Tag: Educators

Informed Comment

Educators as Public Intellectuals in an Age of Tyranny: Confront, Fight Back and Organize – CounterPunch.org

In his landmark book The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills argues that social scientists (and educators) have an obligation to address the question of truth and its political meaning during a time of widely communicated nonsense. He further argues that in addition to a politics of truth, social scientists have to support the values of reason and human freedom. He also believed that the role of social scientists was to disturb, bear witness, and resist systems of oppression. In this view, intellectuals have to have a deep sense of commitment and civic courage while “writing with vigor and clarity for the general reader [in order] to sustain the idea and the hope of a public culture.”[1] These principles, in the age of emerging fascism, are under attack in the age of gangster capitalism by a horde of anti-public intellectuals and far-right members of the GOP.

Source: Educators as Public Intellectuals in an Age of Tyranny: Confront, Fight Back and Organize – CounterPunch.org

Murdoch Media

Tucker Carlson’s cameras in the classroom proposal will harm both students and teachers — RT Op-ed

Tucker Carlson’s cameras in the classroom proposal will harm both students and teachers

Paradoxically, while Carlson, Lowry, and other conservatives profess to see teachers as leftist ideologues secretly indoctrinating students behind closed classroom doors, the fact is that, under federal law, the public is already able to come in and observe classes. School administrators and district officials have the same right. Nobody is hiding anything. What we are trying to do is meet the needs of our students. The student bodies of public school districts in major cities are overwhelmingly black and brown. Issues such as police brutality, the wealth gap, housing inequality, mass incarceration and the school-to-prison pipeline, the lack of healthcare, living-wage jobs, and childcare, and others, are important to them. And you can’t talk about these problems without discussing race. These issues are our students’ reality. They’re what concerns them. What kind of educators would we be if we ignored this?

Source: Tucker Carlson’s cameras in the classroom proposal will harm both students and teachers — RT Op-ed