[For this year’s annual post-Valentine’s non-favorites series, I wanted to highlight some current (and in most cases longstanding) trends that really gripe my cookies. Add your non-favorites to a crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances that’s always one of my favorite posts of the year, ironically enough!]
On one
horrifying and one really horrifying evolution of a longstanding trend.
My
colleague and friend Heather
Urbanski likes to point out just how far back (and I do mean really
far back) complaints about “students these days” not being able to write can be
found. These things aren’t synonymous by any means, but I’d nonetheless say
that there’s a pretty direct parallel between those longstanding complaints and
the similarly deeply-rooted history of complaints about teachers and educators
of all types. Often those complaints take the form of relatively good-natured
if deeply misguided microaggressions (“Must be nice to
get summers off!), and sometimes they’re part of understandable parent
frustration with things
like homework. But far too often, complaints about educators have turned
into full-blown attacks
on educators, and despite its consistent presence that trend has quite
strikingly exploded over the last few years.
As I
traced in this
Saturday Evening Post Considering History
column (very much a corollary to the column on defunding public higher education
that I highlighted in yesterday’s post), most of those
recent attacks have been focalized around bills and laws that seek to
limit, preclude, and outlaw entirely a variety of educational subjects and
strategies (and even basic
conversation points) that are deemed “woke” (to use one of the
pejorative buzzwords these anti-education voices employ ad nauseam). These
aren’t just symbolic statements, although they can feel that way at times—real
teachers and librarians have lost
their jobs as a result of these laws, and it’s hard to imagine that many
others won’t be similarly affected (and countless more limited in performing
their already incredibly tough jobs) if we don’t change these laws and policies
ASAP. If that doesn’t seem to you all as well like a truly horrifying trend, we’re
definitely on very different wavelengths.
But
(inside baseball warning) as I draft this post in late 2022, such attacks are
far from the most horrifying layer to this evolving and deepening trend. For
that extremely dubious honor I’d have to go with the white supremacist domestic
terrorist organizations that have created
online resources and communities through which folks can identity libraries
or schools that are hosting drag
queen reading events, allowing these armed, dangerous, and dangerously
dumbass roving gangs of aggrieved white men (I’m generalizing, but I’d stand by
it) to descend
upon these institutions of learning and education and their overworked and
underpaid and truly inspiring employees (to say nothing of the terrorized young
people about whom these idiots proclaim to care so much). To lean into that
last parenthetical point, I’d hasten to guess that each and every child and
family at these events is infinitely more traumatized by the appearance of
armed angry assholes than they could ever be by someone living their truth and
reading them a book. Anti-education trends are now morphing directly into
domestic terrorism, and that’s one of my least favorite things in the world.
Next
non-favorite trend tomorrow,
Ben
PS.
Thoughts on this non-favorite? Other non-favorites of any kind you’d share?
No comments:
Post a Comment