E Wayne Ross – Critical Theories in Education

Thoughts to contemplate on May Day

Consider the thoughts below as part of your May Day activities:

Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt Euch! – Marx & Engels

“Think! It ain’t illegal yet!”
—George Clinton [“Lunchmeatophobia”]

“There was a movement at one time, not so many years ago either, which was international in its scope, which had for its object the setting aside the first of May for a general, international holiday, looking ultimately to the inauguration of a short-hour workday, but this grand idea has been side-tracked in later years by a lot of political buncombe and claptrap, thus persuading the working classes into the notion that they can gain their freedom by electing a lot of fellows to office.”

― Lucy Parsons (1906)

“I want to die a slave to principles. Not to men.”
— Emiliano Zapata

“… the most urgent expression of freedom is the destruction of idols, especially when they claim to represent freedom.”
— Guy Debord et al [“Position of the Lettrist International,” 1952]

“Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.”
—Karl Marx

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin

“The state is nothing but an instrument of oppression of one class by another—no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.”
—Marx & Engels

“When it can be said by any country in the world, my poor are happy, neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them, my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars, the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive, the rational world is my friend because I am the friend of happiness. When these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and government. Independence is my happiness, the world is my country and my religion is to do good.”
– Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
—Henry David Thoreau

“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.”
—Raoul Vaneigem

“One form of wage labor may correct the abuses of another, but no form of wage labor can correct the abuse of wage labor itself.”
—Karl Marx

“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.
— Guy Debord [Society of the Spectacle, Thesis 1, 1967]

“[In The Power Elite (1956) C. Wright Mills quoted] Sophie Tucker (without either approval or disapproval in the context) ‘I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and believe me, rich is best.’ For a radical, the corollary of the this attitude is that it is not wealth that is wrong with America but poverty, and that what is reprehensible about the rich is not that they enjoy the good things of life but that they use their power to maintain a system which needlessly denies the same advantages to others.
—Paul M. Sweezy, “Power Elite and the Ruling Class,” Monthly Review, September, 1956

“Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or a knife, and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy and let it be a war of extermination without pity.”
—Lucy Parsons quoted in Women Building Chicago, 2001, p. 671

“… and there will be rivers of blood!”
– Anonymous Rouge Forum Member

BCCLA: UBC Profs’ perverse interpretation of the University Act lays bare a hidden agenda

UBC Profs’ perverse interpretation of the University Act lays bare a hidden agenda
Posted on April 16, 2025
by Liza Hughes

Universities are a crucial social space of free expression, exchange of ideas, and academic debate.

Universities are not meant to be sanitized from political thought or discourse. The recent lawsuit brought by UBC professors and one former graduate student in the name of free expression is a perverse interpretation of the prohibition of political activity under the University Act that cannot be justified from a civil liberties lens.

The University Act requires that universities be “non-sectarian and non-political in principle.” In our view, this is to create a buffer between government and university. It functions to ensure that universities do not become tools of indoctrination for state-sponsored religions or ideologies.

BCCLA fully supports the need to keep universities free from state interference, which is why we condemn this case. We disagree with the interpretation of the University Act advanced by the petitioners and raise alarm at a lawsuit that considers diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) values, land acknowledgements, and faculty statements of solidarity to be inconsistent with civil liberties.

The UBC petitioners allege that acknowledging unceded territories, promoting DEI values, or faculty members denouncing state violence are political actions prohibited by the legislation and that they limit academic freedom.

However, their interpretation of “political” is ultimately self-defeating. Acknowledging that you are on unceded land is no more political than refusing to do so. Muzzling faculty will not advance academic freedom. Claiming that DEI values are “political”, while other value-laden concepts like academic freedom are not, is nonsensical.

Academic freedom includes the rights of university groups to speak out about important social issues including Indigenous Peoples’ inherent rights, issues of power and oppression, and genocide. Civil liberties include the rights of diverse voices to be heard and protected through promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion values.

It is paradoxical to claim that an acknowledgement of Indigenous rights undermines the colonial state and is therefore political.

Remaining “neutral” necessarily supports the status quo, which in itself is a political act.

Advancing a legal argument that universities should be prevented from acknowledging land theft or colonial occupation enforces and enables genocide denialism.

