For the two groups tasked with cobbling together research presentations (and wikis!) in a week, this week’s reading assignment was unsympathetic. In my opinion, this does not facilitate students’ production of superior work.
Workshop 1: Democracy, Citizenship, and Social Studies Curriculum
Alan Sears’s essay, “What Research Tells Us About Citizenship Education in English Canada”, examines disconnects between curricula and policy in Canadian education. Although there is a prevailing affinity for participatory citizenship, Sears suggests that in practice there is a preference for passive spectating (p. 121). Far from a provocative thesis, perhaps the real scandal is that society continues to prefer to remain willfully ignorant rather than face the reality that we’re seeing the successful implementation of forced schooling. It is no accident at all that schools indoctrinate students with bigotry and fundamentalisms. That is what they are designed to do.
Sears suggests that Canadian and American students have distinctive tendencies. In comparison with American society, Canadians are presented as more conservative and favoring a more passive role of citizenship. Canadians also suffer from identity crisis, and have diverse attitudes towards the relationship between citizens and the state (p. 121). My curiosity was piqued by his mention of a “persistent identity crisis”, as I’ve noticed this tendency among Canadians as well. Over the course of my global travels, I’ve met quite a few ex-pat Canadians, and many of them seem dedicated in their attempts to occupy stereotypes. Since I was born in the US I may have a degree of cultural bias, but my wife has also bemoaned the shallow anti-culture of Canada. Almost without fail, everywhere we traveled there would be a Canadian with an embroidered Canadian flag on an oversized backpack; but we didn’t notice this tendency among travelers from other countries. When meeting these “patriots”, my wife (who is Canadian, btw) would often inquire about the context of the flag. She wanted to know why they chose to advocate for Canada, why they were “proud to be Canadian”, and what they thought made Canada unique. Our experimental protocols were obviously not sufficient to presume an unnecessary degree of certainty, but there were clear similarities among responses. These “patriotic” ex-pats were apparently very proud to be Canadian, but for the most part that simply meant “not American”. When asked what they thought made Canada great, many responded with banal platitudes or ignorant stereotypes. Simply summarized, Canada is great because it isn’t America. These “patriots” were almost culturally identical to most Americans, but they somehow didn’t catch the irony. Besides, the whole idea of having pride for the place you were born – simply because you were born there – strikes me as absurd. I don’t think there’s any reasonable justification for taking pride in nationality. I can’t be proud to be American because I didn’t have anything to do with making America what it is today, and I certainly wasn’t consulted before being born there. Likewise, my ancestors lived and died in and out of America, but they didn’t make it what it is today. There are many Americans who naively take pride in their nationality, but I would argue this results from an egocentric misunderstanding of pride steeped in arrogance. If Canadians suffer from a “persistent identity crisis”, I would argue they aren’t alone. If students declare their pride as Canadians and feel fortunate they live in Canada, chances seem likely that this arises due to successful indoctrination of preferred social mores (p. 124). Personally, I don’t see the ubiquity of brainwashed citizens who are oblivious to their own history as “heartening”. For example, I’m frequently dumbfounded when Canadians (especially Vancouverites!) get on a soap box for “environmental responsibility”. Although it won’t make the evening news, Victoria has no sewage treatment facilities. Waste passes directly into the bay and ocean. How much sewage do you think Vancouver Island has produced over the past century? Is that something to take pride in? (For further reading, see Mel Hurtig’s “The Truth About Canada: Some Truly Appalling Things All Canadians Should Know About Our Country”).
UBC’s Teacher Ed. program places an emphasis on collaborative and cooperative techniques for learning, but Sears states the obvious by suggesting that “many new teachers faced with the ‘reality shock’ of the classroom retreat from the progressive methods they became committed to in university to very conservative and custodial ones” (p. 124). How often do children swear to themselves they won’t revisit their parents’ vices when they have children, only to fall into familiar patterns of authority they once viewed as tyrannical when they have children of their own? Sometimes the apple falls far from the tree, but often it doesn’t. In the case of pedagogy, new teachers often suffer from an excess of optimism and become stymied within institutionalized apathy. Moreover, behavior management problems can easily undercut the teacher’s noble attentions. Teachers that resort to “traditional civics” style curricula don’t do so to satisfy their inner-most longings; they do it because they feel it’s easier to implement than cooperative alternatives. I feel confident that if UBC began tracking PDP graduates after certification, many of the teacher candidates now endorsing collaborative methods would be practicing something quite different in their classrooms.
