Education pedagogy

Konstantin Kostin writes:

A starker example of the naked Emperor lies in the canon in some disciplines, especially education. Imagine what the public reaction would be if it came out that the most cited and assigned books in teachers’ colleges were written by Nazi sympathizers, whose most influential pedagogical ideas were directly connected to their Nazi sympathizing (as opposed to, say, James Watson, whose discovery of DNA structure is not directly connected to his recreational racism). My guess is that the public would be very upset about this, and liberals would call for much more drastic government interventions in campus governance than conservatives are calling for now. Yet, replace Nazism with communism (which was even deadlier) in that sentence, and that’s basically exactly what is currently happening in schools of education. The most widely assigned and cited works in the “critical pedagogy” canon, such as those by Paulo Freire, literally praise Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and other communist despots, encourage educators to emphasize revolutionary politics over learning reading and math, and endorse political violence.

It will surprise no-one that Paulo Freire is widely assigned in New Zealand. Now this is not to advocate that someone should not be read or cited because they praise Lenin, Stalin and Mao. The point is the huge double standard. Also I suspect that there are very very few educationalists whose politics are not on the left ever get allowed near our educational institutes.

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