Grumpy Old Teacher explains in his blog the “thinking” behind Ron DeSantis’ decision to censor math textbooks and purge them of content that he and his Department of Education found objectionable.
He begins:
As the uproar over Department of Education (FLDOE) deemed inappropriate mathematics textbooks continued this week, the governor claiming that the curriculum materials were proprietary, the publishers could appeal the decision, and he would respect the process, the FLDOE decided to release four examples of objectionable content. In this post, GOT will examine the first example or as he will dub it, Exhibit A for the court of public opinion. Cue the theme song for the People’s Court.
The exhibit shows two bar graphs with the cited source being Project Implicit, which is a research endeavor by three scientists from the University of Washington, Harvard University, and the University of Virginia. From their page, they describe themselves as “The mission of Project Implicit is to educate the public about bias and to provide a “virtual laboratory” for collecting data on the internet…”
CRT is used like people use acronyms for texting, shorthand for talking about race and the disparate treatment of human beings based upon their perceived category. This is anathema to people like Ron DeSantis and Moms for Liberty, who disguise their preference for white supremacy by claiming to be color-blind and that is the highest ideal. They even quote the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. out of context as support.
In response to actions like banning math books over Exhibit A, public education advocates explain that this is not CRT and that CRT is not taught in public schools. They might as well try to explain that LOL means laughing out loud, not lots of love to the uninitiated. They’re not listening. The actual meaning or theory does not matter; what matters is the irrationality and great emotion that the acronym will arouse.
CRT, for them, means any discussion about race other than that America is a great, benevolent nation, Ronald Reagan’s shining white city on the hill, and that is all public schools should teach.
Fun fact: Florida avers that history such as the 1920 Ocoee massacre will be taught. That was when a white mob took revenge on the Black citizens who had had the audacity to vote in the 1920 presidential election. In one November night, a Black population of hundreds was reduced to nearly none.
We will teach the history of Ocoee, but that is not the question. The question is how it will be taught. Will schools present it as a shameful episode of lynching? Or will it be taught as something else? (If you’re following the policies of Ron DeSantis, you’ve already noted that the voting rights of Black citizens is something he does not respect.)
The excerpt does not do the post justice. Open the link and read the rest.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Republican thought police are really good at framing what should be thought provoking topics into one or two word slogans that elicit only an emotional reaction, no thought required or wanted.
They are much better at messaging than are progressives, but, of course, they have a lot of well-paid operatives at well-endowed “think tanks” to work on this full time.
scary to know that that is the underlying goal: bring endless emotional chaos and get voters to vote dramatically against their own interests
What you call “emotional chaos” means “culture war” issues.
What we are talking about here are one or two special features in a 1,000+-page textbook.
It has come to our attention that Ms. Piccolo has had her 3rd period music students perform the fourth movement chorale from Bach’s cantata Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, popularly known as “Sleepers, Awaken.” Therefore, we are suing her for indoctrinating our children in this woke ideology! Enough of these attacks on white somnolence!
Egad. Imagine the $$$ wasted at the FL DofEd poring over these tomes with toothpicks.
Or– wait a minute. Maybe they didn’t even look at the ones published by fave donors with connections!
Who knows? Some of the news reports have stated that the adoption committee reacted to parent comments. The adoption procedure includes a period of in-person review of proposed texts (the texts are made available for review at a particular place and times). So, it’s easy to massage this process–to invite rightwing groups to show up and pour over the texts, looking for anything objectionable to them.
Hey Bob, thanks for that detail. I was confused when newspaper accounts referred to textbook complaints referred to them y “the public.”
“Black history and white history are not the same. History is not the recitation of facts, events, and years. It is the interpretation of such things, how we understand the past and how it impacts the present. History is the science of connecting causes and effects. It is the art of tracing the movement of ideas and power through generations to see where we are today and why we are here.”
So much nonsense (except the last sentence)!
If you don’t understand why this paragraph is full of nonsense (hey, I’m playing nice in the sandbox as virgin eyes and ears are around), Hint, it has to do with language usage and meaning.
I’m not sure what the issues are here, Duane. Let’s take this piece by piece.
