Why the Left Wants Twitter Over Tolstoy in Our Schools

If one leftist teachers group gets its way, reading literature in school will be replaced by reading internet memes and Twitter posts.

A powerful group of educators called the National Council of Teachers of English recently released a statement calling on schools to “decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.”

But why? To more thoroughly push its leftist ideology, of course.

The statement goes on to support critical pedagogies, referring to Marxist ideas, a la critical race theory. It reads,

Educators value the use of teaching and learning practices that help to identify and disrupt the inequalities of contemporary life, including structural racism, sexism, consumerism, and economic injustice. Critical pedagogies help learners see themselves as empowered change agents, able to imagine and build a better, more just world.

The left frequently attacks traditional educational strategies like reading classical literature as upholding white supremacy.

Founded in 1911, the National Council of Teachers of English boasts that it has 25,000 members across the country that receive its materials and recommendations. One English teacher in Massachusetts bragged about getting Homer’s epic poem “The Odyssey” removed from her school’s curriculum, while the journalists at NPR extoll listeners to “decolonize” their bookshelves.

The group goes full radical Marxist by saying kids should learn critical literacy and critical media literacy, dropping all pretense of neutrality. “Critical” here is a thinly veiled code for Marxist-style ideology.

For example, one recommendation reads that students should “examine the cultural, ideological, and sociolinguistic content of the curriculum and focus on the uses of literacy for social justice in marginalized and disenfranchised communities.”

Another recommendation pushes students to “examine mass communication, popular culture, and new technologies by analyzing relationships between media and audiences, information, and power, often with attention to media institutions and representations that address systemic inequalities and social justice.”

The rise of social media and increasing reliance the world has on technology represents an ever-evolving frontier in education. Kids today will need to be taught differently than generations that preceded them, and a focus on parsing online information should be included in a modern curriculum.

However, in their quest to eliminate any semblance of the old fact- and logic-based order, the left has decided that reading and writing must be sacrificed on the altar of memes and social media.

The council declares this in its statement when it says, “We no longer live in a print-dominant, text-only world. We experience this reality daily in the GIFs and selfies we share with one another, the memes and videos we circulate through our social media feeds.”

But modern education shouldn’t be media literacy instead of classical literature, it should be media literacy and classical literature.

Authors from times past still offer valuable lessons and insight into the human condition, and as a society, we suffer enormously when we replace them with quick quips from Twitter.

Indeed, it’s our obsession with reducing messages to sound bites and 280-character tweets that’s part of the cause of today’s moral rot. Distilling strong values and lessons about what it means to be good people and good citizens is impossible under such conditions.

Literature takes effort and skill to unpack, but the value is immeasurable.

It’s also important to learn actual media literacy, not just the twisted social justice-oriented media literacy being pushed by the National Council of Teachers of English. Students should be able to tell when an outlet is lying or stretching the truth and be able to parse between opinion and fact.

By eliminating classical literature from our education system, the left hopes to fill the gap with dogma and propaganda. It hopes to weaponize yet another angle of scholastic life.

We’ve already seen the dire consequences of the radical left’s long march through the school system. Allowing it to destroy yet another bulwark of classical education leaves America one step closer to total leftist dominance. Literature helps to repel that invasion.

As “Fahrenheit 451” author Ray Bradbury said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

With those words in mind, it’s essential for kids to keep on reading.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/26/why-the-left-wants-twitter-over-tolstoy-in-our-schools/

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Clemson University backpedals

One of the most dangerous developments in recent years at college campuses has been universities setting up Star Chamber, Soviet-style, show trial procedures over complaints of sexual assault in which the universities deny basic and fundamental due process rights to accused students. That includes refusing to allow the students an opportunity to present exculpatory evidence, to question their accusers and cross-examine witnesses, or to be represented by a lawyer.

A South Carolina jury just awarded a Clemson University student, Andrew Pampu, $5.3 million for defamation and civil conspiracy by a female Clemson student, her boyfriend, and her father.

The university had suspended Pampu for a year after finding him guilty of sexual misconduct against Erin Wingo. To get to that finding, however, the university ignored multiple witnesses and text messages showing that Wingo had consensual sex with Pampu and manufactured a rape claim only after her boyfriend, Colin Gahagan, found out about it.

Pampu filed a lawsuit after he received a text message from Gahagan admitting that Pampu was innocent, that Gahagan had lied in the hearing, that Wingo “wanted to have sex that night,” and that Gahagan had deleted texts “from that night that prove she was f—— crazy.”

Clemson acted almost immediately to remove the disciplinary finding against Pampu and agreed to pay him $100,000, likely saving Clemson from an even bigger judgment against the university. Of course, if it had not ignored the exculpatory evidence in the first place and assumed Pampu was guilty, it would not have had to pay anything.

Unfortunately, the trend toward madness at the secondary education level is sure to increase if the Biden administration has its way with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

The Office for Management and Budget is reviewing a new rule on the 50-year-old statute that would expand Title IX’s prohibition on “sex” discrimination to “gender identity” discrimination, thereby upending women’s sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms in schools across the country.

In addition, the new Title IX rule would roll back the Trump administration’s Department of Education rule on campus sexual assault, which requires due process protections such as representation by counsel and the right to present exculpatory evidence and cross-examine witnesses, including the accuser.

This new rule once again would implement a “guilty until proven innocent” assumption, leading to more cases such as what happened to Pampu at Clemson.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/21/3-colleges-get-their-just-desserts/

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Georgia Governor Signs Bills to Banish Wokeness From Schools

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, signed seven education bills into law Thursday taking aim at wokeness in schools, including legislation that limits discussions about race in classrooms and transgender students’ ability to compete in women’s sports.

The bills included Georgia’s Parents’ Bill of Rights, or HB 1178, which “provides greater transparency to parents and legal guardians regarding what their student is being taught in school and protects the fundamental right of moms and dads across this state to direct the education of their child,” according to a press release.

Another bill, the Protect Students First Act, or HB 1084, prohibits “divisive concepts” such as the belief that one race is inherently superior to another race, the U.S. is fundamentally racist country, or that an individual, “by virtue of his or her race, is inherently or consciously racist or oppressive toward individuals of other races.”

The law also allows the state athletic association to pass a law prohibiting “students whose gender is male from participating in athletic events that are designated for students whose gender is female.”

“As the parents of three daughters, Marty and I want every young girl in this state to have every opportunity to succeed in the sport they love,” Kemp said in a statement. “That should not be controversial.”

Other signed bills will require the removal of obscene materials from school libraries, ensure transparency at school board meetings, double on the current donation cap for student scholarships, create a committee that will look at ways to ensure student financial literacy, and allow retired teachers to return to the classroom full time in areas with high demand.

“Unfortunately, there are those outside our state, and other members in the General Assembly, who chose partisan politics over commonsense reforms to put our students and our parents first,” Kemp said. “But standing up for the God-given potential of each and every child in our schools and protecting the teaching of freedom, liberty, opportunity, and the American dream in the classroom should not be controversial.”

“Making sure parents have the ultimate say in their child’s education should not be controversial,” he added.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/29/this-should-not-be-controversial-georgia-governor-signs-bills-to-banish-wokeness-from-schools/

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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