogy wasn't fleshed out at all, much less to a degree commensurate with the huge changes to education that these articles spent most of their length prescribing.
So needless to say I'm a little frustrated. But I still don't think the notion of "decolonizing education" is necessarily bad/wrong.
The problem is that a clear description of the problem is apparently nowhere to be found. Also, it seems like too many people are clear and specific with regard to prescribing changes, but vague and lazy when it comes to revealing the rationale behind those changes.
I can understand how writing out the same points over and over gets tiresome.
Unfortunately, when it comes to researching "woke" ideas, Google is usually unhelpful. It's only good for vague definitions for certain terms. I feel like the info I is never complete enough to allow for any critical thinking on my part.
For example, from sipping the equitea on medium: "Our education system wasn’t integrated until the 1970s. How can a system that separated people of color and white people, that was created and maintained by white people, be an inclusive system that prioritizes the success of ALL? It cannot."
As far as justifying the idea that "our education system is colonialized," this is about as deep as the reasoning in the piece goes.
And at first glance it seems ok, but I'm still left wondering what *specifically* is wrong with education? Is it too much to ask for a single example of the kinds of things white people baked into the education system to the detriment of non-white people?
This lack of specificity is seemingly everywhere, and I haven't experienced this kind of thing when researching any topic outside of the "woke" category.
It doesn't end either. Just go more woke. To borrow from some very woke scholars, Decolonization is not a metaphor. You can't decolonize a bookshelf or a classroom if the very land is still appropriate by white invaders. If true decolonization of indigenous lands is not your "project" then it's inappropriate to claim you are decolonizing anything.
I'll second Jason's point about performance but will sidestep the invocation of Judith Butler that seems like it would be fun to invoke here.
I took Shakespeare my Senior year... I loved it when I figured out all the dirty jokes. Taming of a Shrew was pretty subversive... could they even teach it these days?
This is true—the wolves aren’t going to take Matt’s advice—but I think it’s really important to recognize when the social-justice left has made good a relevant points.
There is already a backpack on both the right and the left to social justice politics. When it loses its relevancy, we need to make sure to throw out the bath water and keep the baby.
Matt is pointing at the one of the babies that I think we need to keep going forward.
+1 for modern literature. My big thing: expand the option set. Culturally, we are so obsessed with cutting people into distinct, rigid groups. Just give people 5-10 options for their English class material. If you want to set a higher bar for the Shakespeare people, do some kind of "Theatre Honors" certificate.
differentiated literature and writing instruction is way underrated as a tool to help kids develop from either below-competent to competent users of language or from competent to excellent ones. Most high school English teachers can help a talented kid through Shakespeare which will put that kid on the path towards being a sophisticated reader and writer by the end of college to the extent they'll potentially be extended career opportunities as a result. For a lot of other kids, reaching that competency level will prevent them from being denied career opportunities due to their reading or writing skills. It's also just not that hard to do but for whatever reason isn't widely practiced. Could have something to do with availability of books in school libraries.
Like almost every problem in this country, it starts with a lack of imagination. It ends with people and institutions unwilling to commit to the basic work required to perform above the global median. This is boring stuff: slow, boring stuff.
I think that's partly true (i'm a high school english/history/special education teacher so that's going to bias my perspective here) but I do think the reality is that teaching in underserved schools in the US is really hard and it's hard to modify curriculum on an individual level without getting in trouble. Another dynamic that's at play is that there's a glut of innovative and really cool ways to improve the way we teach but I have no idea how to incorporate them all. The obvious answer is to pick like one or two, but there's a lot of people who just shut it all out because it's overwhelming and impossible to implement all of them. I've had something like 15 professional development sessions this semester and each one pointed me towards either a different learning tool or curriculum method.
Well put: "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."
I would tend to direct my ire toward administrators. It is the job of leadership in an organization to align people toward a goal and give them the facilities it requires to accomplish that goal. Doing everything at once or drastically switching the plan each year seems like a recipe for failure, and I can't imagine many teachers would be for it, anyway.
And I am not one of those people that thinks "The private sector ALWAYS does better in this." I have been part of some severely dysfunctional corporate bureaucracies where indecision and scattered strategy is like nitrogen, it just floats in the air. Doing something requires choosing something, and our leaders right now have an inability to choose things.
Yeah I agree with this wholeheartedly, administrators don't have easy jobs but there's a tendency to not stick to any pedagogical philosophy for more than a semester or at most a year.
Same. As a kid I read a mountain of comic books, got into science fiction in high school, then segued into literary fiction. I still don't read the classics much.
I think this line: "...my advice to proponents of decolonizing language arts curricula [really insert any progressive cause here] would be to remember that in a democracy, they need to communicate these ideas to an electorate that is mostly white, mostly over 50, and mostly did not graduate from college."
is almost a thesis statement for this site. To me, a person who personally holds fairly progressive values, but would rather win and compromise on a half loaf than lose on purity, I find it disheartening how negative a reaction I get from some people (friends, even) when sharing a pretty obvious statement like the above.
Just typing that out, my inner progressive is reminded of how frustrating it must be to be a member of a minority group and be told that your immediate interests need to be dialed back so we can win an election and maybe you get some crumbs. How many election cycles can you deal with that frustration? But at the same time, that's the reality of our system.
Only solution that springs to mind is more along the lines of your "Make Blue States Great Again," and some other work you've done on who should be primaried, arguing blue areas should be bold in their policy and making sure that deep blue areas have no qualms primarying moderate democrats. Federalism can be a beautiful thing.
" how frustrating it must be to be a member of a minority group and be told that your immediate interests need to be dialed back so we can win an election and maybe you get some crumbs."
I think the idea is that we should be focusing on things that help everyone and not trying to divide people along semi-arbitrary lines and then pit their interests against one another.
"...remember that in a democracy, they need to communicate these ideas to an electorate that is mostly white, mostly over 50, and mostly did not graduate from college."
I totally agree with this as a recipe for national politics, and I am totally on board with MY's populism (or at least, facade of populism in pursuit of progressive objectives).
At the same time: not everything is national politics. How much should these considerations constrain the behavior and rhetoric of people who are not currently doing national politics?
For instance, what if you are an undergraduate in a university, trying to figure out gender politics? What if you are researching the history of racial oppression? Are even people in these positions required to tailor their utterances to the white, over-50, HS dropouts?
If the gay rights movement had censored itself this way, back when it was a tiny fringe in academia and society, then it never would have developed the frameworks that eventually became popular and led to marriage equality and openly gay war-fighters in the military. Ditto for feminism -- equal pay for equal work is now a majority position, but once marked you as a laughable "libber", a radical whom no one needed to take seriously.
So, while I agree with the view that the left needs to get more populist in national politics, I would like to argue for protecting little enclaves of radical thought, where new ideas can grow (you might call them "hothouses"). Tomorrow's equal pay or marriage equality or other majority view maybe today's woke absurdity.
(Which, conversely, is why the anti-wokists are so fixated on whatever a random undergrad at Oberlin just said in a drum-circle. The content of those discussions is both politically trivial in itself -- the kids are just being kids -- and also a sign of possible future mass movements.)
Yep. When I talk to other progressives about this I try to frame it in terms of "there's not a lot of point to this if we never get to do any of it" - e.g. my hope is to make clear that I'm asking them to consider a behavior change not because I think they are wrong, misguided, stupid, immoral, or anything, but rather because we both want to see a common outcome and it might be time to try a new tactic.
(In practice, maybe some of them are misguided - maybe some are not - but I don't think there's anyone out there whom you can convince to do something by leading with "you suck.")
I've put 9 kids through K-12.... so I guess it makes me more of an expert than most. Also... I know Sara Mead from my old school education blogging days. That was a decade ago.
A math curriculum that only does "drill and kill" would be very detrimental to students. Mastery at math requires a) conceptual understanding, b) procedural knowledge, and c) fluency (or memorization). Again, a balanced approach is needed. The Singapore Math Curriculum, when property used, is a good example of a balanced curriculum. "Fuzzy math" isn't a thing. Bad instruction or poorly designed curriculum is.
Project Based instruction is a powerful took in a teacher's arsenal, but the idea that every assessment can be project based is misguided. Key, however, is that PBL is not synonymous with group work. My own preference is that all *graded* assessments should be individual assessments and not group.
I can barely put one kid through skill, so I tip my hat to Rory! But can you imagine if I said to a professional baseball player: "I've seen over a thousand baseball games in my life and coached my kid through little league so I'm as much of an expert in baseball as anyone else." Good parents know their kids very well; good educators know kids very well.
Big fan of Singapore Math. Obviously Math requires a conceptional understanding, but you have to memorize the facts first to mastery.
An example is Algebra... people struggle with factoring. Factoring requires some to basically know their math facts backwards. Know them so well that they can look at "20" and know instantly that its 1*20, 2*10, 4*5. When they know these intuitively, they have more working memory to figure out the rest. Even if they understand the concept... fluency is key.
The key thing is to teach a single process... don't get me started about the multiple ways to do long division. The simple fact is that some kids are going to struggle and probably never internalize math the same way as other kids. If we half ass teach a bunch of ways... that kid will never learn to be competent in any of the processes.
New math try to teach too much, at the expense of teaching one thing well. Now obviously some kids can learn it this way and excel.... even though a lot of the real teaching is happening at home (I have been there and done that).
The problem with "good educators" is everyone thinks they are a "good educator"... the system is dead set against value added metrics at the individual level. So a parent with multiple kids might be a better judge at who/what a good teacher is.
I personally am a big fan of Direct Instruction (google Project Follow Through). Lots of middle class and above families aren't because they think its to rote, but done well, it can actually lead to acceleration.
My 14-year old did Algebra II Honors and Calculus II Honors last year (8-th grade) entirely via remote/online learning. It was awesome because it was entirely mastery based... once you learn something, she tested out, moved to the next level. In a normal class, she would of only got through one of the courses, and probably been bored of her ass.
But mastery learning is also good for those who struggle... it ensures that they are provided with enough practices to master something, before they move on. In a normal class, they would be lost.
All this controversy about Project Based Learning... why hasn't anyone addressed by Homework is Bad hot take.
I don't know enough to comment on different instructional methods, but I really wish instead of learning calculus I had learned about statistics and modeling.
Actually, my biggest pet peeve with my education is not enough statistics. Personally, I think we would be better off teaching High Schoolers less Algebra and more Statistics.
