Sep 01 2009
Propaganda in the Classroom
Some of my conservative web-quaintances ™ are disgusted by the President’s plan to address Kindergartners and other elementary school children. Bob Parks, at Black & Right, even embedded the “lesson plans” to go with the historic address.
President Obama’s Address to Students Across America September 8, 2009 –
Ha! Amateurs! I refer both to the conservatives and to the “Teaching Ambassador Fellows” who wrote the plans.
Conservative political commentors think they get ticked off by propaganda posing as “education”? Since I spent the summer working on new lesson plans for all my classes, I am furious at these so-called “Teaching Ambassador Fellows”. The classroom activities list is pure crapola. There’s no justification for how it fits ANY curricular goals, and it’s not even grade-specific. Heck, my colleague who was hit by a drunk driver made better lesson plans from the hospital!
A first-year student in the college of education couldn’t get a decent grade on such shoddy work, so I wondered what these “Teaching Ambassador Fellows” were. Thirteen fellows sent to the U.S. Department of Education as ambassadors to learn about this strange American tradition that some like to calll “edumacation”? Why, no! In fact, these thirteen people were chosen for their leadership, their students’ achievements, and their “insight on education policy”. You can read more here:
http://www.ed.gov/programs/teacherfellowship/awards.html
Click on each person’s name and you can read his or her fellowship-earning essay. I find a few vomit-inducing in their political-speak. Except for Tamra Jackson, who spent 23 years in the same district, there seems to be a plethora of experiences outside the norm; e.g. teaching in prison, working under a government grant, etc.
I smiled wryly at the teacher who was shocked to find that education was politicized and that colleagues resisted improving education. Try telling a local politician or business leader that his daughter is failing history class because she plagiarized her term paper. I dare you. Or, in my case, have a “school improvement” guru tell you that American students do worse on tests than the average student in a developing nation, so we should adopt their strategies. And when you point out that the average citizen in that nation doesn’t take those tests because their education ended before high school, the guru smiles patronizingly and waves off your critique. Bonus points if the nation in question has a history of considering girls less worthy of education than boys.
BTW, I have noticed that a lot of the “education experts” at conferences escaped from the daily grind as soon as possible. For example, the writer of The Freedom Writers Diary, Erin Gruwell, left the classroom after her memoir became a best-seller and she had a media tour. She became an educational consultant after just four years of experience as teaching. She now heads the Erin Gruwell Education Project, which focuses on inclusion and scholarships.
