MESSAGE
| DATE | 2020-07-30 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] fre the mind
|
nypost.com
Teaching marginalized kids taught me orderly classrooms, Western canon
keys to liberation
By Sohrab Ahmari
5-6 minutes
The worst campus ideas are sweeping America.
In 2005, I graduated college with a degree in philosophy and a head
brimming with critical theory, the strange brew of American and
Continental-European ideas that has intoxicated campus humanities
departments since at least the 1980s and is now bathing the whole
country.
Funny enough, it was teaching kids in a poor, majority-minority school
district on the US-Mexico border that disabused me of my theory-imbued
views.
At the time, I was 20 years old, self-righteous and half-erudite (which
is worse than being illiterate). Having read my Michel Foucault and my
Judith Butler, I regarded moral order, beauty, human nature, even truth
itself as the impositions of power specifically white, male,
heteronormative, colonialist power.
Certain books had been deemed classics and placed on a pedestal called
the Western canon a pedestal that rested on the backs of the
marginalized. Even correct grammar and spelling were discursive
practices used to discipline and control the powerless of the earth.
The right thing to do, then, was to question or subvert the Western
canon and to disrupt the oppressive structures baked into language
itself. (I held all this to be true, even though, as an immigrant from
Iran, I had worked hard to master English.)
If these notions sound familiar, its because theyve lately made it into
the mainstream of American life. But at the time, they were still
largely confined to the English faculty lounge, as well as various
grievance-studies disciplines (gender studies, queer studies, fat
studies, etc.).
But how exactly was I supposed to apply them in real life?
Well, as Bill Murrays character in Lost in Translation says, Philosophy?
Theres a buck in that racket. Not quite prepared to pursue a PhD in
critical theory, I decided to join Teach for America, the corps of
recent college grads who are dispatched as educators to some of the most
underserved K-12 classrooms across the country.
My TFA assignment took me to Brownsville, Texas, in the Rio Grande
Valley region.
The student body at the school that hired me was almost entirely
Hispanic. The vast majority received free or reduced-price lunches. Many
came from migrant families that only spent part of the year in Texas.
For some, potable water was a distant luxury.
And guess what? Their families emphatically wanted them to learn
English.
Like any rookie, lefty-minded teacher, I festooned my classroom with
posters of Muhammad Ali and resistance-y slogans. But that wasnt enough.
For these kids to have any chance to succeed, much less liberate
themselves, they had to learn. It wouldnt have made sense to deny them
the knowledge Id picked up further north in the name of a perverse
theory of justice cooked up by some Berkeley theorist.
Do you know what would have happened if Id told my Mexican-American
students moms, You know, ladies, Im not teaching your children grammar,
because grammar is an integral part of the white, phallocentric
structures of oppression that keep you and your community down?
They wouldve slapped me with their purses and called me a pendejo and
rightly so.
The same would have gone for the notion, bizarrely gaining currency
these days, that the yearning for order and even abstract reasoning as
such are white, colonial constructs.
I watched the best of my fellow teachers run tight ships, with clear
expectations for behavior, systems of reward and punishment and a
general ethic of uprightness pervading their classrooms. And, again,
guess what? The kids, and their parents, appreciated such efforts
enormously.
(By the way, imagine a white activist in the 1960s telling Dr. Martin
Luther King who delivered some of the most stirring and finely crafted
oratory in US history that correct grammar really isnt meant for
members of his race.)
The position that minority children deserve to wallow in classroom
disorder or incorrect English is itself downright racist. The truth
shall set you free, the Good Book says, but for children to know the
truth, they must first have the benefit of orderly environments. Thats
true for kids of any race.
Thanks to those kids and their parents, I matured intellectually. Little
did I know that a decade and a half later, the ideas I happily discarded
would be widely celebrated as a force for liberating the marginalized.
Sohrab Ahmari is The Posts op-ed editor. His next book, The Unbroken
Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos, is due
out in Spring 2021. Twitter: -at-SohrabAhmari
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
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