I agree with a lot of what you are saying, but with math, the idea that fluency has to come before conceptual mastery I believe is wrong. That's not how the mind works and or how to engage kids. A 1st grader can achieve a conceptual understanding of addition as the joining of objects before they've memorized basic addition facts just like you can gain a beginning conceptual understanding of multiplication as repeated addition before memorizing the multiplication tables (for the record, I'm pretty decent at math and I have never been able to fully memorize the multiplication tables; it's just something weird about my brain). Conceptual learning, procedural knowledge, and fluency are mutually reinforcing; it's an iterative process, not a first one thing then the other. What you said about working memory is absolutely correct. When you memorize basic math facts it frees up your memory for higher-level thinking. That's really huge and totally underappreciated by educators who discount the value of any memorization.
By Direct Instruction do you mean lecturing? I'd be as skeptical of someone who told me all learning should be collaborative and project-based as I would of someone who told me all teaching should be lecture-based. Again, cue up the research on average person's attention span. And all the great literature on teaching strategies. Lecturing is best if the learning goal is content knowledge. Not a bad goal! But there are other really important learning goals as well. For how to do an effective lecture, this reading is good: http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/107059/chapters/New-American-Lecture.aspx
I think (?) direct instruction means the teacher directly teaches the content (which could be by lecture, but could be through assigned reading or even a video) as opposed to what is currently in vogue in many districts, which is to have students "discover" the content.
"Project based learning. My smart kids would do everything. My lazy kids would coast."
As a kid I thought the same thing. Then I got a real job and the third day they say, "So you'll be part of a team working on a project..." And I thought, "Oh, that's why they did all that project based learning."
This is really interesting to me. Do you feel that group projects starting in elementary school are a meaningful preparation for the dynamics of team projects in a professional context, and kids who got a decent education but without group work are at a disadvantage in this way?
I would also argue that many feel that education and academics should exist for their own sake as a pure "good." The idea that ones education exists to prepare one to work on the upgrade team at Amalgamated Widget is anathema.
I totally think it's a meaningful preparation as the dynamics are exactly the same at 12 years old as they are at 42 years old. For that reason I think people who didn't do group work would be at a disadvantage.
Team sports are better preparation for team projects than project based learning in school. I'm not saying there should be none... but it shouldn't be the only thing that is done.
I have to disagree. Soccer is an awesome sport to learn teamwork. You have to know your position, but its so fluid that you have to naturally cover other places, and then anticipate where space is going to be. Its collaborative more than any other sport.
Many folks aren't cut out for team sports. Also I'm not aware of anyone arguing that there should only be group learning. If they are then that's just silly.
There are some schools that get the balance wrong... and there are some schools which its almost the entire curriculum.
These are usually the same schools where your kid doesn't learn their multiplication facts.
I think more people could do team sports than is done currently. But robot battle club, or chess club, or debate team or any other curricular activity often teaches the same thing.
I remember doing a project in 8th grade that was part of a something they called a "problem solving competition." I remember learning the word "brainstorm" then, but the whole process didn't feel meaningful to me. It was only a few years ago that the light bulb went off and I thought "oh, that's kind of what most of my work is!".
Maybe if they'd shown me how it's applied in the real world via movies or something like that...
Most of my teachers had gone from college right into teaching. If they worked prior, it was in the typical after school or summer jobs that you get as a teen. As a result, when they were told to include something in the curriculum, they didn't really have any insight into how it applied to the real world.
As a social studies teacher, my experience is that project-based learning can be done well or poorly. If kids are researching a presentation together, producing it together, and receiving one group grade, then yes, the brightest and most motivated kids will do all the work. If you have a way of holding each student accountable, project-based learning can be very motivating for students who are typically low engagement. Also, project-based learning can be individual work as well, and it is much more engaging that typical paper and pencil tests that drill and kill students on historical facts.
Interesting fact... every teacher thinks their project-based learning is done right.
All I know is I can learn much more reading a book in two hours than I can "engaging with others" in two hours.
I used to get in trouble in my Social Studies classes for reading my text book while the teacher was lecturing. I'd normally have in read cover to cover within the first two weeks of class. It was painful trying to listen to a teacher explain things to others, when I already got it.
College/University though was a lot more interesting.
I assume PBL is just a way to let the struggling kids get a good grade so teachers don't have to fail them.
First, I think you are conflating project-based learning and group work. Both are important and both serve different functions in the educational process. Group work is important because (as previous posters mention) most "real world" work is collaborative AND discussing material with others actually helps students learn it better, thus group work is a great formative assessment. Group work can be very difficult to assess as a summative, but there are ways of doing so. I will sometimes weight the research more heavily than the actual project or make students responsible for different parts of the project.
Project-based learning is about more than dioramas--which I agree are a waste of time at any grade level outside of art class. I have had students studying trade networks role play as merchants, research the resources available in a region (individually), write business plans (individually), and pitch their business as a group to investors (other teachers I recruited). Never have I seen students more engaged in the work.
Yes, reading and direct instruction are the most efficient ways to learn a lot of content, but if you actually want any of the content to stick, students need to construct something meaningful with it.
My homework philosophy has evolved over the years. I used to assign a lot and grade everything. Now, I either assign homework as reinforcement of what we learned in class or as a continuation of work on a longer term project or piece of writing. I consider all homework "formative" since it is often difficult to tell if parents and tutors have helped produce it.
Excellent points. I once was assigned to teach when my organization had a “swap roles” deal with a local school. It was shocking to realize how much was involved in the sheer act of teaching. I really could have used more theoretical understanding of what was going on in that classroom.
"All I know is I can learn much more reading a book in two hours than I can "engaging with others" in two hours."
But the info in the book isn't the point of the assignment. The point is learning to engage with others productively as one would have to do in almost any professional job.
I didn't really get the idea of the "importance of representation" until I took my then ten-year old daughter to the recent all-female Ghostbusters and she thought it was terrific because the case were all girls doing cool hero stuff. (As somebody who watched the original back in the day, I thought it was a bit "meh" as a remake).
So, I can buy the idea that for Alaska Natives kids, a culturally relevant curriculum makes them more enthused and interested and leads to better overall results . . . as long as the course is actually teaching them the stuff, the actual math. This seems like an idea worth exploring by well-intentioned educators aiming to improve math and reading competence in kids from marginalized backgrounds.
However, terms like "decolonizing" seem like a red flag for the kind of people who are pushing their political ideology rather than actually prioritizing teaching kids stuff, like being able to read, do math, etc. I do not trust that these "culturally relevant" programs are being implemented with the actual concern of better educating kids.
It's amazing how worked up people get about the reading materials assigned to teenagers. I generally skipped the reading and I'm okay. Most kids aren't going to become professional writers and it doesn't matter that much whether they read Catcher in the Rye or Native Son (or neither), as long as they learn to read.
All of the adults fanning this fire (on both sides) seem like bad actors pushing agendas unrelated to education.
Matt uses the example of college kids in publishing pushing lefty media extremely left and this is exactly the same thing. Writers have a different baseline of expectations for competency and they rule the education roost.
At least here in California, the ‘cancel Abraham Lincoln’ has been more prominent than diversifying reading lists (which is being done but more quietly). My fear is the former will generate political backlash (even I’m pissed) to cancel the latter.
I actually genuinely think that high school English classes are an opportunity to expose kids to ideas, motivations, values, and cultures that will make them better-educated in a meaningful way. If that's an agenda, ok. Most of high school is not purely vocational - we don't expect it to tie directly into what people are doing at their jobs. I do not think only people who are going to be professional writers benefit from some exposure to literature any more than only people who are going to be professional historians benefit from some exposure to history. Of course some kids won't engage with it, but some kids will.
There’s a lot of comments here with a lot of words that look interesting but I don’t have time to read them right now. So I just want to weigh in with a simple but highly relevant statement about adolescent psychology:
*Teenagers will not learn anything if they are not interested in the material.*
I’m a high school teacher, so I know what I’m talking about.
Thanks for exposing your largely non-woke audience (me included) to points that push us to think more deeply and less reflexively. This is what I signed up for!
I don’t think that’s the argument that educators who advocate for cultural relevance in curriculum are making. The phrase that a lot of folks go for is “windows and mirrors”. So when you design curriculum, you create opportunities for students to see worlds that are different than their own, and see worlds that reflect their own experience. This is something that we should be doing for all kids, regardless of race or class. And what we’re talking about is including say, Toni Morrison or James Baldwin in the curriculum.
Another common (and effective) practice is pairing texts. So its not necessarily about saying black kids won’t read Homer, its more a question of, what are supplementing Homer with? Or what does Homer supplement in our curriculum. And again, this should be happening at all schools, regardless of the student demographics.
I don’t really disagree with what Marc said on this thread, I was responding to the OP.
Although, I would complicate things by offering that we could look at the cultural relevance question a bit differently. For example, one way to think about is “We should offer culturally relevant texts because kids will find them more interesting”. This may be true, but I don’t think this is the reason to do it. I think the reason to do it is because, it’s offering students something more well rounded in their education.
There’s also a way to think about this in terms of *how* texts are presented to students. For example, Romeo & Juliet almost always kills with 9th graders—because those themes are really relevant to them, if we emphasize those themes in your teaching. So in general I think the conversation is more complicated than if students should read “canon” texts or not based on their racial/cultural backgrounds. That traps us in a conversation about shifting what children of color are reading, rather than a conversation about what all children might be reading. I don’t just teaching the canon texts to white kids is ideal for white students either.
Windows and mirrors makes a great deal of sense! I think what is driving some of the current backlash is the current woke practice of asserting that Homer, for instance, is a mirror for white Americans, which is the assumption of a lot of “decolonize texts” discourse.
I think with Homer this is true. But if you have two books, one about a black boy growing up in Compton, and one about a white boy growing up in Beverly Hills, I think it's not racecraft and actually pretty logical to imagine that the first book appeals more to black boys in Compton and the second book appeals more to white boys growing up in Beverly Hills
Speaking as someone who is around the "decolonize texts" crowd constantly, I can say pretty confidently that yes, Marc's characterization of things is a lot of what this crowd is going after.
And to Matt's point, I think they are totally right to do so. I just think they need to talk about what they are doing in ways that are common sense, as Marc has done here.
So, I'm a bit confused when I read something like the following: "The demand for greater representation from non-European writers need not involve burning copies of Plato and Shakespeare’s texts. We can still teach authors like John Locke, but we should note that he was a liberal political philosopher deeply enmeshed in American slavery – including investing in the slave-trading Royal African Company and co-authoring the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which enshrined chattel slavery." This makes it sound like it's not so much about actually diversifying the curriculum as it is about teaching leftist critiques alongside the traditional criticism. I'm way more comfortable with getting rid of traditional texts and replacing them with reading from other cultures than I am with inserting political tracts.
Maybe we shouldn't assume it, but we shouldn't be above hypothesizing and testing it. I felt like the post characterized culturally-relevant curricula as merely "something to think about."
