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| From Treason of the Intellectuals |
Teachers and ex-teachers – more numerous these days than in the past – will be familiar with the old saw: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; and those who can’t teach, teach teachers.”
This is a slur on a
noble profession, recognized as such by attentive students and many teachers,
retired or otherwise.
There is much in the
postmodern world that militates against teaching, hence the increase in dropouts
in the profession, and we all should recognize that teaching is at its core both
a profession and a professing of some sort of doctrine or truth. Socrates and
Christ, for example, were teachers.
Pedagogy has never
been everyone’s cup of tea. In postmodern America, just as everyone is either
selling something or buying something – a product, a service, an idea, etc. --
so, in the teaching profession, teachers offer to their students the benefits
of their minds and experiences. Personalized knowledge that comes from a live
mouth to a listening ear is the best kind of teaching. It sticks in a way that,
say, virtual teaching does not. The sharp dip in student performance during an
extended virtual teaching bout underscores the importance of personalized
teaching.
Now then, if a
teacher is charged with teaching students how to think, what is the mission of
those who teach teachers?
The answer is
obvious: The mission of those who teach teachers is to teach their charges how
to teach.
Paulo Freire, the
godfather of critical pedagogy, is the author of Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, a highly influential book – in fact, the third most cited book
in the social sciences -- widely used in teacher training and
certification courses. The premise of the book is that teaching itself, the
transmittal of knowledge from teacher to student, often is a form of
oppression, hence the title of the book.
Freire was a Brazilian
pedagogue and progressive Marxist philosopher, a target of the 1964
Brazilian military coup d'état that had imprisoned him as
a traitor for 70 days. Following the enthusiastic international
reception of his widely read and highly influential book, Freire was offered
a visiting professorship at Harvard University in 1969.
At least two notable
American terrorists -- Bernardine
Dohrn, a leader of the radical
Weather Underground, now a retired law professor, and her husband Bill
Ayers retired Distinguished
Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar in the College of
Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago – intellectually sat at
the knees of Freire.
The Weather
Underground, a radical, militant organization claimed responsibility for
bombings of the United States Capitol, the Pentagon, and several
police stations in New York, as well as a Greenwich Village
townhouse explosion that killed three of its own members. Fortunately,
U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was not in attendance during the bombings.
Both Dohrn and Ayers later shucked off their terrorist ways.
But Freire’s ways
and doctrines are with us still. Oppression, big on college campus in the late
60’s, has trickled down to the lower grades.
Not only do teachers
oppress, there is something in the nature of knowledge itself that is
oppressive. Some texts oppress, and it would be far better if such oppressive
texts were to be replaced not by objectively true historical narratives but by
imaginative story telling that corrects the various oppressions of history --
enter critical thinking.
The purpose of
critical thinking for Freire, a thoroughgoing Marxist, is not simply to
reproduce accurately the past and understand the present; it is to alter both
by entering into a critical dialogue with history for the purpose of imagining
a future – prospectively less oppressive – that will transform both the past
and the future. The traditional education system, Freire taught, was designed
to crank out thoughtless workers in order to perpetuate the capitalist system which continually oppresses the working class
Karl Marx put the
idea more lucidly this way: “Hitherto,” Marx said, “philosophers have
interpreted the world, the point however is to change it.” The new pedagogy
hopes to change the world by changing young minds and abolishing objectively
real history in favor of literary if not fictional personal narratives. That is
also the primary goal of Critical Race Theory, a destructive pedagogy much talked about these days but little
understood.
Four things are
wrong with education here in Connecticut and elsewhere in the nation: 1) best
educational practices should be taken from the field, not from education
professors doped up on Freire and false pedagogical amelioratives; 2) subject matter
in the various courses should predominate over esoteric psychological and
pedagogical theories; 3) the teaching profession has become over-credentialed
and should admit to high schools professionals in various fields and occupations whose efforts
have not yet been turned under by education courses; and 4) political power and
decision making should revert from distant politicians to the municipalities where
educational decision making belongs.
MORE> How to Reform Public Education
Kids matter, but so
do excellent teachers. Some way must be found to retain at every level of
education the best teachers and at the same time to easily eject the worst. The
old saw about the rotten apple spoiling the bunch is often repeated because it
is often true.
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