“Black history and white history are not the same.” I suspect that what he means here is that black people and white people have not, historically, had the same experiences. For example, there weren’t laws saying that white people had to use the white people’s entrance in the back, to sit on the back of the bus, to get their meal to go instead of sitting at the lunch counter. This seems obvious enough.
“History is not the recitation of facts, events, and years.” I suspect that he means “is not only.” Again, this is clearly so. The practice of history consists of much more than just naming these things.
“It is the interpretation of such things, how we understand the past and how it impacts the present.” Of course, two of the reasons that we study history are to understand what happened in the past and how past events created the present. For example, a study of federal housing regulation in the 20th century shows clearly that it encouraged house ownership by whites and discouraged house ownership by blacks and led to destruction of black communities with high black housing ownership by enabling seizure of those via eminent domain. These things, coupled with the fact that home ownership is the primary means by which most ordinary people build generational wealth (another being business ownership) goes a long way toward explaining why black people today are poorer than are white people. That’s clearly an interpretation of one meaning of federal housing regulation in the 20th century, and it’s an important one. And, of course, one interpretation is better than another if it is more warranted by the available facts.
And here I mean “meaning” in the sense of significance in addition to in the sense of lexical definition (by the various means by which words are defined, including ostensive definition (pointing to examples), restatement (saying the same thing in different words), and meaning in use (observing how people interact in response to the particular language).
The history is the same, even though there may be many interpretations of the facts of history and that those facts affected different groups differently. My point being that history is not a black or white issue (pun intended). History is what it is, it is the interpretations of historical events, sequences, time frames that may or may not be quite as black and white.
My point being that I wish that “our side”, the “woke” side would be more diligent in its language usage as we give openings to those who do use false histories as a political tool to discredit, to the general public, a fuller and more nuanced historical perspective.
Without the knowledge of “facts, events and years” history cannot be written and interpreted other than to be some dogmatic nonsense with no hint of truth-telling. One has to learn those facts, events and years before one can cogently comment on them.
What facts people perceive and how they understand them often depends upon the concepts available to them in their own times and places–on their cultural lenses, or, to use the term adopted by philosopher and historiographer Hans-Georg Gadamer, their “cultural horizons.” So, for example, consider the fifth-grade teacher who hauls off her lesson on “Greek myths” with a slide show of pictures of Greek gods and goddesses and says, for example, “This is Dionysus, the god of wine. This is Demeter, the goddess of the Earth. This is Athene, the goddess of wisdom and justice and mercy.” and so on. Well, this teachers is imposing a foreign conceptual schema on ancient Greek ways of thought that were VERY DIFFERENT from hers. Of course, she’s just following what she has in turn read in popular books about “Greek myths,” which also suffer from this problem. The problem is that the Greeks thought about, conceptualized, this business of deity very differently than we do. Here’s W.K.C. Guthrie, in his superb book The Greek Philosopehers from Tales to Aristotle: “[T]heos, the Greek word which we have in mind when we speak of Plato’s god, has primarily a predicative force. That is to say, the Greeks did not, as Christians or Jews do, first assert the existence of God and then proceed to enumerate his attributes, saying, ‘God is good,’ “God is love,’ and so forth. Rather, they were so impressed or awed by things in life or nature remarkable either for joy or fear that they said, ‘This is a god’ or “That is a god.’ The Christian says, ‘God is love,’ the Greek ‘Love is theos,’ or ‘a god.’ As another writer has explained it: ‘By saying that love, or victory, is god, or, to be more accurate, a god, was meant first and foremost that it was more than human, not subject to death everlasting . . . Any power, any force we see at work in the world, which is not born with us and will continue after we are gone could thus be called a god, and most of them were.'” This difference in conceptualization of the notion of deity explains why, in the Iliad, people don’t seem to act on their own. The Greeks had this notion of being seized by an Ate, the spirit of something, that was the reason why people were motivated to do one thing or another. So, a warrior doesn’t act on his own but is seized by the spirit of a god, which causes him to act. And so Agamemnon begs pardon of Achilles for taking the slave girl Breisis, saying that he couldn’t help himself because he was seized by his Ate. This notion of being filled with a motivating spirit is preserved in the roots meanings of words like inspiration (taking in the spirit) or enthusiasm, from the Latin enthusiasmus, or frenzy, from the Greek enthousiazein, to be inspired or possessed by a god, itself containing a form of the noun theos, or god.
