In my last post, I listed some of the authors, primarily philosophers, that the high school students used in their essays for the Ethics in Education Symposium. Then I began to think, am I over-reacting? Are these men really contributors to the philosophies of Marxism? Is it really a bad thing if Pine Richland high school teachers present these philosophers in a positive light to their students, thus impressing upon their minds that their ideas are acceptable, favorable, and beneficial to society? Are the students really projecting a secular humanistic worldview in 14 of 16 essays that I read? Hmmmmm…
Of course, as stand-alone readings, Aristotle and Kant are fairly innocuous, speculations on ethics and morality. Freire's work is not, however, it is a setup for open Marxism, calling actual instructive teaching "oppression" and the students the "oppressed". One reading by an environmentalist, Wendell Berry, would hardly change one's worldview. But there is so much more revealed in the essays themselves (I hope the rebuttals are posted at some point, or the whole event televised). Because someone with ties to the district said the required reading choices were balanced, I decided to revisit the kids' writings. Here are some more examples of the results of a PRHS education:
- Abortion is not wrong, and author could not even call it a "death" but fighting to stave off experiencing non-life. Also cited as fact that the unborn baby could not really feel pain because it did not have emotions, but many studies – including ultrasound of procedure – show otherwise, yet student used one biased source for this info.
- Sources for bioethics argument were an atheist, Joshua Green (argues man has no soul) and an self-avowed atheistic anarchist (or is that an anarchistic atheist?), Steven Pinker (evolutionary psychologist)
- One said the pursuit or desire for wealth is unethical.
- One says we have a "basic primate morality" as a result of evolution.
- One said the U.S has no strong alliances with any other countries and would not be obliged to supply troops to aid in any war they might instigate; a very interesting, faulty and unsubstantiated statement considering the plight of Israel, one of our staunchest allies, the only democracy in the Middle East, and under severe threat of attack from Iran.
- Same author said that the administrations in the 21st century were more ethical than the John Adam's administration because they allow people to apply knowledge and make suggestions for improvements, and mentioned how people are liberal.
- One said it was "the right decision" for Obama to discontinue the European missile defense – many would say renege on our country's pledge – but had nothing to support this. How about using the phrase "in my opinion" for that's all it is – an opinion.
- One was discussing how we humans shouldn't tamper with evolution.
- Same author says religions are "painfully constant even in the face of broad social liberalism", and that society's ethics were very different than Judeo-Christian values, e.g in accepting pre-marital sex and open homosexuality.
- Says "we need to keep religion out" of the bioethics debate. There are too many "fanatical believers".
- One advocated a nationwide education reform because PRHS education is unethical (because of the criterion based grading system).
- One thought if man was free of societal constraints primarily imposed by Christian religion, we would not even need laws because of man's natural goodness.
- One could not possibly have understood the irony when writing about educators imposing their "politicized knowledge in the classroom" and the students are "free from the teacher's imposition of his or her deceptive or explicitly biased point of view" when a variety of perspectives is possible – No Kidding!
I wonder if this is the worldview shared by the majority of Pine Richland parents, and I wonder if this is the worldview that parents of 8th graders, for example, would like to see in their children after a few years of high school higher learning.
here is website for the event with the students' essays: www.prsymposium.info
ReplyDeleteI don't have the time to illustrate how shockingly bad your argument is here. Suffice to say, you might want to read a bit more of the history of philosophy before you start attaching your own evil "marxist" or "progressive" labels to certain thinkers. And just so you know "googling" and finding an author's name on a website does not constitute evidence that they are Marxist anymore than going to a Wikipedia page counts as actually reading a philosophical text. If I made a website entitled "Conservatives who Believe in Indoctrinating Youth Rather than Educating Them to Think for Themselves", I could certainly put your name on there but this doesn't mean you support this. Or does it?
ReplyDeleteYou say "I don't have the time to illustrate how shockingly bad your argument is here" but what you really mean is "I don't have anything substantial and thoughtful to say that actually addresses and refutes any of your well-reasoned points so I will just use the tried and true liberal adage to avoid a real discussion." Our liberal teachers are using my hard-earned tax dollars to promote their one-sided worldview by directing the discussions and controlling the resources used. If they wanted the students to think for themselves, they would have started off with a balanced topic - for that in and of itself was self-serving on the part of this district, which is trending toward student centered, discovery-based, "Project-based" education/curricula - and provide materials that actually present an opposite point of view. Just wait, I am reading last year's essays...