In Sears’s discussion on what is being taught in Canadian Social Studies classrooms, he highlights the sparsity of research available as well as the dominant tendency to avoid controversial issues and debate (p. 123). Recognizing this as ineffective, he suggests that “a contemporary issues/inquiry-based approach to social education fosters the development of democratic skills and attitudes” (p. 124). This resonated very strongly with me, and correlates with a significant criticism I have with UBC’s PDP program. If “contemporary issues” are so relevant to effective Social Studies instruction, why is it that we haven’t discussed any current issues in any of our classes? There’s been time taken out of class to discuss frivolous issues like hockey, but not a single one of my classes has had a discussion on the bases and implications of the economic collapse of ’08. Apparently it’s not worthy of discussion if our neighbor to the South suffers from a bloodless coup. Not a single one of my classes has discussed the US under martial law. Not a single one of my classes has discussed the misrepresentation of the Russia/Georgia conflict by the mainstream media. I could probably go on for some time, but my point has been made: there is inherent hypocrisy in saying Social Studies teachers should engage “contemporary issues” while failing to provide examples. We may discuss pervasive contentious issues like social justice, gender or culture, but we should not be skipping over what’s happening right now.
In conclusion, Sears’s essay calls for additional research into Canadian classrooms, and I couldn’t agree more. Noting the lack of replication among studies, Sears suggests that more effort needs to be given to verifying tentative conclusions reached by other researchers (p. 126), but he somehow ignores the fact that every classroom is different. No two classes are the same and no two lessons are the same. The same teacher in the same room, given different students, will convey different information. Teachers are unique individuals that defy empirical evaluation. It seems irresponsibile to place an inordinate amount of confidence in generalizing their methods or results. Nonetheless, if our aim is create environments that enable each student to excel to the best of their abilities, additional research would potentially help teachers revise their methods.
Workshop 2: Race and Social Studies Curriculum
George Dei’s essay, “‘We Cannot Be Color-Blind’ Race, Antiracism, and the Subversion of Dominant Thinking” stood out as a potentially incisive examination of attitudes towards race in Canadian classrooms. As a [caucasian] native of southern Mississippi, I have a unique background when it comes to racial relations. African Americans suffer under egregious oppression in my region, and have fared even worse throughout history. Having lived throughout the Deep South, traveled throughout the US and around the globe, I no longer maintain the racist ideologies that dominate the region. In common with Dei, I have found that “color is not the problem; it is the interpretation that we put on color that makes the problem” (p. 26).
There are far more countries on my list of places I want to visit than there are on my list of places I have visited. However, I’ve had the fortune of traveling throughout America, East and South Asia, North Africa and West Europe. During these explorations I have repeatedly witnessed deeply entrenched racist tendencies. In South Mississippi I may have ‘enjoyed’ the ‘benefits’ of my race, but that certainly wasn’t the case elsewhere. While living in Asia, I was regularly disadvantaged because of my race. Racist attitudes are far from uncommon in Asia, and many of my experiences would compare admirably with those of oppressed minorities elsewhere. Gangs of children throwing rocks chased my wife and I out of parks. Taxi drivers pulled over to the curb only to speed off when they noticed I’m white. Children innocently referred to me as “ghost monster”, grandmothers would cross to the other side of the street rather than walk past me, and people would wait for the next elevator rather than get in with a caucasian. I’ve no doubt that there were other mitigating circumstances that contributed to these experiences, but the effect is the same: oppressive racism. In Africa I experienced another type of racism – since I was caucasian everyone thought I must be rich! There are many other anecdotes that I could cite to illustrate my intimacy with racism, but they’d probably fall on deaf ears. For the most part, racism is something that needs to be experienced before it can be understood. In Canada, where the ruling majority is caucasian, there is little opportunity for whites to feel the oppression of minorities.
