Some years ago, when I was an adjunct professor, I taught (in English) for a year at a university in Thailand. It was an amazing and ultimately rewarding experience, both for me and my students, most of whom were Asian. Their education had usually involved being quiet unless called on after the teacher spoke, which happened rarely. In whispered voices students would regurgitate what had been said by the achan (teacher), devoid of conviction, originality, or Aha! moments.
That was not my style. I called on students to interpret literature's plots and themes, to question their classmates and me, to defend their own ideas, to think critically. Slowly I watched them light up, look up, and smile with satisfaction when I agreed with their ideas. Those were my Aha! moments, along with being told by several students that I was the reason they wanted to come to school in the morning.
I think about that year now as I watch our education system crumble into something worse than second rate. It's a system that is being destroyed by political ideologies that influence laws, curricula, teacher qualifications, and students' futures in profoundly troubling and negative ways.
Thanks to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, even the College Board recently caved to his demands. In a revised Advance Placement course curriculum in African American Studies, the Board stripped much of the subject matter from a preceding course curriculum that had upset the governor and other arch conservatives. The changes resulted in the removal of pioneering Black scholars associated with critical race theory (which is actually comprehensive American History), including Kimberle' Crenshaw and many other Black writers and scholars associated not only with critical race theory, but also subjects like Black feminism, Black Lives Matter literature, and more. In a further insult the Board also added "Black conservatism" as a suggested research topic.
Interestingly, when Kimberle' Crenshaw, a professor of law at Columbia and UCLA/Los Angeles law schools, coined the term "intersectionality" 30 years ago it was a little understood concept that basically illuminated connections between issue like race, gender, class, and other socially constructed barriers. Now the word is loathed by American conservatives who see it as opening the door to placing nonwhite, non-heterosexual people at the top of a revised caste system.
To understand intersectionality requires an understanding of Crenshaw's extensive body of work. For example, in a 2017 article she explained that critical race theory emerged in the 1980s and '90s among a group of legal scholars who were responding to what appeared to be a false consensus, i.e., that discrimination and racism in the law were irrational, and that "once the irrational distortions of bias were removed, the underlying legal and socioeconomic order would revert to a neutral, benign state of impersonally apportioned justice."
Crenshaw argued that this was a dangerous delusion. She didn't believe racism ceased to exist in 1965 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, or that racism was a multi-century aberration that, once corrected through legislative action, would no longer impact the law or the people who rely upon it. She also identified key issues in the continuation of inequality, including the "school to prison pipeline" for African American children.
A looming and perhaps less intellectual crisis in American education is the increasingly troubling teacher shortage which is a large and growing problem. More than half of school districts across the country have already reported worrisome teacher shortages, according to the Learning Policy Institute. "We know that the single most powerful predictor of [student] achievement is the presence of very experienced teachers, especially for students of color," the president and CEO of the Institute told researchers last summer. The shortfall of teachers across the country has become so serious that it is now called a crisis, according to many state education leaders. Despite efforts to fill vacancies, the shortage persists.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
