"In a report compiled last summer, the Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group at the U's College of Education and Human Development recommended that aspiring teachers there must repudiate the notion of "the American Dream" in order to obtain the recommendation for licensure required by the Minnesota Board of Teaching. Instead, teacher candidates must embrace -- and be prepared to teach our state's kids -- the task force's own vision of America as an oppressive hellhole: racist, sexist and homophobic.
The task group is part of the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative, a multiyear project to change the way future teachers are trained at the U's flagship campus....The report advocates making race, class and gender politics the "overarching framework" for all teaching courses at the U. It calls for evaluating future teachers in both coursework and practice teaching based on their willingness to fall into ideological lockstep.....Anyone familiar with the reeducation camps of China's Cultural Revolution will recognize the modus operandi. The task group recommends, for example, that prospective teachers be required to prepare an "autoethnography" report. They must describe their own prejudices and stereotypes, question their "cultural" motives for wishing to become teachers, and take a "cultural intelligence" assessment designed to ferret out their latent racism, classism and other "isms." They "earn points" for "demonstrating the ability to be self-critical." The task group opens its report with a model for officially approved confessional statements: "As an Anglo teacher, I struggle to quiet voices from my own farm family, echoing as always from some unstated standard. ... How can we untangle our own deeply entrenched assumptions?""
The task group is part of the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative, a multiyear project to change the way future teachers are trained at the U's flagship campus....The report advocates making race, class and gender politics the "overarching framework" for all teaching courses at the U. It calls for evaluating future teachers in both coursework and practice teaching based on their willingness to fall into ideological lockstep.....Anyone familiar with the reeducation camps of China's Cultural Revolution will recognize the modus operandi. The task group recommends, for example, that prospective teachers be required to prepare an "autoethnography" report. They must describe their own prejudices and stereotypes, question their "cultural" motives for wishing to become teachers, and take a "cultural intelligence" assessment designed to ferret out their latent racism, classism and other "isms." They "earn points" for "demonstrating the ability to be self-critical." The task group opens its report with a model for officially approved confessional statements: "As an Anglo teacher, I struggle to quiet voices from my own farm family, echoing as always from some unstated standard. ... How can we untangle our own deeply entrenched assumptions?""
This article sends a chill down my spine. This is just one example of one university that will be turning out our future teachers. Where do I go to get my country back?
9 comments:
'Sup JD
The biggest problem with this type of mentality is the more they spread this message of America is full of sexism, racism or any other kind of ism is that many of these indoctrinated kids will look for these "ism's" where it doesn't even apply.
There can be one black guy in a room full of fifty white people and then someone will ask "hey what's that guy over there drinking"? I don't know, what guy? Uh the guy with the blue shirt on. Which guy with the blue shirt on. The guy with the blue shirt and he's kinda skinny. What guy with a blue shirt on that's kinda skinny. The one over there next to the plant and that blonde girl. Do you mean the black guy? Your a racist.
Peace, feeno
My first thought/feeling upon reading this was - yuk.
Then I re-read and started to try to figure out what university is utilizing this model pf teaching so I clicked on the article. It still said "U", but since the article seems to be out of St Paul, Minnesota, I'm assuming it's at a University there. Which interests me even more since us Californians always assume places like Minnesota are way more conservative. Bottom line: I hope this isn't the education being dished out to all potential teachers. I have a close friend going back to school to be a teacher; I'll have to ask her to update me on any indoctrination she encounters (of course she'd complain to me any way if she encountered something like this).
If history is any indication, this article is over-blown, taken out of context, and entirely inaccurate. Perusing the work of the writer, she seems to be the typical chicken-little scare mongering type of right winger that gets so much press lately. You know who I'm talking about, the people who try to claim that gay marriage is going to destroy America or that the health care bill is going to demand that we kill off all the elderly or that trying to be conscious of racial and sexual issues that a lot of us take for granted in order to be sensitive to kids in college is going to make a 1984-like situation where no one has freedom. It's all a bunch of over-reactive BS and an exercise in demonizing their opponents without even knowing what they are being critical of and simply being inflexible about wanting everything to be their way or the highway.
Speaking in strictly research terms, the program mentioned in Minnesota begins with the presupposition that America is bad/evil etc. I am not aware of any other country under the sun where opportunity has been so readily available for those willing to work. That's my main problem with this program.
I'm sorry but I don't believe that for a second. I believe that the author believes this is what the program begins with and I believe that you are credulous enough to swallow it, but it's the same overblown rhetoric that we always get. This is on par with the claims of the Bush admin that if you don't support the president during a time of war, then you're being traitorous. Of course, they aren't supporting Obama now, but that's another story, right?
They arent opposing Obama.....yet. Afghanistan was the "good war" according to him. Only a small part of what was done by journalists during the Bush administration could be considered questionable. For an example, I posted, this in September.
I posted this in September. This is what really aggravates me.
"They arent opposing Obama.....yet."
I'm sorry, but what rock have you been living under lately?
"Only a small part of what was done by journalists during the Bush administration could be considered questionable. For an example, I posted, this in September."
No, because it's not newsworthy anymore for one, and for two the Bush admin was trying to sweep these casualties under the rug since their promises of us being greeted as liberators wasn't true and all the other lies they told us to get us into war were all false too. It's not so much of a story for a president that inherited an effed up situation and is simply trying to figure out how to fix what the last guy broke.
PZ Myers has taken this to task and shown the overblown rhetoric that is coming from the hysterical right that you seem to be swallowing.
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