ReplyDeleteI decided to make time, just for you. Just remember, you asked for a real discussion. This discussion will be contained in several posts as it is too long for just one.
ReplyDeleteLet’s deal first with your charge in Part I of your post. You indicate that you almost fell out of your chair when you found two of the authors whose readings were assigned to students can be found on the website Marxists.org. Later you express this sentiment in a letter to the teacher putting on the symposium:
“Even more disconcerting is the fact that I can find two of the required readings on the website marxist.org (Paulo Freire and Immanual Kant). Presenting these authors as credible sources of the viewpoint on "Ethical Considerations for the Twenty-First Century" is simply unfathomable to me.”
Again, as I said in my last post—simply because you find something on a website does not make it true. Second, I am concerned when you say “the viewpoint”. It is as if you are insinuating there were simply one. In fact, it’s less insinuation, more of just a statement on your part. Really, though, your argument against these philosophers boils down to the fact that you found their names and/or works on a website that had a name that means bad things to you.
My first question is naturally—have you ever READ these philosophers? Your post seems to indicate that you printed out the readings. I don’t see any evidence or even the suggestion (up to this point in your post) that you have actually read any of their works or even the very small selections provided on the symposium website other than perhaps the Freire chapter. You haven’t explained what your understanding of Marxism is or what your understanding of Kant is, so your reader is supposed to believe that Kant is a Marxist or that his philosophy contributed to Marxism (these two are very different claims) based solely on the fact that you found his name on the website. This is not compelling evidence. It is hearsay: “Hey Jimmy, did you hear? Michele is a Marxist, I heard it from Tim who got it off the internet. Dude, it was on the internet? It MUST be true.”
You describe sitting down with the teachers and addressing your issues with them. The teachers tried explaining to you that these are not Marxist authors. But again you present undeniable evidence. Let’s take a look at your argument.
ReplyDelete“The teachers claimed these weren't Marxist authors…I told them I read the works, read the essays and found the essays agreed with these works.”
This is one of the parts I was referring to when I called this post a “shockingly bad” argument. Your ellipsis implies a connection between the two parts of your sentence.
Let me reformulate this for you.
The teachers claimed that A is not B
I read A
I read C
I found C agreed with A
Therefore A is B
Surely you can see how this conclusion in no way follows from the premises that you have given. You have not demonstrated in any way how these authors are Marxist. Your argument now has shifted to “the students agree with these thinkers (as demonstrated from their own essays) and therefore must have been brainwashed into believing they were right by their teachers”. Interestingly enough in the second part of your post you seem to backtrack, calling Aristotle and Kant “innocuous” but you maintain that Freire’s work is “an open call to Marxism”. Now if I were in the brainwashing business, I would want to send a consistent message through all of the texts I had chosen for my indoctrinees. If I were really trying to indoctrinate these kids with Marxism, would I really have just one work that presents the Marxist perspective? The Freire work actually challenges students to critically think about the normal pedagogical model and the roles of both the teacher and the student. If I were trying to get these kids to believe whatever I told them, would I really want them to challenge my authority as the sole possessor of knowledge? Only if I were a terrible brainwasher. In short, you have not demonstrated any evidence that suggests that the work these kids are doing is not wholly their own, that these are not their own thoughts and conclusions. In fact, I find your approach to be rather insulting to these young men and women. You have automatically assumed that Pine Richland’s “best and brightest” are not critical thinkers, that they cannot make up their own minds and that they would simply accept what someone tells them to be true. Curiously, this is exactly what Freire’s chapter warns them against. So in your view, either they can’t read and understand what he is saying or they have been brainwashed if they agree with him.
I also enjoyed the snide comment insinuating that the teacher chose to meet face to face with you so as not to put his own views in writing. Curiously, I found that you failed to do this as well. In fact, you refer so often to “other viewpoints” and perhaps other selections from different authors, yet I fail to find you suggesting what these other viewpoints might be or which other authors they should perhaps consider for next year. I take from your attempt to lump all of these thinkers into “secular humanism” and the fact that your sole approval for a student’s paper goes to the young lady “who used the Bible well as a source of ethics” that your issue is less with the humanistic quality of the work and more with the secular viewpoint. Perhaps you are right. They should have included some Muslim teachings, Jewish teachings, Buddhist teachings, Hindu teachings, Pagan teachings, Christian teachings and perhaps a few more. Except there is that whole pesky separation of church and state thing and some parents might get pretty upset by this. Or am I mistaken? Is PRHS a private school? I’ll take the fact that you mentioned abuse of tax-payer dollars to indicate that it is in fact public.