It's also fun to peel back the layers of rhetoric and look at the kind of pedagogy that's going on under the label of, say, #DisruptTexts.
There are three things I notice when I look at approaches like theirs.
1. One of the main tactics I see used is pairing a traditional text with a modern and diverse text or even some nonfiction. They use these texts in conversation with one another to ask interesting questions about the author, historical context, content and style of the texts, etc. These are great approaches that urge kids to think critically. The Great Gatsby paired with The Warmth of Other Suns seems like a really interesting set of texts for a unit that spans English class and History class.
2. Overall it's a view of reading that doesn't come across in official curriculum often enough. Usually you see reading (in high school, elementary is a whole other thing) as broken down into discrete skills - skills very similar to those you might want kids to learn for acing mandatory state exams. You might spend a week with a short story in your textbook and you'd spend day 1 looking at the plot diagram and day two looking at the way the author uses characterization, and day three looking at how setting and the environment are used to create mood, and so on. This is so common I'd almost call it ubiquitous. It's also boring as hell. It makes reading less about enjoyment or learning or seeking some kind of universal values and more like a meaningless job. The material is uninteresting but equally uninteresting are the activities they are asked to do with that material. When I look at the kind of teaching that goes along with culturally relevant pedagogy, I also see an attempt to teach in a way that helps students makes sense of things as a whole and in the context of the world they actually live in.
3. (Not exactly pedagogy, more about teacher training) Teachers seem hungry for resources and techniques that support their use of diverse texts in their classrooms. This tells me schools of education aren't doing a great job of teaching teachers how to do this. Which makes me wonder if schools of education are really po-mo-woke-anti-racist-marxist-intersectional breeding grounds? I mean, if they can't teach teachers to "decolonize" a bookshelf how are they going to decolonize schools or society? Point is, there's a disconnect between the perception of universities as a leftist force indoctrinating generations of educators and the educators who say they don't know how to do any of that leftist stuff.
"Point is, there's a disconnect between the perception of universities as a leftist force indoctrinating generations of educators and the educators who say they don't know how to do any of that leftist stuff."
Agreed.
Plus, as one of the educators, I can tell you that I am so far from indoctrinating my class, that I cannot even get them to hear me in the simple stuff -- I can't get them to follow the directions on the exam.
Fox News thinks that college teachers are up in front of our impressionable students, pouring leperous distilments into the porches of their ears, converting them into trans gay marxist abortionists.
In fact, no matter what I say, it sounds to them like the muffled squawking-noise that adults make in the Charlie Brown specials.
College English and creative-writhing teacher/ student here.
Agree with this entirely.
It’s important to help students to build a passion for the subject itself if you want to see them excel in it. Research on cognitive fluency theory shows that we love things that we can process easily and efficiently. We will process things more easily and more efficiently if they trigger memories in us. And we are like to have those memories triggered if we are studying something that we “identify” with or from someone we “identify” with. So yeah, our instruction and our content need to be culturally relevant.
At the same time, we need to discuss these ideas in ways that are not off-putting to the average person. Some of the woke grandstanding is making some really good ideas—which is just frustrating.
Likewise, I REALLY appreciate the point you made about boys and books. That topic is complicated though—sociologists have shown that when men and women are educated equally, women tend to read more than men. From what I’ve seen, this trend seems to have been recorded in more than twenty countries, suggesting that it’s not just a matter of how women are enculturated. (See the work of Wendy Griswold.)
So it’s probably no mistake that the last creative writing class I taught was made up of 15 women and 3 men. And it’s probably no mistake that women make up 75% of the publishing industry. (And make up 60% of publishing executives.)
On the other hand, I think there is A LOT more that we can be doing to get boys and men interested in reading. Black and Latino men read for pleasure even less than white men, statistically speaking. So getting men to read is actually kind of a matter of race as well. Feminism in literary spaces is VERY common but from my perspective, it’s somewhat racist since I never hear feminists calling to make literary spaces more friendly to Black and Latino MEN, in particular.
In any case, as a boy who likes books, I wish there was more discussion of this topic. Men aren’t reading as much as they used to. To some extent that is to be expected due to the equality of education, but to some extent, that trend is probably being exacerbated by some well-intentioned ideologies being indiscriminately applied.
'Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,' the Mock Turtle replied; 'and then the different branches of Arithmetic — Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.'
(To quote from a classic book that everyone should be forced to read, whether they like it or not.)
Someone made this comment somewhere else, but I think we don't recognize enough the differences between men and women on average, regardless of society. I think it's what leads us to be so afraid of engineering programs that tilt more male (and in theory, worry about reading/writing programs that tilt more female, but this doesn't happen). And I think the key thing is that this doesn't apply to race because people of all races think the same on average. But as a writing-loving boy, I commiserate! I've taken so many college classes that were over 2/3 girls.
This is slightly off topic, but I just finished watching Bob Wright and Mickey Kaus's New Year's Rockin' Eve youtube video. Kaus brought up a point about woke backlash that I hadn't considered.
The recent woke infiltration of public health discourse (eg vaccination priorities) has given opponents of expanded government a powerful weapon they can leverage across any democratic policy initiative that increases the role of government.
Forget health care and death panels, the new rallying cry for republicans will be "if dems get into power they'll reallocate resources by race, let Nicole Hannah Jones rewrite your kids' history books, and mandate puberty blockers in kids' milk. See all these examples as proof..."
My off the cuff guess is that woke culture war talking points will gain republicans several percentage points of support against any democratic initiative that requires an expansion of government.
As a staunch democrat, even I'm starting to get a little worried. No one elected the ACIP, yet they are making decisions that impact millions. I used to trust bureaucrats to a degree as informed, thoughtful people, but I'm slowly losing my faith.
Even Texas is prioritizing the elderly, despite having a Lt. Governor who said the olds (including him) should be willing to die to get the economy back on track!
Exactly. I didn't articulate this well above, but Mickey's point is that in addition to wokeness being used as a factor in specific elections, like it was against Biden, the ACIP debacle provides great fuel for republicans to use wokeness as a generic argument against any expansion of government or spending.
- How can you support a national health care system when it'll be run by woke bureaucrats prioritizing justice and equity over grandma's well being?
- How can you support greater spending on transportation when it'll just be squandered by woke bureaucrats awarding all the contracts to minorities and prioritizing equity over pragmatism when choosing the route for the new subway?
- How can you support the green new deal when it's less about climate and more of a back-door way to for woke bureaucrats to hand out billions in reparations to oppressed minorities in the name of equity?
Every democratic policy initiative will now be fought from a wokeness angle, in addition to whatever other tactics would have been used in the past.
This is partly the story of how we lost the House races this year. Every Democrat was stained with the woke message, whether on defund the police, or whatever else. It's hard to win if you're stained
I think it's worth bearing in mind how far ACIP were thrown out of their depth here. Their normal job is "who should we recommend take the new shingles vaccine", not defining an incredibly fractious political issue like how to prioritize vaccine rollout for a nation wide pandemic. It's really a failure of the administration that it fell to this one advisory group.
I don't know...maybe I was just triggered by their presentation, but it seems like most other places (including now a number of states) got the very simple notion that saving the most lives is probably the best choice.
With the clarity of retrospect, my guess is that the Great Awokening was the biggest factor in the rise of Trumpism in the first place. There’s a reason the “deplorables” comment stung so bad. Conservatives are tired of everyone assuming the only reason to oppose progressives is due to being sexist or racist.
I think Wokeness is the wrong lens to read the ACIP debacle through. They used that language, but if you look at the substance of their draft recommendation, it was to prioritize vaccinating the workforce over vaccinating non-workers.
I suspect if we ever get deep reporting on it, this will prove to be a case of a body that normally does quiet, apolitical work suddenly being the center of the biggest political issue of the day, and getting inundated by interest group lobbying that distorted their priorities.
The substance was that the essential workers had the right pigments! I think it's almost impossible to look at the ACIP thing through any lens other than wokeness
Essential workers were going to be prioritized because essential workers were a group with more POC in them. This would benefit white essential workers and hurt old POC, but the calculus was absolutely about which group had more POC
When you see a plan that claims to be concerned with helping POC but straightforwardly leads to more POC deaths, I think it's worth at least considering who materially benefits from the plan. And that's fairly obviously businesses who could avoid the costs of work practice changes if their employees were vaccinated.
It's very well established that every industry group in the country was lobbying to get their employees (or at least the frontline ones) prioritized as essential and get the vaccine. I don't think it's crazy to consider how that lobbying affected ACIP.
Even if we assume this to be true, the scenario still shows that "wokeness" is a Bad Thing, because the ACIP draft has shown that it can be effectively utilized by powerful groups to manipulate the public.
They were explicit about their reasoning though. It’s not what you’re saying. It was to strike a blow for racial equity. (As you note, it would not have actually done that in practice.
I would love to see that level of examination - we see the ACIP report and we're all like "how dare they" but ... I have no priors and no baseline. I have no idea what any of this work product should look like or what past decisions have been.
The only caveat I'd add is that communication matters, and if you communicate something to your audience and they don't get it, you can't really blame the audience for not understanding - you have to chance how you communicate.
So if public health officials use language that triggers an anti-woke backlash and they didn't mean to do that, maybe it's on them to use different words?
I mean, if you're prioritizing the workforce over the most vulnerable, "essential workers are more likely to be POC, who have borne the brunt of this pandemic" seems like better messaging than "big business wants to get back to their normal work practices and stop spending money on worker safety."
A tangential point in response to "it’s dangerous to discuss K-12 policy with normies because everyone went to school and has an opinion about it, even if they haven’t done any research or given it serious thought": I do wish, though, that the K-12 policy discussion I see would pay a lot more attention to what people say they wish their K-12 education had *felt* like, rather than exclusively focusing on the measured *outcomes* of that education. K-12 takes up thirteen years of a sentient human's life. We owe it to children to make it a positive experience, not merely a crucible for The Future.
For example, I hate arguments that boil down to "high academic achievers turn out fine no matter what you do to them, so we don't have to think about them at all". Being bored out of your skull for thirteen years waiting for any teacher to challenge you with anything *sucks*, even if hypothetically the opportunity cost of all that wasted time made absolutely no difference to your future productivity (which I doubt, but that's not the point).
I guess this is also an argument for kids reading things they like.
Smart kids need different education than average kids or kids who are struggling. It is a waste for all if this is not understood, or is denied. And I would disagree that smart kids denied the education appropriate for them, will necessarily "turn out fine"
I’d like to share some thoughts from the perspective of an educator.
(I work in secondary education teaching history and economics and also working as a sort of curricular and pedagogical coach for faculty across all departments. While I try and stay current on research and read widely as part of my administrative job, I am a practitioner and not a researcher.)
