Radical Teaching Defined

Campus Report ^ | February 17, 2009 | Bethany Stotts

[bs9021]

Radical Teaching Defined

by: Bethany Stotts, February 17, 2009

In the effort to radicalize students willing to work for social change, “critical” teachers may be forgetting to let their students freely choose their own ideological positions in the first place.

That’s what Gerald Graff concluded of a Modern Language Association special session on “The Dilemma of Critical Pedagogy.” “My complaint was not that radical pedagogy is political, my complaint is that it’s authoritarian, or at least it sounds authoritarian in some of the versions that [as you can see] I quoted from: “How can we turn our students into radicals?,” he said, later continuing, “...and I think Mark Bauerlein is trying to point out that a lot of people hear that as authoritarian and it would seem that if you wanted to advance the fortunes of this kind of pedagogy you would want to take that more seriously than I hear you doing.”

The University of Illinois at Chicago professor, who was not listed as a speaker but responded from the audience, had argued in the Winter Issue of Radical Teacher that he thinks “it’s immoral for teachers to try to get students in their classes ‘to work for egalitarian change,’ as you put it.”

“What right do we have to be the self-appointed political conscience of our students?” he asked.

Graff was addressing Wesleyan University professor Richard Ohmann, who argued during the MLA session that “We here are all too well aware of incessant efforts of the right wing and its enablers in the mainstream media to ignore or deny any validity in critical pedagogy, same with challenging the biases of corporate capitalist business as usual and to distort our effort into an effort to simply coerce students into parroting agreement with leftist biases.”...

[Savage Beast]

“critical” teachers may be forgetting to let their students freely choose their own ideological positions

No kidding???

Hey, I've got a surprise for you! Karl Marx included in his own theories the necessity of indoctrination and authoritarianism to the establishment of his "workers' paradise".

Marxism--as Karl Marx recognized--requires a brutal totalitarian government for its establishment and implementation.

Obviously the contemporary Left--enamored of Marx's theories and determined to implement them--has no problem with brutal totalitarian government.

[AbeKrieger]

Radicalizing students is wrong, it is evil, and these “teachers” should be removed from any position of authority. Teachers should be imparting knowledge, teaching learning skills and facts and enabling them to become critical thinkers, not “inspiring” them to become intellectual vandals.