Read between the lines, and what you get is the racist belief that American blacks can't be educated to the level of other groups of Americans:
The English Department at Rutgers University recently announced a list of “anti-racist” directives and initiatives for the upcoming fall and spring semesters, including an effort to deemphasize traditional grammar rules...
One of the initiatives is described as “incorporating ‘critical grammar’ into our pedagogy"...Under a so-called critical grammar pedagogy, “This approach challenges the familiar dogma that writing instruction should limit emphasis on grammar/sentence-level issues so as to not put students from multilingual, non-standard ‘academic’ English backgrounds at a disadvantage,” the email states.
“Instead, it encourages students to develop a critical awareness of the variety of choices available to them w/ regard to micro-level issues in order to empower them and equip them to push against biases based on ‘written’ accents.”
3 comments:
Statements like this make me, an English teacher, realize that the profession is doomed if idiots like this are the gatekeepers.
Apparently their wokeness has blinded them to the following:
1) Code switching -- being able to use DIFFERENT Englishes in different situations. To not give people the tools of formal Written English is discrimination.
2) Formal Written English is a foreign language for EVERYBODY, no matter what their skin colors may be. It is not racist to teach this as a standard when even many "white" folks struggle to learn it.
3) The whole initiative is a pretentious word salad, designed to impress people with the right buzzwords. Bad communication there, but it's not designed to communicate -- instead it's virtue signaling.
ALL of this is to cover for the utter incompetence of K-12, and particularly K-6 education, in our nation's urban cores. If our inner-city schools actually did their job (see Zig Engelmann on how it can be done) everything would change.
What, you want to teach kids to read? What if they did--and started thinking for themselves???
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