I agree with the general thrust of this piece, especially as captured in the title. I wish it were not framed around the issue of being "woke" since that's just red meat that really doesn't speak to questions of effectiveness in teaching and learning. More importantly, the argument of this newsletter suffers greatly from a terrible lack of precision. A “culturally relevant pedagogy” is different than an “ethnic studies” program (and both are different from the entire movement for “culturally responsive teaching,” not referenced here). More importantly, to argue that something “works” you have to specify for what purpose it works. How does doing X improve Y? Matt doesn’t define X precisely (but instead uses terms with really different meanings interchangeably) and you doesn’t define Y precisely either. And this is all intended by way of constructive criticism, since fundamentally I do agree with the overall point Matt is making.
Is the goal to improve student’s reading abilities? To increase the graduation rates of underrepresented minorities? To create a more inclusive school community that fosters higher degrees of relational trust? In other words, to determine what works you first have to look at what you are trying to accomplish and then work backwards to the research on that particular goal. And most importantly, to compare the relative effectiveness of various interventions.
I’m going to guess that the reason why research on the effectiveness of “culturally relevant pedagogy” is so think is because of the difficulty of defining what that means and because of the difficulty of sorting out first order and second order effects. (That, and I don’t know that ed schools are necessarily known for their rigorous research methodologies). There might not be a lot of research on how diversifying the literature curriculum affects student outcomes, but there is a lot research on how fostering growth mindsets or strong teacher-student bonds does. I’d argue that a literature curriculum that feels engaging and relevant to students is an important toolkit in achieving both of those goals.
I do think it’s possible to make arguments about educational practices that don’t rely on any specific research findings. In a pluralistic society having pluralistic reading lists are probably a good in and of themselves in promoting greater cross-cultural understanding.
FYI, if you like reading about education here is a very incomplete list of authors you may want to check out (links below):
-On this particular topic, see Lisa D. Delpit
-More generally, John Hattie’s work is probably the most comprehensive summary of what research indicates are the most effective teaching strategies.
-Daniel Willingham is also a great source of research-based insights for teaching effectiveness. -For curriculum design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe are great; and for pedagogy, check out
Ron Ritchhart and the work of Project Zero at Harvard.
-On student engagement see Denise Pope and the work of Challenge Success as well as the work of Carol Dweck.
-The Marshall Memo is a good newsletter for teachers who want to stay up to date on the field of education but don’t have a lot of time.
Total non sequitur, any other Californians wish we weren’t always so late to these conversations!
Educator here as well... I think you made all the right points. I’ll add to your recommendations Gholdy Muhammad’s recent work as well, with I think speaks past the false choice of “culturally relevant” content and skills. There is not trade off to be had, only one that people imagine is there.
You’re over point on effectiveness is also important in any education discussion, folks are often not sure what goals we’re talking when we say a certain practice or policy is effective, and how those various inputs correlate (or don’t) to student outcomes.
Is "so think" was mean to be is "so weak." I wish we could edit posts! Please forgive all other typos. Also, specifically on fostering a love of reading, see Daniel T. Willingham, Raising Kids Who Read: What Parents and Teachers Can Do, which is probably the best research based writing specifically and narrowly focused on how to foster a love of reading and an ability to read.
I love this. People who are reflexively "anti-woke" are often engaging in the narrowing epistemology that they claim they hate.
We shouldn't try to be "woke" or "anti-woke" as much as we should strive being pro-evidence.
Plus, nothing fuels woke ideology more than a loud group of people opposing them.
Seems like that applies to pretty much any identity group, good or bad. e.g., you could easily say “nothing fuels White nationalism more than a loud group of people opposing them”. When it comes to opposition, “loud” is not a good substitute for “smart”
Agreed. Also “smart” isn’t usually enough to be effective either. To effectively dismantle extremist views, you have to help them understand how their methods are self-defeating. That requires a degree of empathetic understanding most people aren’t willing to invest. And so the cycle continues...
Agreed! It's the same with political parties: when there are 2 "teams," what are the odds that tens of millions of people believe in everything that's under one team's banner?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOvPBfMzKjE
My own primary and secondary school experience was that I wasn't really ready for the classics in primary and secondary school -- and I don't know if I was ready for them in college, because I didn't take any literature courses in college because I frankly hated literature by then. This wasn't because I was anti-reading -- I read a ton of modern novels. But I wasn't emotionally mature enough nor did I have a broad enough life experience to be spoken to by Dickens, Hemingway, or Dostoevsky, and I just found those books boring. (And I'm white, male, straight, and privileged as hell).
I dunno how common this is. But I always felt like we should concentrate on inculcating a love of reading in our children first, and let great literature come gradually. If that means assigning JK Rowling or whatever, then let the kids get literate, let them enjoy their books, and then let them read classics in college or on their own as adults.
Yes yes yes - Teaching younger kids to enjoy reading, meaning anything and everything that has printed words on it, is paramount.
That’s how I approach it with my son: he loves to write stories/comics, but he misspells every other word (he’s well below grade reading level). But I don’t ”help“ him by correcting, s as would likely happen in an institutional educational setting. Given that he lives with two college educated parents in a house full of books, he’ll pick up spelling eventually. The window that MIGHT close quickly is not of spelling, but of gaining a love of written stories. The test will follow.
My own ability to spell has gone down over time as I increasingly rely on spellcheck. Sometimes I don't even try; I just get the word close enough that it can guess what I want.
I totally agree. Nowadays, I think most teachers encourage phonetic spelling - and it's so wonderful to look at kids' stories and comics with crazy spelling
Beyond that, there really are books that kids like that are trash -- I mean, not even in terms of themes or lessons, just bad writing craft -- and ones that aren't. And maybe the ones that aren't trash also aren't Dickens or Dostoevsky, but I think it'd be really helpful for someone to sit down and say, "Okay, this story actually does some interesting things with subtext or theme (while being about adventures and dragons), while this one is just badly constructed (while being about adventures and dragons)," and created a list of books that kids could read that would ladder them towards more sophisticated understandings of literature instead of hitting that sophisticated understanding like a gigantic cliff.
With kids, I honestly feel that even total dreck (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Rainbow_Magic_books) is good if it has something that resonates with them.
I mean, I guess to me it goes:
not reading < reading stuff they're interested in that's poorly written < reading stuff they're interested in that's well written
So if all they'll read is trash, let them read trash. But if someone can go through a bunch of kids books that kids genuinely enjoy and find the ones that have a little more going on behind the scenes, it's valuable to put those ones in front of the kids.
I agree. Having young kids, picture books and now chapter books have become a big part of my life, sharing ones I loved with them and finding new ones that are wonderful. Both of my kids love books, and I love talking with them about them. Now that my older daughter is nearly 8, she is fully in charge of her own reading, and I am working hard to let go of my judgment about her choices!
Rowling is persona non-grata in the woke crowd, you know.
Rowling is persona non-grata, but Harry Potter is mostly still adored.
You'd think their ability to separate art from artist would come in handy when it comes to other things...
We read Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet in sixth grade, which is insane. I think English class in middle and high school should focus on improving reading and writing skills, and assigning books that cultivate a love of reading fits perfectly with that. The study of literature should be considered akin to the study of paintings and other fine arts and take place mostly in college.
I agree. I don't think I was ready for any of it either. I think maybe TV and movies and warped perceptions of the past make people forget how "young" kids in high school really are and that a lot of them don't have the life experience to wrap their heads around certain books. Since someone brought it up in another post, I remember reading "Beloved" in high school and no one could get past one of the characters having sex with a cow in the first chapter...because we were idiots and just not developmentally ready to grasp what Morrison was trying to say about the desperation involved in someone resorting to that.
Right!1! I have retained 0% of any of the "classics" that were on the curriculum that didn't click with me, which means I basically only remember Orwell and Dostoyevski.
I can't imagine adding more classics is going to work for teens? My N=1 so clearly my thinking is super data driven. ;-)
Agree 100%. The only classics I enjoyed in high school were Poe and Dostoevsky. The rest I wasn't really able to appreciate until well into my 20s and 30s.
Your point about emotional maturity is dead on. You need more life experience and general knowledge to really pick up on the themes and social commentary present in many classic works. Hats off to the high schoolers that are able to grasp and appreciate this stuff right off the bat.
Absolutely. I recall being bored to tears in high school with "Silas Marner" and was put off George Elliot for years. Just in recent years, I picked up Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda and enjoyed them immensely. (I still won't touch Silas Marner.) I love reading now, but to do that I had to overcome the burden of pre-college education, too much of which was "classics," or "good for me."
I really don't care what they assign kids to read in school as long as the aim is to engage them, fire their imagination, spark intelligent, reasoned (and not rigidly ideological) debate and, one hopes, instill a lifelong love of reading, whether or not the classics ever become a part of that.
I'm pretty anti-woke as well, and I have been on this train for awhile. I saw a lot of my peers in high school lose interest in literature when we started reading greek classics and Shakespeare in freshman English. Not that these works don't have value, but getting through them is a struggle at that age. It would have been great to read modern books earlier on that were more topical, entertaining, and relevant to our lives.
That being said, the wokies aren't going to take your advice. Using the extreme and nutty language about decolonizing and white supremacy is an end in itself as moral grandstanding is key component of the advocacy.
The last sentence is perfectly put. I grew up in an evangelical christian bubble. The incentives there was often to performitavely display the quality of one's faith more than actually improve the quality of it. The point here often seems to be to advertise one's wokeness more than thoughtfully engage with the ideas behind it. The lack of real data that Matt cites points to a real truth here: data doesn't matter. Performance does.
I also grew up in an evangelical Christian environment, and in my experience the Great Awakening and the Great Awokening have a lot in common.
Wokeness is extremely religious in its character.
John McWhorter has been pushing this (accurate) description for a few years now.
*display in a performative manner would have been a better way to write the second sentence above. Appologies.
We have a schism on the left (maybe it's been there for years and it was less easy to see when we all agreed that the orange guy was the really big problem) between woke progressives (who tend to get slagged on in these comment threads) and progressives who would like to see things fixed and think wokeness has gotten performative and silly.
Matt's anti-woke critique usually comes in two flavors:
- The woke thing doesn't actually produce the outcomes that anyone wants and
- The woke thing will never happen because conservatives exist and the sales pitch gives them hives.
What's interesting about changes to the reading curriculum is that it shows a potential casualty of the internal left civil war: if the woke folk come up with an idea that's actually useful and dress it up in rhetoric, the idea is going to be a casualty of the polarized argument.
My take-away is that a lot of nuance and care is needed in these discussions to not throw out the occasional baby with gallons of bathwater.
