The course is taught from an Ethnic Studies perspective
Here is Chief Sealth School’s guide to social studies courses including the one that teaches women can have penises.
Ethnic Studies World History 3
Credits: 0.5 credit
Grade(s): 10
Length of Course: One Semester
Prerequisite: World History I, II
Graduation Requirement Satisfied: World History 3This course provides the opportunity for students to examine current world problems and their historical and systemic causes. The course is taught from an Ethnic Studies perspective and includes the structure of the 5 themes including Identity, Power and Oppression, Resistance and Liberation, reflection and Acton and Indigeneity. Students come to understand themselves in relation to systems of power and develop a sense of themselves as potential changemakers. The specific content varies from year to year based on student interest and input. There are bi-weekly class meetings to build community and provide a platform for student input into the class content and function. Students can expect a variety of instructional approaches, including the use of various types of texts, primary and secondary source documents, 21st century technologies, collaborative projects, and class discussion with an emphasis on writing and critical thinking, independently and in groups.
It sounds pretty awful, doesn’t it. I don’t object to teaching about power and oppression, certainly, and in fact it would be hard to teach history at all without those two aspects. But the “Students come to understand themselves in relation to systems of power” bit looks like a road right back into self-obsession, when education should be a road out of that. And why is “Identity” the first item in the list? Why is it on the list at all? And why didn’t they fix the typo on “Acton” which is clearly not the historian but a typo for “Action”?
Over all it doesn’t inspire confidence.
That actually sounds like a lot of college curricula these days, especially in the liberal arts. Some of us in the sciences manage to protect our field from that nonsense, but as we’ve seen on this site, no where near all of us. Most curricula is word salad, and a lot of it is focused on making education ‘relevant’ to the student. If it isn’t ‘relevant’, we shouldn’t teach it.
The thing is, who knows what is relevant? This is to be determined by the student. But they have no clue what will be relevant in the future. Teachers don’t know, either. It’s best to teach what needs to be taught for the student to be educated, and leave relevance for…I don’t know, movies maybe?
One: This is a high school course, not a college course. It has no need for such a word-salad-y description. And yes, “understand themselves in relation to systems of power” is at least a yellow flag. At the high school level, they should absolutely be learning about systems of power, but figuring out how you relate to such things is a matter of personal exploration more suited to work outside the classroom, via volunteering in activist groups and such.
Two: I don’t mind “Identity” on that list, as the course was originally designed as an ethnic studies course, and, well, ethnicity is all about identity, and how it relates to the dominant culture. The issue is that, like so much of the trans ideology, the concept was stolen and twisted into something utterly unrelated to the original use, all in service of The Most Oppressed Minority.
Three: Am I the only one bothered by the failure to capitalize “Reflection” in that course description?
Oh no, it bothers me too, but I decided not to belabor the point because I was already belaboring “Acton.”
And “identity” – it has more than one meaning now, doesn’t it. Yes ethnicity is all about identity but not in the me me me navel-gazing personal sense, where it means something more like “soul” than factual adjectives about sex, race, nationality, etc.
“Indigeneity”? I’m no Billy Shakespeare, but I don’t think that’s a word.
Ah, James, but Shakespeare was in the habit of making up words and phrases, so maybe whoever wrote that curriculum is just following the master!
Freemage, I was sort of making the point that this is becoming standard. I can’t speak for high school, because I’ve never taught it, but college doesn’t need that sort of word salad, either. Twenty-first century pedagogy is a joke to many teachers at all levels, but too many believe in it completely.
And yes to both Reflection and Acton. Proof reader needed.
Ingenuity – Indigeneity. An ingenious attempt to coin a word that is less clumsy than ‘indigenousness’, or a simple mistake. Probably the latter. I don’t mind the neologism, but am not fond of the thinking behind its usage here. There is an obsession with ‘race’, etc on all sides.
@2, 3, 4 – nope you’re not the only one…. I tell people whose reports I review that I don’t care how they capitalise (well actually I do care but I’m not going to pedantically impose it on them unless the report is going out under my name) but whatever method they choose they MUST be consistent.
LOL of course if I make a comment about someone else’s proofreading there’s an error in it! I meant @2, 3, 6.
This is not the first time I’ve encountered the word “indigineity”, although it is new to my iPad’s default dictionary. Googling the term yields 3.5 million results. Perhaps it is new to the US?
Once you rule out the trivial meanings of “identity” (i.e. x=x, people are whatever they happen to be etc.), what’s left is practically synonymous with “ingroup vs. outgroup” or “us vs. them” thinking, the very things the old “Left” was trying to get away from. I’m under no illusion that “who I am” has not to a significant degree been shaped by growing up Norwegian, white, male (in the biological sex sense, not the “gender identity” sense) etc. But that’s a stupid and evil bug of the human brain, not a feature to be embraced, let alone something to define myself by.
Despite attempts by people like Yascha Mounk to salvage some positive meaning of “groupishness” and even nationalism, I don’t think there’s any baby in that bathwater. It’s all cancer and no healthy tissue. Even Mounk admits that the tendency to favor the ingroup can, under the wrong circumstances, lead to extraordinary levels of cruelty and indifference towards to those deemed “other”. Unless one is prepared to argue that, say, the Germans of the Nazi era just happened to be born worse than others on average, it seems to follow that the only thing that prevents most People of Identity from going down the same genocidal route, is that those wrong circumstances simply haven’t arisen. Yet.
We’re all familiar with the “ticking time bomb” metaphor. A better metaphor in my opinion would be the landmine. A time bomb is set to go off at a pre-determined time regardless of the environment. A landmine, on the other hand, will only go off if exposed to certain external influences. Some may have the dumb luck to live out their whole lives without ever having their triggering mechanisms activated, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. The world is full of people prepared to attack and vilify others, go out of their way to destroy their lives, even resort to violence, for bad reasons. If the only reason it hasn’t happened to you yet is that the right (i.e. wrong) kind of bad reasons simply haven’t presented themselves yet, we’re always going to have a reason to worry about you. Group identity may not be the only such bad reason (E.g. I don’t think Donald Trump identifies with anyone other than Donald Trump), but it’s a major one.
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I am currently reading “Woke Racism – How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America” by John McWhorter.
The ‘new religion’ has white privilege as its ‘original sin’. Just one of the parallels with goddy religion.
The only way it differs from trans BS is that there is a real oppression for it to claim it opposes.
Mind you, that is a pretty major way to differ.