Dei suggests that “the propensity to blame the victim is generally unquestioned” (p. 27). This strongly corresponds with the views of Malcolm X, who said, “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” Western culture demonizes racial minorities through an insidious process of misinformation, but this doesn’t happen by accident.
Associating racialization with biological determinism, Dei argues against popular views of “human nature” (p. 27). Further corroboration for Dei’s criticism can be found in transpersonal psychology, which suggests that there is no such thing as human nature; there is only human behavior. Many pundits love to argue that ‘human nature’ makes us greedy, ignorant and arrogant, but I think they misunderstand the distinction between correlation and causation. The author suggests that people think a “[minority] group [can be] possessed of certain biological traits that lead to the nurturing of suicide bombers” (p. 28); but what does this really say aside from, “Many people are incredibly stupid”? The path to becoming a “suicide bomber” has a lot to do with culture, history and economics, but nothing to do with “human nature”. There is a correlation between ethnicity and behavior, but ethnicity does not cause behavior.
One minor point of contention arose when Dei wrote, “One can only point to the so-called enlightened European scholars’ attempts to deny Egyptian and Nubian influence on European history or Western (Greek) civilization” (p. 29). Although it would be irresponsible of me to ignore the prevailing chauvinisms of “enlightened European scholars”, I’d also be remiss for ignoring the impact of occultism. Athanasius Kircher, for example, was one of the earliest advocates of the interrelation between Egyptian and European occultism. In Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition Francis Yates convincingly argued in favor of the occult roots of the Renaissance. Giordano Bruno challenged the assumptions of the “enlightened European scholars” and got himself burned alive. Indeed, the entire basis of the Renaissance rests on the shoulders of Hermes Trismegistus, a mythic archetypal magician who lived in Egyptian antiquity. When Medici was funding the translation of newly rediscovered papyri, the works of Plato took a backseat to Hermes Trismegistus. Although many “enlightened European scholars” may have been remiss to note these developments, a neutral scholar cannot.
When examining the form and effects of funding cutbacks on educational programs, Dei states that “repeated cutbacks in education to frontline services–such as school community advisors; equity departments; and programs like ESL, African heritage, and adult education–all serve to disadvantage learners” (p. 34). One might wonder if there has been any comparable reduction in funding for sports. There is certainly value in sports, but when universities favor athletes over philosophers and poets, how does this help society? For example, many Canadians have an amazing fondness for hockey. Why? For the majority of them, hockey seems to be a spectator activity (wasn’t the spectator-approach to democracy criticized elsewhere?). This reminds me of Noam Chosmky:
In fact, I have the habit when I’m driving of turning on these radio call-in programs, and it’s striking when you hear the ones about sports. They have these groups of sports reporters, or some kind of experts on a panel, and people call in and have discussions with them. First of all, the audience obviously is devoting an enormous amount of time to it all. But the more striking fact is, the callers have a tremendous amount of expertise, they have detailed knowledge of all kinds of things, they carry on these extremely complex discussions…
…And when you look at the structure of them, they seem like a kind of mathematics. It’s as though people want to work out mathematical problems, and it they don’t have calculus and arithmetic, they work them out with other structures…And what all these things look like is that people just want to use their intelligence somehow…
Well, in our society we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can’t get involved in them in a very serious way — so what they do is put their minds to other things, such as sports. You’re trained to be obedient; you don’t have an interesting job; there’s no work around for you that’s creative; in the cultural environment you’re a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff…So what’s left?
…And I suppose that’s also one of the basic functions it serves society in general: it occupies the populations, and it keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter. In fact, I presume that’s part of the reason why spectator sports are supported to the degree they are by the dominant institutions. (link)
To conclude, I found Dei’s discussion on racism and antiracism riddled with assumptions and generalizations. In my opinion, the underlying link between racism and bigotry is epistemic and arises due to flawed fundamentalisms. When people begin thinking in fundamentalisms, honesty and accuracy are lost. One relatively practical ‘fix’ for this condition is the implementation of general semantics – especially E-Prime. If there was a cultural emphasis on accurate semantics, many of these antagonistic fundamentalisms would be mitigated.