"Gallons of bathwater" being the crucially operative phrase there ^
It's a lot of bathwater. But I think it's on me to engage with the ideas and think carefully and not just flip the bit on the whole thing.
Oh absolutely. To be clear - I completely agree with your point. We should be willing to look at the proposals that have evidence backing them and decide if they make sense. Matt's point is the correct one, saying "kids should be shown content that they relate to" makes a ton of sense and all but the most obscene cultural conservative would object. Saying "we need to dismantle white supremacy in schools" makes everyone to the right of the che guevara say "what the fuck are you talking about?"
One thing that I think is remarkably disingenuous in this thread is boiling broader social and cultural justice movements down to the language they use. Yeah, as someone who graduated from an ivy-adjacent school less than two years ago I'm well aware that the euphemism olympics can be tiring. But it's really not the point and I think most people here know that it's not the point but it's way easier to attack entire movements (i.e. in education pushing for CRP) by making fun of them for making people say their pronouns instead of constructively engaging with arguments about how we educate young people.
Exactly this.
This
In my experience, the logic underlying the language is rarely explicated. The vast majority of people seem content say "decolonize American education!" and let the term "decolonize" do all of the rhetorical work.
that's more a function of how it's covered than what they're actually saying. It's way easy for Matt to joke about people saying to decolonize education than to write a policy article about what that means. My school district has a contract with UCLA to provide professional development which does lead to a lot of the "woke" language but it's not intellectually honest to argue there's not an underlying philosophy. I'm not on-board with everything, but we should generally give people the benefit of believing they honestly believe what they say they do and trying to listen to them. That rarely happens among the part of the left that Matt and a few others belong to that would probably be described as sophisticated pragmatic progressives. There's almost more of an inclination to give figures on the right, who I think far more frequently operate in bad faith, more of the benefit of the doubt than those on the cultural left.
I'm sure there is reasoning behind phrases like "decolonize American education." I'm saying that this reasoning is seemingly never made transparent. I honestly wonder if some supporters of these ideas don't know the deeper reasoning themselves?
566,000 results
https://www.google.com/search?q=decolonize+education&oq=decolonize+education&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l2j0i22i30l5.2989j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Also, I read through the top 5 google results. Apart from one reference to a controversial statue, I did not come across a single concrete example of colonization in US education. I also did not come across a general definition of colonization that seemed to apply to our classrooms.
I can barely make out an analogy between the classrooms of colonized India and modern US classrooms. But this analogy wasn't fleshed out at all, much less to a degree commensurate with the huge changes to education that these articles spent most of their length prescribing.
So needless to say I'm a little frustrated. But I still don't think the notion of "decolonizing education" is necessarily bad/wrong.
The problem is that a clear description of the problem is apparently nowhere to be found. Also, it seems like too many people are clear and specific with regard to prescribing changes, but vague and lazy when it comes to revealing the rationale behind those changes.
Right, the "just Google it" thing.
I can understand how writing out the same points over and over gets tiresome.
Unfortunately, when it comes to researching "woke" ideas, Google is usually unhelpful. It's only good for vague definitions for certain terms. I feel like the info I is never complete enough to allow for any critical thinking on my part.
For example, from sipping the equitea on medium: "Our education system wasn’t integrated until the 1970s. How can a system that separated people of color and white people, that was created and maintained by white people, be an inclusive system that prioritizes the success of ALL? It cannot."
As far as justifying the idea that "our education system is colonialized," this is about as deep as the reasoning in the piece goes.
And at first glance it seems ok, but I'm still left wondering what *specifically* is wrong with education? Is it too much to ask for a single example of the kinds of things white people baked into the education system to the detriment of non-white people?
This lack of specificity is seemingly everywhere, and I haven't experienced this kind of thing when researching any topic outside of the "woke" category.
It doesn't end either. Just go more woke. To borrow from some very woke scholars, Decolonization is not a metaphor. You can't decolonize a bookshelf or a classroom if the very land is still appropriate by white invaders. If true decolonization of indigenous lands is not your "project" then it's inappropriate to claim you are decolonizing anything.
I'll second Jason's point about performance but will sidestep the invocation of Judith Butler that seems like it would be fun to invoke here.
*appropriated by...
I took Shakespeare my Senior year... I loved it when I figured out all the dirty jokes. Taming of a Shrew was pretty subversive... could they even teach it these days?
This is true—the wolves aren’t going to take Matt’s advice—but I think it’s really important to recognize when the social-justice left has made good a relevant points.
There is already a backpack on both the right and the left to social justice politics. When it loses its relevancy, we need to make sure to throw out the bath water and keep the baby.
Matt is pointing at the one of the babies that I think we need to keep going forward.
Haha wow I need to proofread...
Wokies, not wolves.
Backlash, not backpack
You are at home here on Matt Yglesias’ blog.
Hahaha apparently...
+1 for modern literature. My big thing: expand the option set. Culturally, we are so obsessed with cutting people into distinct, rigid groups. Just give people 5-10 options for their English class material. If you want to set a higher bar for the Shakespeare people, do some kind of "Theatre Honors" certificate.
differentiated literature and writing instruction is way underrated as a tool to help kids develop from either below-competent to competent users of language or from competent to excellent ones. Most high school English teachers can help a talented kid through Shakespeare which will put that kid on the path towards being a sophisticated reader and writer by the end of college to the extent they'll potentially be extended career opportunities as a result. For a lot of other kids, reaching that competency level will prevent them from being denied career opportunities due to their reading or writing skills. It's also just not that hard to do but for whatever reason isn't widely practiced. Could have something to do with availability of books in school libraries.
Like almost every problem in this country, it starts with a lack of imagination. It ends with people and institutions unwilling to commit to the basic work required to perform above the global median. This is boring stuff: slow, boring stuff.
I think that's partly true (i'm a high school english/history/special education teacher so that's going to bias my perspective here) but I do think the reality is that teaching in underserved schools in the US is really hard and it's hard to modify curriculum on an individual level without getting in trouble. Another dynamic that's at play is that there's a glut of innovative and really cool ways to improve the way we teach but I have no idea how to incorporate them all. The obvious answer is to pick like one or two, but there's a lot of people who just shut it all out because it's overwhelming and impossible to implement all of them. I've had something like 15 professional development sessions this semester and each one pointed me towards either a different learning tool or curriculum method.
Well put: "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."
I would tend to direct my ire toward administrators. It is the job of leadership in an organization to align people toward a goal and give them the facilities it requires to accomplish that goal. Doing everything at once or drastically switching the plan each year seems like a recipe for failure, and I can't imagine many teachers would be for it, anyway.
And I am not one of those people that thinks "The private sector ALWAYS does better in this." I have been part of some severely dysfunctional corporate bureaucracies where indecision and scattered strategy is like nitrogen, it just floats in the air. Doing something requires choosing something, and our leaders right now have an inability to choose things.
Yeah I agree with this wholeheartedly, administrators don't have easy jobs but there's a tendency to not stick to any pedagogical philosophy for more than a semester or at most a year.
Same. As a kid I read a mountain of comic books, got into science fiction in high school, then segued into literary fiction. I still don't read the classics much.
I think this line: "...my advice to proponents of decolonizing language arts curricula [really insert any progressive cause here] would be to remember that in a democracy, they need to communicate these ideas to an electorate that is mostly white, mostly over 50, and mostly did not graduate from college."
is almost a thesis statement for this site. To me, a person who personally holds fairly progressive values, but would rather win and compromise on a half loaf than lose on purity, I find it disheartening how negative a reaction I get from some people (friends, even) when sharing a pretty obvious statement like the above.
Just typing that out, my inner progressive is reminded of how frustrating it must be to be a member of a minority group and be told that your immediate interests need to be dialed back so we can win an election and maybe you get some crumbs. How many election cycles can you deal with that frustration? But at the same time, that's the reality of our system.
Only solution that springs to mind is more along the lines of your "Make Blue States Great Again," and some other work you've done on who should be primaried, arguing blue areas should be bold in their policy and making sure that deep blue areas have no qualms primarying moderate democrats. Federalism can be a beautiful thing.
" how frustrating it must be to be a member of a minority group and be told that your immediate interests need to be dialed back so we can win an election and maybe you get some crumbs."
I think the idea is that we should be focusing on things that help everyone and not trying to divide people along semi-arbitrary lines and then pit their interests against one another.
"...remember that in a democracy, they need to communicate these ideas to an electorate that is mostly white, mostly over 50, and mostly did not graduate from college."
I totally agree with this as a recipe for national politics, and I am totally on board with MY's populism (or at least, facade of populism in pursuit of progressive objectives).
At the same time: not everything is national politics. How much should these considerations constrain the behavior and rhetoric of people who are not currently doing national politics?
For instance, what if you are an undergraduate in a university, trying to figure out gender politics? What if you are researching the history of racial oppression? Are even people in these positions required to tailor their utterances to the white, over-50, HS dropouts?
If the gay rights movement had censored itself this way, back when it was a tiny fringe in academia and society, then it never would have developed the frameworks that eventually became popular and led to marriage equality and openly gay war-fighters in the military. Ditto for feminism -- equal pay for equal work is now a majority position, but once marked you as a laughable "libber", a radical whom no one needed to take seriously.
So, while I agree with the view that the left needs to get more populist in national politics, I would like to argue for protecting little enclaves of radical thought, where new ideas can grow (you might call them "hothouses"). Tomorrow's equal pay or marriage equality or other majority view maybe today's woke absurdity.
(Which, conversely, is why the anti-wokists are so fixated on whatever a random undergrad at Oberlin just said in a drum-circle. The content of those discussions is both politically trivial in itself -- the kids are just being kids -- and also a sign of possible future mass movements.)
Yep. When I talk to other progressives about this I try to frame it in terms of "there's not a lot of point to this if we never get to do any of it" - e.g. my hope is to make clear that I'm asking them to consider a behavior change not because I think they are wrong, misguided, stupid, immoral, or anything, but rather because we both want to see a common outcome and it might be time to try a new tactic.
(In practice, maybe some of them are misguided - maybe some are not - but I don't think there's anyone out there whom you can convince to do something by leading with "you suck.")
"me, a person who personally holds fairly progressive values, but would rather win and compromise on a half loaf than lose on purity"
Nailed the description. Preach!
I've put 9 kids through K-12.... so I guess it makes me more of an expert than most. Also... I know Sara Mead from my old school education blogging days. That was a decade ago.
Good school systems
1. teach phonics
2. drill multiplication tables
3. encourage reading anything... comics, youth novels, doest matter, just read.
