By Kenny Xu
Saturday, July 29, 2023
Recently, parents, teachers, and schools have been engaging in a cultural battle over what kinds of curricula should be taught to young minds. Should kids be immersed in the dynamics of privilege and oppression — à la critical race theory — or should we avoid exposing kids to this form of education?
Critical-race-theory proponents argue that this kind of education is empowering. As Paulo Freire, the Marxist educator and founder of critical pedagogy argued, “the only effective instrument” in education “is a humanizing pedagogy in which the revolutionary leadership establishes a permanent relationship of dialogue with the oppressed.” According to critical pedagogists, education in one’s “place” in society can empower and stimulate interest in and growth in the world.
Who is right? Are the critical pedagogists right? Or are their critics?
To answer the question, we need to understand what the negative consequences of critical-pedagogical techniques could be. “The cold, hard scientific facts are that [people] think better when they are not stressed, afraid, or depressed,” writes clinical psychologist Henry Cloud of Biola University, and we have no reason to doubt him. There are two parts of the human brain: the upper brain and the lower brain. In the upper brain, we use logic, exercise judgment, apply our creativity, and otherwise develop into highly skilled thinkers. In the lower brain, we stimulate some of the most primordial emotions, including fear and panic. In the lower brain, we think mainly in two terms: “kill him” (fight) or “run away” (flight). Stress is the main cause of the descent down the staircase from higher-order to lower-order thinking.
During the lower-order-thinking stage, our high cognitive abilities, such as the ability to think critically and to memorize effectively, are impaired. Stress overtakes our mind, and we are thinking only in terms of survival. Children experience a variety of stressors in school — an overload of work, problems with discipline, teacher and friend issues. One place where stress should not be associated with the school setting is the curriculum itself, at least not until children experience enough maturity to handle it.
The endless, 24/7 news cycle surrounding race and discrimination has already done half of the work of the school system in bringing these stressors into the child’s brain. “Current events are clearly stressful for everyone in the country, but young people are really feeling the impact of issues in the news, particularly those issues that may feel beyond their control,” writes Arthur Evans, the head of the American Psychological Association.
In APA studies, nearly one quarter of adults say that discrimination is a major stress factor in their lives. That number increases to around 40 percent with African Americans and Latin Americans. Now imagine how much the percentage would increase with minority teenagers. Teachers need to be careful with how they teach racial justice in class — 14 percent of white Americans also state that discrimination is a stress factor in their lives. It’s extremely difficult to teach such heavy topics without putting additional stress on young minds.
Whatever the age should be at which students grapple with harsh narratives about a racist society, it should be after they’ve properly matured into free thinkers and won’t internalize the teachings into their own sense of self-worth. Schools teaching about race should follow the example of the young King Randall, who built a boarding school for young children in Albany, Ga. — the murder capital of the state. Mostly black, entirely poor, King Randall’s “X for Boys” school focuses on teaching children basic life skills before it addresses topics such as racism and discrimination. Those are topics for another day. Today is focused on building up a confident young man ready to take on society.
Randall’s No. 1 priority is basic reading. “I had to go through the entire alphabet, like ‘A’–‘ah’, ‘B’–‘buh,’ basic phonics,” Randall says, in describing his tutoring of a twelve-year-old. In his community, kids either didn’t know how to read or claimed they did but consistently read at lower than grade level. For Randall, by far the most important priority for him was to teach his low-income black brothers how to read and how to write properly. “In my X for Boys group chat — for our boys they’re mandatory — everything has to be spelled correctly, you have to use punctuation, capital letters, you name it. In that way they’re able to correct each other.”
At the X for Boys school, the boys learn how to take care of a garden. “They learn how to fertilize the land,” Randall said. “How to feed your family.” The entire point of the boarding school is to cultivate self-sufficiency for black kids.
And yes, Randall had been reading Malcolm X, one of whose points was that the black child should learn how to be self-sufficient. “And I was like, why don’t we do it for ourselves? Why don’t we try doing these things on our own? Because it seems like we’ve been begging these people for how many years to do something for us or to make life better for us when we could simply do it ourselves!”
Critical pedagogy that teaches that racism is overarching attempts to make black people think of their political status as inferior. Randall teaches black kids to view themselves as equals to the white man not by imposing the racial dichotomy on them but by enabling them to become equally skilled. In doing so he follows the line of thinking of Booker T. Washington, a black American teacher and orator who wrote in his autobiographical Up From Slavery: “I tried to emphasize the fact that while the Negro should not be deprived by unfair means of the franchise, political agitation alone would not save him, and that back of the ballot he must have property, industry, skill, economy, intelligence, and character, and that no race without these elements could permanently succeed.”
In light of this, there should be three “boundaries” on curricular materials when race is addressed in a school setting:
Don’t address race in a way that promotes the idea that society or one category of people are, as a whole, racist.
Don’t promote ideas that there are inherent differences in entire racial categories of people.
Don’t make it seem as if race limits what one can accomplish as a person.
If schools and teachers largely adhere to these guidelines in talking about race, they can succeed in opening children up to sensitive racial issues without making them feel as if the world is a bath of racism and prejudice against them. They can help discussions about prejudice and
discrimination truly empower minority children, rather than flatten them into an attitude of victimhood.
Note: This article is adapted from the author’s new book School of Woke.
No comments:
Post a Comment