Teachers Are Not Learning to Teach

I stumbled across two articles. One, from City Journal, is pretty short. The other one, from Quillette, is pretty substantial - at least by internet standards. It must have taken at least 15 to 20 minutes to read - an eternity in today's fast-paced world.

The City Journal article is about the American Education Research Association. The Quillette article is about the teacher training program at the University of Washington's Secondary Teacher Education Program, aka STEP. Neither the AERA or STEP program are truly interested in teaching teachers to teach. Rather, they're both concerned with creating social justice warriors. Who needs to teach reading and math when you can teach children their proper spot on the "victim hierarchy pyramid?"

From City Journal:

A symposium called “The Interrogation of Whiteness in Progressive Public Schools” promises to explore “the experience of teachers and education leaders who work to undo whiteness in public schools.” A featured paper in that session is “Trust, Community, and Dismantling White Dominance.” Another, “Critical-Race Elementary Schooling: Teacher Change Agents are Undoing Whiteness in Elementary Schools,” celebrates teachers who “actively resist elements of Whiteness.”

 “Marking the Invisible: Articulating Whiteness in Social Studies” promises that participants will “call out the strategies deployed by white supremacy and acknowledge the depths by which it is used to control, manipulate, confine, and define identities, communities, citizenships, and historical narratives” in order to “promote justice-oriented teaching and learning.” Conference-goers can then attend “Whiteness at the Table: Whiteness and White Racial Identities in Education,” which features an academic exploration of student participation in “The Whiteness Project,”  in a paper titled “Whiteness as Chaos and Weakness: Our ‘Abnormal’ White Lives.” The author of that paper laments that “with complex theory, it feels impossible, on some level, to interrogate whiteness, to suggest that it is something less violent than it is.”

From Quillette:

This focus on ideology comes at the cost of studying the craft of teaching or how to productively deal with difficult social problems on a small scale. Much of the practical teaching guidance we were given has no demonstrable efficacy or validation in the peer-reviewed literature. Most of the classes at the UW require little if any academic work and they often resemble group therapy sessions along with activities like personal journaling, which I tried to undertake with an open mind, despite my sense that these tasks are far removed from the vocational demands of teaching. STEP is a travesty in its disservice to its own students and, because the program neglects the practice of teaching in favor of pontifications on social justice, it lets down the disadvantaged children it purports to serve. Each year it sends out a cohort of graduates who, due to a lack of preparation, are likely to become overwhelmed in a profession already suffering from alarming rates of attrition, particularly in high-needs schools.

One of the more peculiar and psychologically manipulative requirements in STEP is called “Caucusing.” The 60-student cohort is divided into smaller caucuses based on race, sexuality, and gender. In the first quarter, students are segregated by race to discuss their place in the intersectional hierarchy of oppression. White students are required to demonstrate contrition for their privilege with examples of how whiteness, latent racism, and America’s institutionalized racism has benefitted them personally. Essentially, in these classes white people are asked to sit around to free-associate and express how badly they feel about race relations in America. Students of color are put in a separate caucus and at the close of the first quarter the two groups are united into one caucus and, convening in a large circle, are asked to stand up and pat their thighs, rub their palms together and click their fingers—to create the sound of a thunderstorm, for some reason. If my experience is anything to go by, the students of color then regale the group with their painful experiences and excoriate the white students, making accusations of racism and subconscious marginalization. After many tears and public apologies, my caucus finished with everyone being asked to hug one another. The consequences of this acrimony were realized in the following quarter, as the students of color instigated walk-outs in one class to protest about the insensitive manner in which a white instructor and various white students had chosen to discuss the fatal police shooting of Charleena Lyles, a black woman who had been living close to the university campus. This, inevitably, led to further apologies, crying, hand-wringing, mandatory contrite letter-writing for white students, and a deep sense of foreboding each week as the class descended further into chaos and uncertainty from which it never recovered.

Yes, I read both articles in their entirety and concluded that it's going to be difficult to change the current anti-intellectual SJW position. I did disagree though, with the Quillette article author's assertion that

"Additionally, teachers should work to cultivate catholic tastes, and in light of demographic changes, white Americans shouldn't expect the literature and old-fashioned narrative history of Europe and the United States to be considered the normal curriculum with a few token "diverse" authors alongside Shakespeare and Hemingway."

While teachers should work to encourage students to broaden their intellectual horizons, the rest of that statement is pure SJW and is a step toward focusing on the victimhood hierarchy instead of focusing on a solid education. The United States' cultural, legal, and philosophical underpinnings were created over centuries of European and American history by European and American thinkers. That will remain true no matter the students' skin color, and it would be a terrible disservice to not introduce these cultural icons to students.

Sadly though, it seems that the mission to create new generations of activists will continue. There will be little to no push-back because the social justice warriors are in charge and they tolerate no dissent. On the other hand, it's clear from the Quillette article that in most cases social justice warriors end up battling each other over victim status and end up eating their own. So there might just be hope after all - depending on who arrives to pick up the pieces.