Bad School Systems
1. site reading
2. fuzzy math
3. assign classics that even adults dont read
4. Project based learning. My smart kids would do everything. My lazy kids would coast.
5. Send home coloring assignments for math or history class. Diaramas are always bad.
Also... homework is bad and unnecessary. It causes stress at home.
I have spoken.
Phonics ought to be more widely used, but the research is pretty clear that a balanced approach works best. But to achieve a balanced result we'd probably need to increase the use of phonics. See: http://www.danielwillingham.com/daniel-willingham-science-and-education-blog/the-current-controversy-about-teaching-reading-comments-for-those-left-with-questions-after-reading-the-new-york-times-article
A math curriculum that only does "drill and kill" would be very detrimental to students. Mastery at math requires a) conceptual understanding, b) procedural knowledge, and c) fluency (or memorization). Again, a balanced approach is needed. The Singapore Math Curriculum, when property used, is a good example of a balanced curriculum. "Fuzzy math" isn't a thing. Bad instruction or poorly designed curriculum is.
Project Based instruction is a powerful took in a teacher's arsenal, but the idea that every assessment can be project based is misguided. Key, however, is that PBL is not synonymous with group work. My own preference is that all *graded* assessments should be individual assessments and not group.
I can barely put one kid through skill, so I tip my hat to Rory! But can you imagine if I said to a professional baseball player: "I've seen over a thousand baseball games in my life and coached my kid through little league so I'm as much of an expert in baseball as anyone else." Good parents know their kids very well; good educators know kids very well.
Big fan of Singapore Math. Obviously Math requires a conceptional understanding, but you have to memorize the facts first to mastery.
An example is Algebra... people struggle with factoring. Factoring requires some to basically know their math facts backwards. Know them so well that they can look at "20" and know instantly that its 1*20, 2*10, 4*5. When they know these intuitively, they have more working memory to figure out the rest. Even if they understand the concept... fluency is key.
The key thing is to teach a single process... don't get me started about the multiple ways to do long division. The simple fact is that some kids are going to struggle and probably never internalize math the same way as other kids. If we half ass teach a bunch of ways... that kid will never learn to be competent in any of the processes.
New math try to teach too much, at the expense of teaching one thing well. Now obviously some kids can learn it this way and excel.... even though a lot of the real teaching is happening at home (I have been there and done that).
The problem with "good educators" is everyone thinks they are a "good educator"... the system is dead set against value added metrics at the individual level. So a parent with multiple kids might be a better judge at who/what a good teacher is.
I personally am a big fan of Direct Instruction (google Project Follow Through). Lots of middle class and above families aren't because they think its to rote, but done well, it can actually lead to acceleration.
My 14-year old did Algebra II Honors and Calculus II Honors last year (8-th grade) entirely via remote/online learning. It was awesome because it was entirely mastery based... once you learn something, she tested out, moved to the next level. In a normal class, she would of only got through one of the courses, and probably been bored of her ass.
But mastery learning is also good for those who struggle... it ensures that they are provided with enough practices to master something, before they move on. In a normal class, they would be lost.
All this controversy about Project Based Learning... why hasn't anyone addressed by Homework is Bad hot take.
I don't know enough to comment on different instructional methods, but I really wish instead of learning calculus I had learned about statistics and modeling.
Actually, my biggest pet peeve with my education is not enough statistics. Personally, I think we would be better off teaching High Schoolers less Algebra and more Statistics.
I agree with a lot of what you are saying, but with math, the idea that fluency has to come before conceptual mastery I believe is wrong. That's not how the mind works and or how to engage kids. A 1st grader can achieve a conceptual understanding of addition as the joining of objects before they've memorized basic addition facts just like you can gain a beginning conceptual understanding of multiplication as repeated addition before memorizing the multiplication tables (for the record, I'm pretty decent at math and I have never been able to fully memorize the multiplication tables; it's just something weird about my brain). Conceptual learning, procedural knowledge, and fluency are mutually reinforcing; it's an iterative process, not a first one thing then the other. What you said about working memory is absolutely correct. When you memorize basic math facts it frees up your memory for higher-level thinking. That's really huge and totally underappreciated by educators who discount the value of any memorization.
By Direct Instruction do you mean lecturing? I'd be as skeptical of someone who told me all learning should be collaborative and project-based as I would of someone who told me all teaching should be lecture-based. Again, cue up the research on average person's attention span. And all the great literature on teaching strategies. Lecturing is best if the learning goal is content knowledge. Not a bad goal! But there are other really important learning goals as well. For how to do an effective lecture, this reading is good: http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/107059/chapters/New-American-Lecture.aspx
Yes, homework is bad. I hate it. This summary of the research on homework is pretty good (and more balanced than my own views) and I encourage anyone who is interested in the topic to read it: https://www.challengesuccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Challenge-Success-Homework-White-Paper-2020.pdf
I think (?) direct instruction means the teacher directly teaches the content (which could be by lecture, but could be through assigned reading or even a video) as opposed to what is currently in vogue in many districts, which is to have students "discover" the content.
HA! That was mean to be "one kid through school" and not "one kid through skill."
lol.. Im proofreading my comment above and cringing. Proofreading is for losers! I need an editor.
"Project based learning. My smart kids would do everything. My lazy kids would coast."
As a kid I thought the same thing. Then I got a real job and the third day they say, "So you'll be part of a team working on a project..." And I thought, "Oh, that's why they did all that project based learning."
This is really interesting to me. Do you feel that group projects starting in elementary school are a meaningful preparation for the dynamics of team projects in a professional context, and kids who got a decent education but without group work are at a disadvantage in this way?
I would also argue that many feel that education and academics should exist for their own sake as a pure "good." The idea that ones education exists to prepare one to work on the upgrade team at Amalgamated Widget is anathema.
The people at Amalgamated Widget disagree... they are having problems finding qualified people with engineering and coding skills.
"they are having problems finding qualified people with engineering and coding skills."
Yes because engineering and coding require someone to have an IQ above 135. You can't teach someone with an IQ of to "code" as you call it.
That would be news to Richard Feynman, whose IQ was not above 135.
I'd say more like 120... but IQ is subversive, and on the banned list. Please pretend it doesn't exist.
I totally think it's a meaningful preparation as the dynamics are exactly the same at 12 years old as they are at 42 years old. For that reason I think people who didn't do group work would be at a disadvantage.
Team sports are better preparation for team projects than project based learning in school. I'm not saying there should be none... but it shouldn't be the only thing that is done.
Or other group activities like putting on a play. I loved playing soccer in high school but I'm not sure I learned much about collaboration from that.
I have to disagree. Soccer is an awesome sport to learn teamwork. You have to know your position, but its so fluid that you have to naturally cover other places, and then anticipate where space is going to be. Its collaborative more than any other sport.
Many folks aren't cut out for team sports. Also I'm not aware of anyone arguing that there should only be group learning. If they are then that's just silly.
There are some schools that get the balance wrong... and there are some schools which its almost the entire curriculum.
These are usually the same schools where your kid doesn't learn their multiplication facts.
I think more people could do team sports than is done currently. But robot battle club, or chess club, or debate team or any other curricular activity often teaches the same thing.
I remember doing a project in 8th grade that was part of a something they called a "problem solving competition." I remember learning the word "brainstorm" then, but the whole process didn't feel meaningful to me. It was only a few years ago that the light bulb went off and I thought "oh, that's kind of what most of my work is!".
Maybe if they'd shown me how it's applied in the real world via movies or something like that...
Most of my teachers had gone from college right into teaching. If they worked prior, it was in the typical after school or summer jobs that you get as a teen. As a result, when they were told to include something in the curriculum, they didn't really have any insight into how it applied to the real world.
As a social studies teacher, my experience is that project-based learning can be done well or poorly. If kids are researching a presentation together, producing it together, and receiving one group grade, then yes, the brightest and most motivated kids will do all the work. If you have a way of holding each student accountable, project-based learning can be very motivating for students who are typically low engagement. Also, project-based learning can be individual work as well, and it is much more engaging that typical paper and pencil tests that drill and kill students on historical facts.
Interesting fact... every teacher thinks their project-based learning is done right.
All I know is I can learn much more reading a book in two hours than I can "engaging with others" in two hours.
I used to get in trouble in my Social Studies classes for reading my text book while the teacher was lecturing. I'd normally have in read cover to cover within the first two weeks of class. It was painful trying to listen to a teacher explain things to others, when I already got it.
College/University though was a lot more interesting.
I assume PBL is just a way to let the struggling kids get a good grade so teachers don't have to fail them.
What's your stance on Homework?
First, I think you are conflating project-based learning and group work. Both are important and both serve different functions in the educational process. Group work is important because (as previous posters mention) most "real world" work is collaborative AND discussing material with others actually helps students learn it better, thus group work is a great formative assessment. Group work can be very difficult to assess as a summative, but there are ways of doing so. I will sometimes weight the research more heavily than the actual project or make students responsible for different parts of the project.
Project-based learning is about more than dioramas--which I agree are a waste of time at any grade level outside of art class. I have had students studying trade networks role play as merchants, research the resources available in a region (individually), write business plans (individually), and pitch their business as a group to investors (other teachers I recruited). Never have I seen students more engaged in the work.
Yes, reading and direct instruction are the most efficient ways to learn a lot of content, but if you actually want any of the content to stick, students need to construct something meaningful with it.
My homework philosophy has evolved over the years. I used to assign a lot and grade everything. Now, I either assign homework as reinforcement of what we learned in class or as a continuation of work on a longer term project or piece of writing. I consider all homework "formative" since it is often difficult to tell if parents and tutors have helped produce it.
Excellent points. I once was assigned to teach when my organization had a “swap roles” deal with a local school. It was shocking to realize how much was involved in the sheer act of teaching. I really could have used more theoretical understanding of what was going on in that classroom.
"All I know is I can learn much more reading a book in two hours than I can "engaging with others" in two hours."
But the info in the book isn't the point of the assignment. The point is learning to engage with others productively as one would have to do in almost any professional job.
Dioramas are always bad? They can be a lot of fun...
I LOVED dioramas. But I’m a huge nerd.
confession... I have never done a diorama in my life.
You didn't miss anything.
I wonder if I could still make my Columbus diorama from fifth grade...
"Diaramas are always bad" is a 👕 I would wear. Preach!
I didn't really get the idea of the "importance of representation" until I took my then ten-year old daughter to the recent all-female Ghostbusters and she thought it was terrific because the case were all girls doing cool hero stuff. (As somebody who watched the original back in the day, I thought it was a bit "meh" as a remake).
So, I can buy the idea that for Alaska Natives kids, a culturally relevant curriculum makes them more enthused and interested and leads to better overall results . . . as long as the course is actually teaching them the stuff, the actual math. This seems like an idea worth exploring by well-intentioned educators aiming to improve math and reading competence in kids from marginalized backgrounds.
