Saturday, November 14, 2020

Who *Should* Be In Charge In Classrooms, Teachers or Students?

 The Southern Poverty Law Center has been on a moral decline for many years, but in recent years they've fallen off the cliff.  Case in point:

The Southern Poverty Law Center published an article documenting the ways in which white teachers "weaponize their whiteness" to harm black students.

The article, published by SPLC's "Teaching Tolerance" division, outlines how white people weaponize their "entitlement, anger, … need for retaliation, feigned fear and, finally, white fragility."

It suggests that teachers—particularly white, female teachers—can stop the weaponization of whiteness by relinquishing control of their classrooms when a student questions their authority. One teacher quoted in the piece says he has to "resist the urge to maintain power or control in [his] class, and especially to resist the anger that can bubble up in [him] when that control is called into question."

Ignoring the plethora of buzzwords and kooky ideas in the second paragraph/sentence, I want to focus on the third.  Relinquish control of their classrooms--what does that look like?  Does it look like Seattle's so-called "autonomous zone" of 2020, or perhaps Minneapolis or any of a dozen other cities during this past spring's riots?  If a teacher "relinquishes control", who is harmed by it?  I assert it's the other students, who obviously don't matter to the SPLC--and often, those other students are of the same race and are from the same neighborhood as those who act out in class.

I'm hard-pressed to think of a time in history where giving in to mob rule ended up being a net positive for a society, but that is exactly what the SPLC is suggesting.  The United Negro College Fund used to tell us that a mind is a terrible thing to waste, now the SPLC tells us to sacrifice that mind on the altar of so-called social justice.

I see no justice in doing so.

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