Hold the books, pass the Communism, please.
It seems like every week, my posts start out with “Last week in class, we discussed…” and I’m sick of starting them that way, so this time I will not.
Some things, I think just should not be done. Taking textbooks out of class is one of these things. I think that it is a terrible idea to remove books from the classroom solely because they have been deemed too biased. This is what the communists do. They remove books from the classrooms, because they are thought to contain objectionable material. This idea of censorship, once it gains a foothold, spreads like a virus. Gradually, the “objectionable content” is replaced with propaganda, and eventually the original text is lost, and the original bias destroyed. In its place, a new bias is created. Leaving the lesson up to the teacher is not acceptable. Teachers are not perfect. They must be held accountable for their teaching. What can hold a teacher more accountable than a reference? No textbooks equal no references, meaning the teacher can say anything he wants and the students will have to just sit and agree because they have no other option.
Some people will argue that they can weed out the fallacies and are able to see through deception, but is this possible? This seems feasible to our honors forum class, but we have to step back and view things from a broader scope. Of course the honors student will analyze what the teacher says, that’s why they are in the program, because they have an ability to think critically. The problem is that this group is only a couple hundred individuals. What about the other five-thousand or so students who may not know how to think critically, or don’t care to? They will absorb whatever the teacher says. This is a big problem. The teacher cannot be given this much influence over the class. The written word is one of the most important tools that humans have and to get rid of it would be a shameless travesty.
Another argument that was brought up was that teachers are not teaching interesting lessons anymore, not being creative. An example of a system that kept teachers thinking creatively at my high school was the auditing system. Randomly, the administration would sit in on a teacher’s class and rate them according to their lesson plans. This was very successful because it kept the teachers from getting boring and monotonous.
All things must come to an end eventually and today I am having a hard time concluding, so for now, this is the end of my discussion. Goodbye.
Some things, I think just should not be done. Taking textbooks out of class is one of these things. I think that it is a terrible idea to remove books from the classroom solely because they have been deemed too biased. This is what the communists do. They remove books from the classrooms, because they are thought to contain objectionable material. This idea of censorship, once it gains a foothold, spreads like a virus. Gradually, the “objectionable content” is replaced with propaganda, and eventually the original text is lost, and the original bias destroyed. In its place, a new bias is created. Leaving the lesson up to the teacher is not acceptable. Teachers are not perfect. They must be held accountable for their teaching. What can hold a teacher more accountable than a reference? No textbooks equal no references, meaning the teacher can say anything he wants and the students will have to just sit and agree because they have no other option.
Some people will argue that they can weed out the fallacies and are able to see through deception, but is this possible? This seems feasible to our honors forum class, but we have to step back and view things from a broader scope. Of course the honors student will analyze what the teacher says, that’s why they are in the program, because they have an ability to think critically. The problem is that this group is only a couple hundred individuals. What about the other five-thousand or so students who may not know how to think critically, or don’t care to? They will absorb whatever the teacher says. This is a big problem. The teacher cannot be given this much influence over the class. The written word is one of the most important tools that humans have and to get rid of it would be a shameless travesty.
Another argument that was brought up was that teachers are not teaching interesting lessons anymore, not being creative. An example of a system that kept teachers thinking creatively at my high school was the auditing system. Randomly, the administration would sit in on a teacher’s class and rate them according to their lesson plans. This was very successful because it kept the teachers from getting boring and monotonous.
All things must come to an end eventually and today I am having a hard time concluding, so for now, this is the end of my discussion. Goodbye.
posted by Tyler Brown @ 11:13 PM
1 Comments:
At 10:31 AM,
Jeff Martinek said…
Tyler:
Interesting take on Postman's suggestion about textsbooks. I think it's revealing when you speak of textbooks as keeping teachers and their personal biases in check. That certainly makes sense, but who writes the textbooks? Who chooses the textbooks? Isn't it possible that administrators could be just as guilty of imposing their biases on students by choosing particular textbooks and forcing all teachers to stick to them?
When you say that "no textbooks equal no references, meaning the teacher can say anything he wants" do you mean that only textbooks are authoritative? What about Postman's claim that textbooks themselves are often biased, full or errors, poorly written and---worst of all----created in a way that masks their own imperfections and gives the illusion of complete trust-worthy authority?
Post a Comment
<< Home