Literacy is racism
Intellectual challenge, logic and reality are racist.
Get with the program or end up in the camps.
I recall reading an article in National Review (during the WFB era when I subscribed) and it discussed how beginning in the 1960s, even university degrees began to be dumbed down to that extent as to increase numbers at state run universities and thus get more public funding, etc. That’s why nowadays in California and elsewhere, one can study rap music as opposed to the genuine classics (literature, art, music, etc) as you’ve got many people in such places who would likely not be able to pass grade eight exams in language and math proficiency from two generations back or so.
Therefore, it is of course an easy thing to ban To Kill A Mockingbird or The Merchant of Venice and numerous other titles when you have the dumbing down taking place at the top.
“To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Of Mice and Men” are simply the enforced public school shlock of an earlier era.
Dunno ‘bout “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” but I would not ask the kids to read “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Of Mice and Men,” “The Cay,” or “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.”
After all, I want them to ENJOY reading and not think of it as chore or punishment.
Critical thinking requires the ability to speak truth to power. Today, as James Russell Lowell put it, truth is on the scaffold and wrong is on the throne, so critical thinking is the last thing the Left wishes to teach young people.
“Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.”
“Schools Ban Classic Novels As Much For Laziness And Ignorance As Politics”
Pure BS. We’re fools to call these people lazy. They busy termites working overtime finding everyway to undermine our culture and traditions. For them it’s 100% politics.
We are the lazy one who simply sit back and watch it happen without even a whimper.
After I retired 10 years ago, I heard the next librarian threw out many of the classics. I don’t imagine there are any left there now, and teachers don’t require reading them anymore.
As a history major with a degree in humanities from the University of Chicago and a law degree from CU Boulder, I find this one of the most depressing threads I have ever seen.
BTW, no criticism meant for you, Kaslin.
They should let the Kids read Fahrenheit 451 to see if they can figure out the Irony.
I’m a teacher in a public school located in a remote Alaska bush village, where the reading and writing scores for most students are far, far below the average for the rest of the United States.
When I was an English teacher, my students read “Of Mice and Men” as high school sophomores. They loved the story, they appreciated the themes presented by Steinbeck, and many of them cried at the end. When you are growing up in one of the poorest census districts in the country, you can identify easily with poor men walking the landscape looking for work. (I think the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota is more impoverished.) Not one student mentioned race when reading the story, even though there is a black character in the story who is shown as stoic and suffering, in a foreshadow of the current cult of critical race theory, and practically all of my students are Alaska Native. Good stories transcend skin color, and even culture.
I’m glad that I’m retiring in a few years. I can see critical race theory and its associated lunacy like a tsunami on the horizon, even out here, ready to crash into my community and destroy it down to its foundations. Already there are a few people here and there who are speaking out using the catechism of critical theory, and our staff had this shown boldly when we had an online workshop with an Ivy League school about managing meetings which started every gathering with a Maoist struggle session about racial oppression and white privilege. Many staff members spoke out about being exposed to critical theory as the bullshit it is, but I can see the day coming when those of us who speak out will be silenced in our careers, and worse.
I’m still speaking out with students and their families about my desire to focus on actual skills, like reading comprehension and grammar, and using time-honored classics to do so. I’ve even used “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” to inoculate my students against socialism and communism when they are exposed to it outside the village. Gramsci once exhorted the communists to make “the long march through the institutions” to change culture and turn the West into a communist enclave; little did they know that I’m taking the same long march through THEIR institutions. Maybe I’ve saved a few hundred young men and women from being enslaved under totalitarian rule. As long as I’m breathing, I will stand against the tyrants, in my own way. Your prayers are appreciated as I watch the wave move onto shore.
I assign primary source reading all the time in my classes, and the kids won’t read them..... And their parents call in and complain that my econ class is too hard.
Students don’t learn. They do not study. Instead, they copy and paste off of google. The stupid iPads and chromebooks are ensuring this: a nation of idiot youth enslaved to google search instead of actual thinking. Parents complain when I count this as cheating! Everyone in my department complains of this but our Admin calls it “engagement”.
I am sure by writing this the anti-school people are going nuts, but we need to start being honest about the personal-accountability issues going on in our schools and country..... And this starts at home.
There are bad teachers and they should lose their jobs for being idiots, bullies, lazy, etc. But replacing every one of these people with a computer program, droid, or top notch teacher won’t change the factors of personal responsibility. If parents don’t make their kids behave, if kids refuse to learn, if society keeps dumbing everything down for self esteem and equity/equality, our schools will remain the same as they are now: shitty leftist robot factories.
It would be nice if every once in a while, as people on the right, we would acknowledge that maybe all the CRAPPY PARENTING has a little bit to do with the academic, social, psychological problems of youth and our schools. Maybe all the babying, excusing and not holding kids accountable has something to do with young people being morons and turning into leftists.
“To Kill a Mockingbird” should be removed - for being a hokey simplistic pile of white liberal merde.