Also, I noticed that you chastise the teachers and students both for failing to repeatedly assert, either in their papers or presumably in class, that the philosophers’ thoughts are in fact opinions. Yet in your own writing I don’t find you confessing a single time that any of your own writing is YOUR opinion. You seem to represent it as a truth claim, which is the standard model for a persuasive argument: this is true and here is my evidence for why it is true. Except that the evidence for your claims is beyond weak to the point of being…oh yes, shockingly bad.
ReplyDeleteOne of my biggest issues with your post is that you don’t seem capable of or interested in distinguishing between political and ethical. You seem to be attempting to pile a great many things under one hat of progressive political ideology though you give no context for their mutual association as falling under this particular classification. But these philosophers have VERY different ideas about the nature of ethics. If I could, I would refer you to the symposium webpage where the purpose/driving question of the event is “one of assessing actions” (somehow you find this to be a “biased topic”, please do explain). This is a characteristically modern approach to ethical questions. Thinkers like Kant with his Categorical Imperative or Mill with Utilitarianism approach ethics by assessing actions as moral or immoral based on very different criteria. As a result, Kantians and Utilitarians would very often sharply disagree over whether particular actions could be considered moral. Both, however, would fall under your umbrella of “secular humanism” because they attempt to apply a rational standard to morality rather than one based on dogmatic authority. Ancient Greek thinkers, like Aristotle, approach ethical questions by asking instead “what is virtue?” or “what is the best life?” His thoughts do not center around particular actions but the cultivation of virtues such as courage, justice, and moderation. To argue, as you have (if we can call it an argument and not a simple misinformed statement), that these different men from different places and different times represent one consistent view with how to approach ethical problems is just plain erroneous. If you want to discuss politics, that’s fine, we can certainly do that. But these kids are not doing that. They are discussing ethics and using examples from current events/issues that they feel can be applied to these discussions.
Incidentally you cannot simultaneously claim that this is a “Postmodern Gibsonia” and that the teachers are indoctrinating students with a single “worldview”. The very notion of a “worldview” is contrary to a fundamental tenet of postmodern thought which holds that the idea of a “Grand Narrative” or “worldview” has been destroyed. What we are left with are smaller, individualistic truths, a kind of anthropomorphism, a reality which is not dictated to us but is in essence shaped by us. You also cannot make the claim that anyone agreeing with Kant believes in such a world: Kant’s Categorical Imperative is universal. You cannot have your cake and eat it too, I’m afraid.
As an educator at the college level who works hard to get my kids to think critically, evaluate arguments, improve their writing, and above all, make up their own minds, I could not be more impressed with the idea of this symposium at the high school level. I very, very rarely have kids in my class who have even heard of some of these philosophers, let alone read them. I hope you enjoyed my “substantial and thoughtful” response. I sincerely hope this leads to a real discussion.
Don't you have anything better to do with your time?
ReplyDeleteCrosbycat, some of your concerns left me with the following message: "I don't want my children being taught in an environment where abortion, atheism, homosexuality, etc, are addressed as possibilities."
ReplyDeleteWhether these things are right or wrong doesn't matter here. It's important for students to be informed about these growing issues, and I see no reason to deprive them of the right to voice their opinions (even if their opinion differs from yours.)
Oh yes because it's rediculous for students in a public school to learn from another source besides the bible. The amount of close-mindedness you express in your posts is despicable. Students have the right to learn about different opinions, some they agree with, and some which they may not. As all of the information on this blog is coming from someone who's children do not even go to pine richland and who gets all of their "information" from the Internet and not from the actual student body can not even be considered a viable source. Any idiot can make a half-assed attempt at a blog not to mention that the entire purpose of this whole blog baffles me. Get off the computer, stop trying to impress your misguided beliefs onto a school that doesn't even effect you, and take care of your own children. You're irrelevant.
ReplyDelete