However, terms like "decolonizing" seem like a red flag for the kind of people who are pushing their political ideology rather than actually prioritizing teaching kids stuff, like being able to read, do math, etc. I do not trust that these "culturally relevant" programs are being implemented with the actual concern of better educating kids.
It's amazing how worked up people get about the reading materials assigned to teenagers. I generally skipped the reading and I'm okay. Most kids aren't going to become professional writers and it doesn't matter that much whether they read Catcher in the Rye or Native Son (or neither), as long as they learn to read.
All of the adults fanning this fire (on both sides) seem like bad actors pushing agendas unrelated to education.
Matt uses the example of college kids in publishing pushing lefty media extremely left and this is exactly the same thing. Writers have a different baseline of expectations for competency and they rule the education roost.
At least here in California, the ‘cancel Abraham Lincoln’ has been more prominent than diversifying reading lists (which is being done but more quietly). My fear is the former will generate political backlash (even I’m pissed) to cancel the latter.
This is like catnip for Republican politicians. I hope none of these people later wonder how Lara Trump became their senator.
Yeah dude. The best thing I learned in college was how not to read. I looked back at myself in high school and was like "you poor fool".
Plus, video games are the new literature.
We do have to make sure that elementary school curricula are focusing on the classic video games and not new, trendy ones though
It's just a fact that the SNES is the best gaming system of all time, past, present, and future.
These are all proxy battles for those seeking power.
I actually genuinely think that high school English classes are an opportunity to expose kids to ideas, motivations, values, and cultures that will make them better-educated in a meaningful way. If that's an agenda, ok. Most of high school is not purely vocational - we don't expect it to tie directly into what people are doing at their jobs. I do not think only people who are going to be professional writers benefit from some exposure to literature any more than only people who are going to be professional historians benefit from some exposure to history. Of course some kids won't engage with it, but some kids will.
There’s a lot of comments here with a lot of words that look interesting but I don’t have time to read them right now. So I just want to weigh in with a simple but highly relevant statement about adolescent psychology:
*Teenagers will not learn anything if they are not interested in the material.*
I’m a high school teacher, so I know what I’m talking about.
Thanks for exposing your largely non-woke audience (me included) to points that push us to think more deeply and less reflexively. This is what I signed up for!
Agreed, good article and consistently high quality discussion beneath it. Very happy about my decision to subscribe!
It's high-test racecraft to assume that Homer is more relevant or relatable to white kids than to non-white.
I don’t think that’s the argument that educators who advocate for cultural relevance in curriculum are making. The phrase that a lot of folks go for is “windows and mirrors”. So when you design curriculum, you create opportunities for students to see worlds that are different than their own, and see worlds that reflect their own experience. This is something that we should be doing for all kids, regardless of race or class. And what we’re talking about is including say, Toni Morrison or James Baldwin in the curriculum.
Another common (and effective) practice is pairing texts. So its not necessarily about saying black kids won’t read Homer, its more a question of, what are supplementing Homer with? Or what does Homer supplement in our curriculum. And again, this should be happening at all schools, regardless of the student demographics.
Haven't heard that phrase before, and I love it. And am totally on board.
But how is this different than what Marc said? Seems like he was just trying to defend and to explain the logic of the mirror side of the equation.
(I'm not asking for any rhetorical reasons, I just feel like I am missing something by you disagreeing with Marc when I don't see much disagreement.)
I don’t really disagree with what Marc said on this thread, I was responding to the OP.
Although, I would complicate things by offering that we could look at the cultural relevance question a bit differently. For example, one way to think about is “We should offer culturally relevant texts because kids will find them more interesting”. This may be true, but I don’t think this is the reason to do it. I think the reason to do it is because, it’s offering students something more well rounded in their education.
There’s also a way to think about this in terms of *how* texts are presented to students. For example, Romeo & Juliet almost always kills with 9th graders—because those themes are really relevant to them, if we emphasize those themes in your teaching. So in general I think the conversation is more complicated than if students should read “canon” texts or not based on their racial/cultural backgrounds. That traps us in a conversation about shifting what children of color are reading, rather than a conversation about what all children might be reading. I don’t just teaching the canon texts to white kids is ideal for white students either.
And as I look at it now, I realize I was mistaken to think you were responding to Marc. But your response kicked ass, so happy accident!
Ah, thanks for the clarification.
And yes! I completely agree with everything you just said.
Windows and mirrors makes a great deal of sense! I think what is driving some of the current backlash is the current woke practice of asserting that Homer, for instance, is a mirror for white Americans, which is the assumption of a lot of “decolonize texts” discourse.
I think with Homer this is true. But if you have two books, one about a black boy growing up in Compton, and one about a white boy growing up in Beverly Hills, I think it's not racecraft and actually pretty logical to imagine that the first book appeals more to black boys in Compton and the second book appeals more to white boys growing up in Beverly Hills
In the examples you give, it does indeed make sense! But that’s not what I see the “decolonize texts“ crowd going after.
Speaking as someone who is around the "decolonize texts" crowd constantly, I can say pretty confidently that yes, Marc's characterization of things is a lot of what this crowd is going after.
And to Matt's point, I think they are totally right to do so. I just think they need to talk about what they are doing in ways that are common sense, as Marc has done here.
So, I'm a bit confused when I read something like the following: "The demand for greater representation from non-European writers need not involve burning copies of Plato and Shakespeare’s texts. We can still teach authors like John Locke, but we should note that he was a liberal political philosopher deeply enmeshed in American slavery – including investing in the slave-trading Royal African Company and co-authoring the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which enshrined chattel slavery." This makes it sound like it's not so much about actually diversifying the curriculum as it is about teaching leftist critiques alongside the traditional criticism. I'm way more comfortable with getting rid of traditional texts and replacing them with reading from other cultures than I am with inserting political tracts.
Maybe we shouldn't assume it, but we shouldn't be above hypothesizing and testing it. I felt like the post characterized culturally-relevant curricula as merely "something to think about."
Correct. No-one should be reading Homer in high school.
Just teach Dune. Everyone can relate to Dune.
That was the first book which helped me feel really confident in my own skin, as a sand worm
Fox News: Your kids are being indoctrinated with a book that glorifies Jihad!
It's also fun to peel back the layers of rhetoric and look at the kind of pedagogy that's going on under the label of, say, #DisruptTexts.
There are three things I notice when I look at approaches like theirs.
1. One of the main tactics I see used is pairing a traditional text with a modern and diverse text or even some nonfiction. They use these texts in conversation with one another to ask interesting questions about the author, historical context, content and style of the texts, etc. These are great approaches that urge kids to think critically. The Great Gatsby paired with The Warmth of Other Suns seems like a really interesting set of texts for a unit that spans English class and History class.
2. Overall it's a view of reading that doesn't come across in official curriculum often enough. Usually you see reading (in high school, elementary is a whole other thing) as broken down into discrete skills - skills very similar to those you might want kids to learn for acing mandatory state exams. You might spend a week with a short story in your textbook and you'd spend day 1 looking at the plot diagram and day two looking at the way the author uses characterization, and day three looking at how setting and the environment are used to create mood, and so on. This is so common I'd almost call it ubiquitous. It's also boring as hell. It makes reading less about enjoyment or learning or seeking some kind of universal values and more like a meaningless job. The material is uninteresting but equally uninteresting are the activities they are asked to do with that material. When I look at the kind of teaching that goes along with culturally relevant pedagogy, I also see an attempt to teach in a way that helps students makes sense of things as a whole and in the context of the world they actually live in.
3. (Not exactly pedagogy, more about teacher training) Teachers seem hungry for resources and techniques that support their use of diverse texts in their classrooms. This tells me schools of education aren't doing a great job of teaching teachers how to do this. Which makes me wonder if schools of education are really po-mo-woke-anti-racist-marxist-intersectional breeding grounds? I mean, if they can't teach teachers to "decolonize" a bookshelf how are they going to decolonize schools or society? Point is, there's a disconnect between the perception of universities as a leftist force indoctrinating generations of educators and the educators who say they don't know how to do any of that leftist stuff.
"Point is, there's a disconnect between the perception of universities as a leftist force indoctrinating generations of educators and the educators who say they don't know how to do any of that leftist stuff."
Agreed.
Plus, as one of the educators, I can tell you that I am so far from indoctrinating my class, that I cannot even get them to hear me in the simple stuff -- I can't get them to follow the directions on the exam.
Fox News thinks that college teachers are up in front of our impressionable students, pouring leperous distilments into the porches of their ears, converting them into trans gay marxist abortionists.
In fact, no matter what I say, it sounds to them like the muffled squawking-noise that adults make in the Charlie Brown specials.
College English and creative-writhing teacher/ student here.
Agree with this entirely.
It’s important to help students to build a passion for the subject itself if you want to see them excel in it. Research on cognitive fluency theory shows that we love things that we can process easily and efficiently. We will process things more easily and more efficiently if they trigger memories in us. And we are like to have those memories triggered if we are studying something that we “identify” with or from someone we “identify” with. So yeah, our instruction and our content need to be culturally relevant.
At the same time, we need to discuss these ideas in ways that are not off-putting to the average person. Some of the woke grandstanding is making some really good ideas—which is just frustrating.
Likewise, I REALLY appreciate the point you made about boys and books. That topic is complicated though—sociologists have shown that when men and women are educated equally, women tend to read more than men. From what I’ve seen, this trend seems to have been recorded in more than twenty countries, suggesting that it’s not just a matter of how women are enculturated. (See the work of Wendy Griswold.)
So it’s probably no mistake that the last creative writing class I taught was made up of 15 women and 3 men. And it’s probably no mistake that women make up 75% of the publishing industry. (And make up 60% of publishing executives.)
On the other hand, I think there is A LOT more that we can be doing to get boys and men interested in reading. Black and Latino men read for pleasure even less than white men, statistically speaking. So getting men to read is actually kind of a matter of race as well. Feminism in literary spaces is VERY common but from my perspective, it’s somewhat racist since I never hear feminists calling to make literary spaces more friendly to Black and Latino MEN, in particular.
In any case, as a boy who likes books, I wish there was more discussion of this topic. Men aren’t reading as much as they used to. To some extent that is to be expected due to the equality of education, but to some extent, that trend is probably being exacerbated by some well-intentioned ideologies being indiscriminately applied.
I love creative writhing too
'Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,' the Mock Turtle replied; 'and then the different branches of Arithmetic — Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.'
(To quote from a classic book that everyone should be forced to read, whether they like it or not.)