The situation is further complicated because the concepts themselves evolved in Greek thought through several stages, as detailed in Gilbert Murray’s Five Stages of Greek Religion.
At any rate, the idea of these gods as being the sovereigns of domains they ruled over, as Joe the Plumber is keeper of Joe’s Plumbing, Zelenskiy is the ruler of Ukraine, Zuckerberg owns and runs Facebook–so, Apollo rules over music, for example–is an imposition of a later conceptualization onto something very different in its inception. Even as late as Plato, one finds Socrates talking of being taken over, entranced, ruled by his daimon.
The same sort of misapplication of foreign conceptualization runs amok through most Western interpretation of indigenous religion. Westerners, post Plato and Christianity, conceptualized the universe being divided into two parts, a lower physical world and a higher spiritual one (in Plato, the world of the archetypal Forms). And that’s how they interpreted indigenous religions. Oh, they worship the Corn Goddess. Oh, they worship a sky god, Wakan Tanka. But that division is a foreign concept in most indigenous religion, or at least was until it was tainted by contact with the Christian West. Instead of seeing the universe as divided into the spirit and the material, they saw the two realms as one. Forces in the world WERE spirits and were perceived as such in states of prayer and vision. Thus, for example, the vision quest. Very, very different way of thinking.
But I see what you mean, Duane. Historians can’t have their Trumpish, Putinist “alternative facts.”
So, for example, among the Santee Dakota, there weren’t two separate worlds, the spirit world and the material world. The spirit world WAS the material world, as perceived in states of vision or prayer.
These impositions of Western concepts on foreign materials have led to extreme misunderstanding of other ways of living, being, thinking.
Roy, I know, is a big fan of Ferdinand Braudel of the Anneles School of historiography. Braudel fought for understanding in detail the economic facts underlying historical events. It’s a powerful technique. Economic forces do drive events. However, one cannot discount entirely the role of cultural lenses in historical interpretation. Often, people in other places and times thought very differently than we do, and recapturing that, fully groking it, is difficult. It involves unlearning one’s own unexamined conceptualizations.
This is interesting. As you might imagine, I have some ideas, but first, I need to Set up risers for the choir.
HAAAA. Funny. Preach it, Brother Roy!
cx: These things . . . go a long way
Duane: history is stories about the past. People use these stories to make sense of their lives. Their lives are personal. Their lives are social. Often their lives are political (complex social, you might say). It is history that I learned to play the fiddle in North Carolina. It is history that Twain wrote Huck Finn. Is it history that every boy who floats one of those beautiful Missouri Rivers wishes he were Huck? Purely interpretation, but fun and possible.
The multiplicity of stories renders history problematic. Stories are important to the National moods that motivate elections and policies. Truth in history exists. But history is like science in that perception of the truth reacts th research and learning. It is not static.
Because of this, changes in the perception of history can be manipulated by those who know that these stories are Powerful And have the ability to motivate people. There is no end of that going on now in the body politic, not just of the United States, but also in the world.
As Putin’s fanciful history “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” clearly shows. It’s an imperialist screed disguised as history.
I love that the word “thinking” was placed in quotation marks in the main post. Exactly.
Love wordpress AI almost as much as FB’s AI.
Word SupPRESSion works in wondrous and mysterious ways. Who can fathom its inner workings or rationale for dumping us into moderation hell. Don’t forget spell check: spell check changes steve bannon to steve cannon or steve bantou?!! If I capitalize the B in Bannon then it’s OK. On other occasions spell check will mis (sic) misspellings.
“FB” “AI” reminds me of the Ali G bit with the FBI.
Off topic, but this is worth reading for teachers and parents of teenagers.
I think that this is a moral panic. It’s bad among teens, but it’s always been bad among teens. It’s a difficult time in development. People are driven by powerful hormones freshly surging through them, but the parts of their brains (in the prefrontal cortex) that do planning and control are not fully developed (and won’t be until they are in their mid-twenties). So, everything is a big crisis. Lots of drama. Lots of emotion. Very little ability to control themselves or work out logically, rationally, the consequences of their actions. I suppose that it is possible that the Internet is intensifying this stuff (for example, there are copycat phenomena, cyberstalking and bullying, comparison of one’s self to Internet others, etc.) but I think that it was always intense and probably just less studied and reported. having recently taught teenagers and seen how weird they are, it’s a wonder to me that many of them make it out of these years alive and reasonably sane.