Genocide can only occur when it is supported and enabled by powerful institutions, both in Canada and abroad. Canadian institutions have supported, enabled, and enacted genocide of Indigenous Peoples since the formation of the country, and these genocidal acts and their legacy continue to this day. Denial of these facts is support for genocide and ought to be condemned by any rights-respecting person or institution.

The petitioners use the guise of civil liberties as a thin veil to cover genocide denialism.

It undermines the very ethos of civil liberties to assert that these liberties are incompatible with free expression on important political issues.

As civil libertarians, we believe that free expression, including expression of faculty members, drives critical, constructive discourse. We disagree that it is necessary or beneficial to silence faculty members in order to protect dissenting voices.

If academic freedom is at stake here, it is a matter to be dealt with by the University itself. This case invites the very political interference that the University Act is meant to prevent.

A principled civil libertarian would conclude that complete deference to the state, enforced by the courts and legislation against a university, is an inexcusable overreach of political power.

There is no social space free from political context. Outside university walls, Land Defenders are stripped of civil liberties; small gains towards uprooting oppression through promoting DEI values are being thwarted by powerful institutions; and voices expressing solidarity with Gaza are being systematically repressed.

This lawsuit is a calculated step backwards. It is not about freedom, academic or otherwise. It is telling that the petitioners challenge these three acts in tandem. Although they are conceptually and legally distinct, they all represent a shift away from colonial dominance. It aligns with a broader global trend moving away from equity values and actively concentrating power and resources within a small, privileged group.

People in Canada have come to understand that our diversity is our strength. That there is room for all of us.

The acknowledgement of existing power dynamics is one small step towards creating a more equitable environment where true freedom, including academic freedom, can flourish.

The notion that DEI commitments are unacceptably political for the university environment weaponizes the fact that marginalized people are politicized just by existing, participating, and taking up space.

This claim is a desperate attempt to hold onto power. It is not a new or edgy idea; it is the tired and dying battle cry of an old guard that is not willing to accept true competition in ideas or opportunities. It is an attempt to maintain status quo and the privilege it offers some, not an effort towards political neutrality.

BCCLA is deeply disturbed to see a past member of our Board of Directors, Andrew Irvine, taking a position that is so deeply antithetical to civil liberties and values of liberty, equality, and justice. We emphatically denounce the notion that land acknowledgements conflict with civil liberties, or that equality initiatives that acknowledge and attempt to remedy structural power dynamics are unacceptably political.

Civil liberties are not a commodity to be horded by the privileged few. Freedom cannot exist alongside oppression. At a time when equality rights and freedom of expression for equity-denied groups are increasingly under attack, BCCLA continues to champion an expansive interpretation of civil liberties that includes the rights of all.

Anti-Palestinian Racism Has No Place on Campus

APR-on-Campus is a self-reporting platform initiated by post-secondary students to document Anti-Palestinian Racism (APR) at Canadian educational institutions. Our objective is to expose the rise of APR, which fuels systemic marginalization, restricts academic freedom, and perpetuates injustice.

APR justifies and upholds systems of oppression by silencing voices, excluding perspectives, erasing narratives, and defamation – targeting Palestinians, those perceived as Palestinian, and non-Palestinians who support Palestinian rights. It manifests in both overt and subtle ways, including physical violence, harassment, smearing, dehumanization, exclusion, micro-aggressions, biased policies, and emotional violence. APR threatens both individuals and the integrity of academic spaces. We’re holding our universities accountable — we will not tolerate racism on campus.

“Anti-Palestinian racism is a form of anti-Arab racism that silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives. Anti-Palestinian racism takes various forms including: denying the Nakba and justifying violence against Palestinians; failing to acknowledge Palestinians as an Indigenous people with a collective identity, belonging and rights in relation to occupied and historic Palestine; erasing the human rights and equal dignity and worth of Palestinians; excluding or pressuring others to exclude Palestinian perspectives, Palestinians and their allies; defaming Palestinians and their allies with slander such as being inherently antisemitic, a terrorist threat/sympathizer or opposed to democratic values.”

Demand the Immediate Release of Palestinian Student Activist Mahmoud Khalil from DHS detention

On March 8, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and recent graduate student at Columbia University, at his place of residence, an apartment building owned by the university.