Hell yeah! #BoysWhoLikeBooks
Someone made this comment somewhere else, but I think we don't recognize enough the differences between men and women on average, regardless of society. I think it's what leads us to be so afraid of engineering programs that tilt more male (and in theory, worry about reading/writing programs that tilt more female, but this doesn't happen). And I think the key thing is that this doesn't apply to race because people of all races think the same on average. But as a writing-loving boy, I commiserate! I've taken so many college classes that were over 2/3 girls.
**masking some really good ideas
This is slightly off topic, but I just finished watching Bob Wright and Mickey Kaus's New Year's Rockin' Eve youtube video. Kaus brought up a point about woke backlash that I hadn't considered.
The recent woke infiltration of public health discourse (eg vaccination priorities) has given opponents of expanded government a powerful weapon they can leverage across any democratic policy initiative that increases the role of government.
Forget health care and death panels, the new rallying cry for republicans will be "if dems get into power they'll reallocate resources by race, let Nicole Hannah Jones rewrite your kids' history books, and mandate puberty blockers in kids' milk. See all these examples as proof..."
My off the cuff guess is that woke culture war talking points will gain republicans several percentage points of support against any democratic initiative that requires an expansion of government.
As a staunch democrat, even I'm starting to get a little worried. No one elected the ACIP, yet they are making decisions that impact millions. I used to trust bureaucrats to a degree as informed, thoughtful people, but I'm slowly losing my faith.
The one thing I will say about ACIP is they don’t actually have any authority. States can do whatever they want.
Even Texas is prioritizing the elderly, despite having a Lt. Governor who said the olds (including him) should be willing to die to get the economy back on track!
Exactly. I didn't articulate this well above, but Mickey's point is that in addition to wokeness being used as a factor in specific elections, like it was against Biden, the ACIP debacle provides great fuel for republicans to use wokeness as a generic argument against any expansion of government or spending.
- How can you support a national health care system when it'll be run by woke bureaucrats prioritizing justice and equity over grandma's well being?
- How can you support greater spending on transportation when it'll just be squandered by woke bureaucrats awarding all the contracts to minorities and prioritizing equity over pragmatism when choosing the route for the new subway?
- How can you support the green new deal when it's less about climate and more of a back-door way to for woke bureaucrats to hand out billions in reparations to oppressed minorities in the name of equity?
Every democratic policy initiative will now be fought from a wokeness angle, in addition to whatever other tactics would have been used in the past.
This is partly the story of how we lost the House races this year. Every Democrat was stained with the woke message, whether on defund the police, or whatever else. It's hard to win if you're stained
I think it's worth bearing in mind how far ACIP were thrown out of their depth here. Their normal job is "who should we recommend take the new shingles vaccine", not defining an incredibly fractious political issue like how to prioritize vaccine rollout for a nation wide pandemic. It's really a failure of the administration that it fell to this one advisory group.
I don't know...maybe I was just triggered by their presentation, but it seems like most other places (including now a number of states) got the very simple notion that saving the most lives is probably the best choice.
Is there any reason why political fractiousness should affect the recommendations of a body of technical experts?
With the clarity of retrospect, my guess is that the Great Awokening was the biggest factor in the rise of Trumpism in the first place. There’s a reason the “deplorables” comment stung so bad. Conservatives are tired of everyone assuming the only reason to oppose progressives is due to being sexist or racist.
I think Wokeness is the wrong lens to read the ACIP debacle through. They used that language, but if you look at the substance of their draft recommendation, it was to prioritize vaccinating the workforce over vaccinating non-workers.
I suspect if we ever get deep reporting on it, this will prove to be a case of a body that normally does quiet, apolitical work suddenly being the center of the biggest political issue of the day, and getting inundated by interest group lobbying that distorted their priorities.
The substance was that the essential workers had the right pigments! I think it's almost impossible to look at the ACIP thing through any lens other than wokeness
It wasn't tho. White essential workers were prioritized alongside POC ones.
Essential workers were going to be prioritized because essential workers were a group with more POC in them. This would benefit white essential workers and hurt old POC, but the calculus was absolutely about which group had more POC
When you see a plan that claims to be concerned with helping POC but straightforwardly leads to more POC deaths, I think it's worth at least considering who materially benefits from the plan. And that's fairly obviously businesses who could avoid the costs of work practice changes if their employees were vaccinated.
It's very well established that every industry group in the country was lobbying to get their employees (or at least the frontline ones) prioritized as essential and get the vaccine. I don't think it's crazy to consider how that lobbying affected ACIP.
Even if we assume this to be true, the scenario still shows that "wokeness" is a Bad Thing, because the ACIP draft has shown that it can be effectively utilized by powerful groups to manipulate the public.
They were explicit about their reasoning though. It’s not what you’re saying. It was to strike a blow for racial equity. (As you note, it would not have actually done that in practice.
I would love to see that level of examination - we see the ACIP report and we're all like "how dare they" but ... I have no priors and no baseline. I have no idea what any of this work product should look like or what past decisions have been.
The only caveat I'd add is that communication matters, and if you communicate something to your audience and they don't get it, you can't really blame the audience for not understanding - you have to chance how you communicate.
So if public health officials use language that triggers an anti-woke backlash and they didn't mean to do that, maybe it's on them to use different words?
I mean, if you're prioritizing the workforce over the most vulnerable, "essential workers are more likely to be POC, who have borne the brunt of this pandemic" seems like better messaging than "big business wants to get back to their normal work practices and stop spending money on worker safety."
Here's the Wright/Kaus clip I'm talking about:
https://youtu.be/GffGh8BbX6U?t=1115
A tangential point in response to "it’s dangerous to discuss K-12 policy with normies because everyone went to school and has an opinion about it, even if they haven’t done any research or given it serious thought": I do wish, though, that the K-12 policy discussion I see would pay a lot more attention to what people say they wish their K-12 education had *felt* like, rather than exclusively focusing on the measured *outcomes* of that education. K-12 takes up thirteen years of a sentient human's life. We owe it to children to make it a positive experience, not merely a crucible for The Future.
For example, I hate arguments that boil down to "high academic achievers turn out fine no matter what you do to them, so we don't have to think about them at all". Being bored out of your skull for thirteen years waiting for any teacher to challenge you with anything *sucks*, even if hypothetically the opportunity cost of all that wasted time made absolutely no difference to your future productivity (which I doubt, but that's not the point).
I guess this is also an argument for kids reading things they like.
Smart kids need different education than average kids or kids who are struggling. It is a waste for all if this is not understood, or is denied. And I would disagree that smart kids denied the education appropriate for them, will necessarily "turn out fine"
I’d like to share some thoughts from the perspective of an educator.
(I work in secondary education teaching history and economics and also working as a sort of curricular and pedagogical coach for faculty across all departments. While I try and stay current on research and read widely as part of my administrative job, I am a practitioner and not a researcher.)
I agree with the general thrust of this piece, especially as captured in the title. I wish it were not framed around the issue of being "woke" since that's just red meat that really doesn't speak to questions of effectiveness in teaching and learning. More importantly, the argument of this newsletter suffers greatly from a terrible lack of precision. A “culturally relevant pedagogy” is different than an “ethnic studies” program (and both are different from the entire movement for “culturally responsive teaching,” not referenced here). More importantly, to argue that something “works” you have to specify for what purpose it works. How does doing X improve Y? Matt doesn’t define X precisely (but instead uses terms with really different meanings interchangeably) and you doesn’t define Y precisely either. And this is all intended by way of constructive criticism, since fundamentally I do agree with the overall point Matt is making.
Is the goal to improve student’s reading abilities? To increase the graduation rates of underrepresented minorities? To create a more inclusive school community that fosters higher degrees of relational trust? In other words, to determine what works you first have to look at what you are trying to accomplish and then work backwards to the research on that particular goal. And most importantly, to compare the relative effectiveness of various interventions.
I’m going to guess that the reason why research on the effectiveness of “culturally relevant pedagogy” is so think is because of the difficulty of defining what that means and because of the difficulty of sorting out first order and second order effects. (That, and I don’t know that ed schools are necessarily known for their rigorous research methodologies). There might not be a lot of research on how diversifying the literature curriculum affects student outcomes, but there is a lot research on how fostering growth mindsets or strong teacher-student bonds does. I’d argue that a literature curriculum that feels engaging and relevant to students is an important toolkit in achieving both of those goals.
I do think it’s possible to make arguments about educational practices that don’t rely on any specific research findings. In a pluralistic society having pluralistic reading lists are probably a good in and of themselves in promoting greater cross-cultural understanding.
FYI, if you like reading about education here is a very incomplete list of authors you may want to check out (links below):
-On this particular topic, see Lisa D. Delpit
-More generally, John Hattie’s work is probably the most comprehensive summary of what research indicates are the most effective teaching strategies.
-Daniel Willingham is also a great source of research-based insights for teaching effectiveness. -For curriculum design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe are great; and for pedagogy, check out
Ron Ritchhart and the work of Project Zero at Harvard.
-On student engagement see Denise Pope and the work of Challenge Success as well as the work of Carol Dweck.
-The Marshall Memo is a good newsletter for teachers who want to stay up to date on the field of education but don’t have a lot of time.
Total non sequitur, any other Californians wish we weren’t always so late to these conversations!
Links to references above:
https://www.amazon.com/Lisa-D.-Delpit/e/B001JP0VH2%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share
https://www.amazon.com/John-Hattie/e/B001JSFFRK/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_book_1
https://www.amazon.com/Daniel-T-Willingham/e/B001IO9SZ0/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_book_1
https://www.amazon.com/Jay-McTighe/e/B001IO9LWA?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1609433045&sr=1-1
https://www.amazon.com/Ron-Ritchhart/e/B001H9RL0U%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share
http://www.pz.harvard.edu/
https://ed.stanford.edu/faculty/dpope
https://www.challengesuccess.org/
https://www.amazon.com/Carol-Dweck/s?k=Carol+Dweck
https://marshallmemo.com/
Yes, I'm the intern, and I miss half the discussion bc I wake up too late! Thanks for your comment, Daniel!
Educator here as well... I think you made all the right points. I’ll add to your recommendations Gholdy Muhammad’s recent work as well, with I think speaks past the false choice of “culturally relevant” content and skills. There is not trade off to be had, only one that people imagine is there.
You’re over point on effectiveness is also important in any education discussion, folks are often not sure what goals we’re talking when we say a certain practice or policy is effective, and how those various inputs correlate (or don’t) to student outcomes.
Is "so think" was mean to be is "so weak." I wish we could edit posts! Please forgive all other typos. Also, specifically on fostering a love of reading, see Daniel T. Willingham, Raising Kids Who Read: What Parents and Teachers Can Do, which is probably the best research based writing specifically and narrowly focused on how to foster a love of reading and an ability to read.