Nothing out of the ordinary, then?
No, not nothing. I do suspect that social media acerbate this stuff, but I also suspect that it was worse in the past than people think it was. Some have argued that in Germany, after the publication of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which a young, unrequited lover shoots himself, there was a terrible rash of suicides among teens. Remember the Rebel without a Cause of the 1950s?
Wow. Interesting stats, Flerp!
So, if these stats are accurate, the number of emergency room visits for self-harm has doubled since the introduction of the Internet, though it was high to begin with (about 250 per hundred thousand).
Thanks for raising this issue, Flerp. It’s an important one, whether or not it’s always been a problem, one that ebbed and flowed, becoming more or less worse at different times. My strong belief is that teenagers suffer terribly emotionally and that they need supports that teachers alone are not sufficient to provide. That means counsellors who can actually do counselling.
This subject is more on my mind because our community, which many perceive as an island of bucolic stability, has lost two kids this year. In my life I have known over fifty people who succeeded in taking their own life. A lot of them were my father’s age. World War II, people whispered. But as the years have proceeded, the list of young and old has grown. In my mind, it was a crisis when the first man, a farmer friend of my father’s, took his life when I was a small boy filled with wondering about the world.
Such tragedy! And so hard on those left behind. It often runs in families. So, that in itself should give people pause, for the sake of their loved ones.
Bob and Roy,
This is why is it truly unconscionable that there are adults trying to censor what kind of medical treatment teens can receive. That is why it is truly unconscionable that there are adults who want to demonize trans kids and gay kids instead of normalizing them.
One thing that should also be looked at is the connections between the rise of teen suicide with the rise of children and teens being prescribed ADHD medications and the use of them off the books.
And Bob, you are so right to cite DeSantis.
The idea that children are demonized and humiliated because they struggle with math (or reading) is unacceptable. There is nothing wrong with textbooks reinforcing the ideas of SEL in a few of the hundreds of pages, and that was never a problem until it became politicized by right wing Republicans, as Florida has proven.
It is extremely dangerous and stupid to ignore the emotional needs of teens. They are emotionally fragile. This should be a major point of all professional preparation of teachers and administrators. And yes, doctors are in better positions to decide whether kids need to start hormone therapies before they are 18. These are private decisions that politicians have no business getting involved in.
Doctors are definitely better positioned than legislators (and insurers, for that matter) to diagnose and treat patients. At the same time, doctors are susceptible to structural incentives that don’t always align with patients’ best interests. We saw this in spades with the opiate crisis. We have arguably seen it again with ADHD over-diagnoses and medication (which the poster above surmises may be connected to suicide rates — I’ve never heard that before, but who knows). And we absolutely should not assume we aren’t going seeing it again to some extent with puberty blockers. Countries like the U.K., Finland, Norway etc. are approaching this very differently than we are in the U.S.
I would add SOME doctors are susceptible and not all are bad actors even when they do accept perks. We need a bit more trust (but verify) rather than jumping to the worst case scenario. I feel like we have become conditioned to automatically react to a wide range of events/people with more than healthy skepticism. I am not excusing myself either, but I am wary of my almost knee jerk urge to assign suspect motives to everyone and everything.
Your point is important, too, though. Moral panics happen all the time, and it’s always good to pause and ask, “is this trend story just another moral panic?”
I will point out that there might very well be too many doctors prescribing ADHD meds but I have yet to see that politicized by the legislature banning how doctors may prescribe ADHD meds.
There was overuse of antibiotics in the past which was not addressed by passing laws forbidding doctors from prescribing antibiotics.
The right wing has POLITICIZED this and there is no point discussing ways to address it without first condemning the folks that are making it impossible to address this by politicizing this issue for their own political and personal benefit. As they do with everything because those folks truly have no morals.
I have no doubt that if the Republicans believed they could gain something politically by banning some other medical treatment they would.