The DHS agents said that the U.S. Department of State had revoked Khalil’s green card.

At approximately 8:30 p.m. ET, Khalil and his wife, a U.S. citizen who is eight months pregnant, had just unlocked the door to their building when two plainclothes DHS agents forced their way in behind them. The agents initially refused to identify themselves, instead asking Khalil to confirm his identity before detaining him without explanation. The agents proceeded to threaten his wife, telling her that if she remained by his side, they would arrest her too.

Later, the DHS agents stated that the U.S. Department of State had revoked Khalil’s student visa, despite the fact that he has no student visa and is a lawful permanent resident. An agent showed Khalil what he claimed was a warrant on his phone. Khalil’s wife went into their apartment to retrieve his green card while the agents remained with Khalil downstairs. When she returned, advising them of Khalil’s legal status and presenting them with Khalil’s green card, one agent was visibly confused and said on the phone, “He has a green card.” However, after a moment, the DHS agents stated that the State Department had “revoked that too.” When Khalil’s attorney attempted to intervene over the phone, the DHS agent hung up the phone.

Khalil is currently being detained in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody at 26 Federal Plaza pending an appearance before an immigration judge.

This significant deviation from normal immigration proceedings comes in the wake of increased and abnormal scrutiny concerning the actions of students alleged to hold pro-Palestine views. Axios recently reported that the State Department, Department of Justice, and DHS were launching a “Catch and Revoke” effort to identify alleged pro-Palestinian activists based on artificial intelligence screening of social media.

Khalil has been specifically and discriminatorily targeted by Columbia University for his Palestinian identity and outspoken activism on multiple occasions over the last 17 months. He served as a lead negotiator during the Gaza Solidarity Encampment last spring. He has frequently appeared in media interviews and press conferences. The university suspended him while he was on a student visa and reversed it within the same day.

Columbia University has published guidance on how best to collaborate with federal enforcement, including advising faculty and staff “not to interfere” with ICE agents even if those agents are unable to present a warrant. Over the last few days, there have been several reports of ICE agents approaching pedestrians and students in the neighborhood surrounding Columbia University’s Morningside campus, creating unsafe environments for students (particularly students of color), regardless of their immigration status.

Columbia’s continued acquiescence to federal agencies and outside partisan institutions has made this situation possible. A Palestinian student and member of the community has been abducted and detained without the physical demonstration of a warrant or officially filed charges. Like many other Arab and Muslim students, Khalil has been the target of various zionist harassment campaigns, fueled by doxxing websites like Canary Mission. This racist targeting serves to instill fear in pro-Palestine activists as well as a warning to others.

An activist familiar with Khalil’s solidarity work said, “Mahmoud is foundational to our community. The state has escalated its repression of students for opposing the U.S.-backed genocide in Palestine, in which all American universities are complicit. However, the students will continue to rally for Palestine and against state violence.”

Detaining students for their activism violates the first amendment and is a threat to all people of conscience. ICE must immediately release Mahmoud Khalil from detention.

Sign the petition below to demand the immediate release of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil from DHS detention.

Open Letter: UBC Protects War Criminals and Terrorizes Community

Via UBC Staff for Palestine:

On February 14th, while “israeli” occupation forces were swimming in the Aquatic Centre, UBC staff member and alum Nathan Herrington was abducted by armed RCMP state agents, handcuffed, searched, and locked in the back of a van for 30+ minutes.

Nathan was doing his job.
He was wearing a keffiyeh.
And he was “detained for mischief.”

It could have been you. It could have been anyone. Without action, it will be.

These incidents are only getting more common in university communities.

The UBC administration has refused join faculty, staff, and students who have called for an end to UBC’s complicity in “israeli” war crimes. Instead, faculty are removed from teaching assignments, staff members are kidnapped, student spaces are abused for militarized surveillance, armed officers demand that students violate their journalism ethics, and anti-discrimination educational resources are removed from the internet. Where will it end? Any UBC administration that permits or encourages these behaviours is a danger to our community.

Please sign and share the open letter “UBC Protects War Criminals and Terrorizes Community” in solidarity with Nathan and the UBC community.

And, if you have not yet signed the petition for UBC to Divest from Corporations Fueling Genocide and Occupation, we urge you to do so!

In Solidarity,
UBC Staff for Palestine

Universities should not invest in genocide and occupation

UBC is currently invested in at least 30 corporations that fuel genocide, occupation, and systemic human rights violations. These include 17 weapons and military technology companies and 13 corporations listed in the UN Database of Enterprises Involved in Illegal Israeli Settlements.

What’s at Stake?

In Palestine and Lebanon: Over 44,000 Palestinians and 3,500 Lebanese civilians have been killed since October 2023 by the Israeli Occupation Forces. Thousands face

starvation and disease due to blockades and relentless attacks.

Beyond the region: The same corporations profit from wars worldwide, the militarization of borders, forced family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border, and countless other atrocities.

As students, faculty, and community members, we have the power to demand change. By signing the petition, you are urging UBC to take responsibility for its investments.

We demand that UBC:

Commits to divesting from these companies

Establishes ethical investment policies that uphold justice and human rights

Visit UBCDivest.org to learn more, read the petition, and sign as a student, alumni, faculty, staff, donor, family member who supported a student, or other community member with financial ties to the university.

Sign the petition now and add your voice to the growing call for divestment!

We also encourage you to share this petition with your networks. Together, we can hold UBC accountable and push for a future free from investments in war and occupation.

Thank you for your support,

UBCDivest

Stephen C. Fleury 1953-2025

NCSS Washington DC (Rouge Forum) 2006

I found out this past Saturday that my long time friend and colleague Steve Fleury passed away last night in New York.

Steve was a first rate intellectual, a farmer, talented musician, a community and educational activist, storyteller and a droll comic. He studied with Jack Mallan (author of No G.O.D.s in the Classroom) at Syracuse University and was an education professor at SUNY Oswego and Le Moyne College in Syracuse where he was also a long serving department head.

I met Steve soon after I arrived in New York in 1986. I was the newbie at meetings of group of studies education profs called the NYS Social Studies Education Consortium, the group met monthly at Syracuse University, Steve’s old stomping grounds.

We hit it off and by 1989 we had guest edited a journal issue critiquing the influence of the cultural right on social studies education. By 1990, Steve and I were co-editors of Social Science Record journal and working lots of conference papers and getting to be not just colleagues but good friends.

I clocked quite a few miles on the NYS Thurway to meet up in Syracuse or his place north of the city. Sometimes we met at a little diner half-way between Albany and Syracuse to work on journal submissions. We would have breakfast, drink gallons of coffee, have serious conversations about education issues, politics, social theory, as well as music, telling stories, laughing and generally having a great time.

Steve was one of the smartest, most well-read humans I have ever known. He was a “social studies guy” but he was also scholar of philosophy, cognitive psychology and the sciences (Steve wrote a tremendous chapter for The Social Studies Curriculum book on reclaiming science for social knowledge).

He also really liked to read Lewis Lapham’s work and I too was a great admirer of him, thus we had many conversations about Lapham and the work he published in Harper’s Magazine.

Steve was a key player in the foundation of The Rouge Forum and was there in Detroit when the RF emerged from a group of social studies, literacy, and inclusive education folks and he supported the RF in very many ways, giving papers, writing articles, organizing RF meetings. We was also very involved in the political battles inside College and University Faculty Assembly – CUFA/NCSS in the 1990s-2000s.

Steve always presented as farmer first, not professor. He was always fun to be with, a self-deprecating humorist. Steve was always interested in exploring ideas. He was a great thinker, writer, and teacher. No matter the topic I always came away from our conversations with new understandings of things. We agreed on most things, but at times Steve also offered subtle, understated critiques of my perspectives or positions that pulled the rug out from under me (in a good way), opening my eyes to things had not seen before … he was engaged in pedagogical work all the time (and always loving it).

Steve was a great friend to me. He was my best man when Sandra and I got married. A few months after Colin died in 2017, he and his wife Liz came to be with us in Vancouver. Their loving and caring for us was a very important moment at a difficult and tragic time.

In the summer of 2023 we had a great holiday with Steve and Liz in Quebec City, where with their many personal connections to Quebec they gave us “the grand tour.”

Love you buddy. Thanks for everything. See you on the other side.

Tell the UBC Administration to Keep the Israeli Occupation Forces Off UBC Campus!