And that is the problem with our country now. People who are complicit look the other way as Republicans trash the entire notion of public discourse and truth. And democracy cannot survive when one party traffics in lies and others who are complicit keep pretending it doesn’t matter or “both sides lie” while claiming that they are not on the side of the Republicans.
Normalizing lying. Normalizing a political party which will pass laws that they exempt themselves from.
That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be responding to this stuff. We should. Every school should have counsellors, and these people should be very well trained to talk kids down and defuse situations. Instead, we have people like Governor DeWTF insisting that we not do any of that darned “woke” “Socialist” socialemotional learning stuff.
Well, we had better be addressing the emotions of teenagers, for their sake.
This article from Jan 2019 was a warning
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/10/by-mollycoddling-our-children-were-fuelling-mental-illness-in-teenagers#comments
Here’s another off-topic story, which gives a deeper meaning to the term “community school.”
!!!!!
An amazing interview with exiled Russian journalist Andrei Loshak. Read the end of this. So important. I really fear that this is coming soon to the United States. Trump wanted to impose this kind of dictat here, but Esper and Milley wouldn’t go along. I fear that the next guy will be smarter than Trump and have the right goons in place.
https://goodwordnews.com/reflections-of-a-russian-in-exile-in-georgia/
Here’s the video of this interview with Mr. Loshak:
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6304976132001#sp=show-clips
“Live not by lies,” wrote Solzhenitsyn, his prescription in a time when the same sort of situation prevailed in Russia that prevails today, in which the potential for swift and sure state violence made any action except nonparticipation too costly.
People will, I’m afraid, learn here how precious democracy was when it is lost, when people dare not speak anymore.
Here’s the piece of Solzhenitsyn that Mr. Loshak refers to:
https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/live-not-by-lies
On Learning That Hopkins Meant to Destroy by Burning His Own Poetry
The great historian of education (and generally great all-round person) Diane Ravitch has written that her favorite poem is one by Gerard Manly Hopkins. So, I wrote this for her, about Hopkins, in Hopkins’s own style. The phrase noli me tangere, in the poem, is the Latin “Touch me not,” spoken to Mary Magdalene by the risen Jesus. The line also occurs in Sir Thomas Wyatt’s sonnet “Whoso List to Hunt.” And, importantly for this poem, “touch me not” is the name of a flower whose seed pods burst, scattering their seeds, when those pods are touched. Hopkins, a Jesuit priest and one of the greatest poets of his generation, worried, as Chaucer did, that his obsession with writing poetry verged on sinful sensuality. LOL.
If a fairy tale begins with a prohibition, you know it’s going to be broken .
The Word was charged anew with the grandeur of Gerard
Hopkins’s bold bald conjugal rhythms that sprang so
springingly sprung across the page and marveling mind
like one of those flowers–noli me tangere—that blows then bursts
raining, dappled, down such confettilike windfall seedpod
images that one might drown in their festive falling,
so scattering round about in lambent Monet-made lily-light
as to make one wonder, bebrindled, seduced, fallen again,
whether to win such a world were worth the fell first fall
after all. Our first father’s, mother’s Eden lost to gain
another. If this be sin, go and sin some more, beautiful brother.
Copyright 2020, Robert D. Shepherd. All rights reserved. For more poetry by Bob Shepherd, go here: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/category/poetry/
FYI: This just in from The Boston Globe on Critical Race Theory:
ALL QUOTED BELOW
In landmark report, Harvard publishes first full accounting of the school’s historical ties to slavery
Harvard University, seeking to confront what it termed “now incontestable truths,” published the first full accounting of the school’s historical ties to slavery Tuesday, and acknowledged its complicity in 19th century “race science” and 20th century racial discrimination.
The report, produced by a team of faculty and student researchers led by a high-ranking dean, describes a range of ties to slavery dating from the university’s founding in the 17th century to abolition in the 19th.
Read the full story.
Related:
• Five takeaways from the report
• Harvard President Lawrence Bacow’s letter to the university community
• Read the full Harvard report
END QUOTED MATERIAL CBK
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/04/26/metro/landmark-report-harvard-confronts-its-ties-slavery/?s_campaign=breakingnews:newsletter
And Harvard intends to pay reparations!!!