Review of The Social Studies Curriculum (5th Ed.) by Peter M. Nelson

I am happy to share a review of The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities (5th Ed.) by Peter M. Nelson (UBC) that was published in Theory and Research in Social Education on January 31, 2025.

While the focus of the review is on the fifth edition, Nelson puts the latest edition of the book in conversation with previous editions that were published in 1997, 2001, 2006 and 2014.

Taking stock of the field: Complicated conversations in social studies curriculum
Book Review by Peter M. Nelson

The social studies curriculum: Purposes, problems, and possibilities (5th edition), by Ross, E. W. (Ed.) Statue University of New York Press, 2024, 430 pp., $99.00 (hardcover), $36.95 (paperback). ISBN (hardcover) 9781438499024, ISBN (paperback) 9781438499031

With the fifth edition of The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities (TSSC), editor E. Wayne Ross and the book’s contributors deliver a vital, timely addition to the influential TSSC series. Across 17 chapters—14 of which are new to this edition—the boundaries of the social studies curriculum are relentlessly complicated and contested, and the book’s authors offer critical, compelling visions for how social studies teaching and learning can attend to a range of contemporary issues and topics.

Contextualizing the book

The fifth edition of TSSC arrives at a time when efforts to “capture,” or tame, social studies curriculum are ubiquitous and well-funded. To put it another way, if TSSC offers visions of the social studies curriculum as inherently wild terrain—even feral in its disorderly commitments to real-world action, to understanding that “social studies curriculum and teaching is by its very nature a political undertaking” (p. 381), to its critical attention to the complicated contexts in which education actually occurs—then the capture of social studies begins with its reduction. Phenomena like uncertainty, ambivalence, unpredictability, and spontaneity, while embedded in human experience (and presumably entangled with the project of education as well), are viewed by policy makers, administrators, ideologues, and politicians as problems to eradicate, let alone the more explicit socio-political potentialities that are part and parcel of any meaningful social studies education. To be sure, attempts to capture social studies curriculum, or to reduce its radical potential to foment sociopolitical change, are not new; what Evans (2004) called the social studies wars have been waged since the advent of the field in the early twentieth century. My point, here, is that the fifth edition of TSSC provides an updated glimpse of current contestations around numerous issues, and one of the book’s most valuable, and unique, contributions is how Ross and other chapter authors manage to frame a wide range of sociopolitical issues as readily available for social studies teachers and students to explore and attend to in meaningful ways. …

To continue reading the review see the link below or download the review here.

Peter M. Nelson (31 Jan 2025): Taking stock of the field: Complicated conversations in social studies curriculum, Theory & Research in Social Education, https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2025.2459031

Critical Education 16(1), Feb 2025: With special section on Neoliberal Capitalism and Public Education

New issue of Critical Education published today. Critical Education, 16(1), includes a special section on “Neoliberal Capitalism and Public Education” edited by Lana Parker (U of WIndsor).

Contesting Concepts, Imagining New Possibilities: David Graeber, Democracy, and Social Studies Curriculum
Peter M Nelson

Applying Critical Race Theory to Enhance the Racial Inclusivity of Teachers in Canada: A Review of the Literature and Facilitative Programming
Lucas Skelton

Critical Making Workshops: Sparking Meta-Discussions for Critical Thinking in Vocational Education
Regina Sipos, Alexander Kutschera, Janina Klose

Neoliberal Capitalism and Public Education (Lana Parker, Section Editor)

A Window into Public Education: Documenting Neoliberal Capitalism’s Harms, Advocating for Alternatives
Lana Parker

Critical Geography and Teaching Against Neoliberal Racial Capitalism in New York City Elementary Schools
Debbie Sonu, Karen Zaino, Robert J. Helfenbein

The Allure of Professionalism: Teacher Candidate Subjectivity and Resistance in Neoliberal Times
Adam Kaszuba

University Bureaucracies as the Death of Play: The 1968 Strax Affair and the Arts of Discombobulation
Harrison Dressler, Noah Pleshet; Daniel Tubb

“I Need This Person’s Support to Have a Career”: The Material and Emotional Impacts of Neoliberalism on Trans Collegians’ Classroom Experiences at a Public University
Justin Gutzwa, Robert Marx