Arizona’s anti-ethnic studies law
Arizona’s new immigration law has justly been receiving attention and legal challenges. However, lost in its wakes has been the other anti-ethnic studies law which targets ethnic studies programs mostly at the high school level. The actual text of the law (which was House Bill 2281) says:
A. A SCHOOL DISTRICT OR CHARTER SCHOOL IN THIS STATE SHALL NOT INCLUDE IN ITS PROGRAM OF INSTRUCTION ANY COURSES OR CLASSES THAT INCLUDE ANY OF THE FOLLOWING:
1. PROMOTE THE OVERTHROW OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.
2. PROMOTE RESENTMENT TOWARD A RACE OR CLASS OF PEOPLE.
3. ARE DESIGNED PRIMARILY FOR PUPILS OF A PARTICULAR ETHNIC GROUP.
4. ADVOCATE ETHNIC SOLIDARITY INSTEAD OF THE TREATMENT OF PUPILS AS INDIVIDUAL
It goes on to say: Continue Reading
There is an old joke I’ve heard in many forms and configurations. The gist of it is that a “mathematician” ignores the simple solution to a problem but will go to elaborate lengths to “reduce it to a problem he has solved before.” So it is with journalists. They reduce problems to ones they have solved before but with a new twist. So it has been with the Wikileaks story. The story has been presented as an updated version of Daniel Ellsburg’s leaking of the Pentagon papers during the Vietnam war. Much of the conversation has been about charges of “treason”, the danger to the American military (as if war wasn’t dangerous before),and the debate about the public’s right to know vs. the government’s need to conduct some of its business in secrecy. Continue Reading
A few months ago one of my son’s college teachers asked me what parenting tips I had that she could use to make her son as intellectually curiosity, polite, hardworking and engaging as mine. I quipped “Be careful what you wish for!” The truth is I’m not sure what we did that made him turn out the way he did. Ninety percent of it comes from him. The impetus to explore the world, respect people and have some personal and social concern for others is not something we explicitly taught although I would like to believe that he saw it practiced in our lives. This is not an argument for “nature or nurture” but only one that the drive to develop things like curiosity, respect and social concern needs to come from the individual. Continue Reading
Scholars have studied race from many perspectives ad infinitum if not ad nauseum. Yet the question that my elders always asked still prevails; “would you get the same result if you substituted white for the non white group?” We must still ask that question about digital media. A friend of mine once said he has to keep reminding his peers at his institution that African American history is American history. In the same way (insert ethnic group here) American studies is American studies. The best American history and studies programs have realized this long ago even if there are some places that haven’t caught up with them. Many of the ways digital media can assist in the scholarship and the pedagogy of America studies are also the ways they help in ethnic studies. Continue Reading
I thought I’d introduce myself for anyone reading this blog. For thirty years I worked as a professor at a small liberal arts college before retiring and stepping away to look at where the profession was going. The press of everyday battle, the pull of responsibilities and the inside perspective limit if not condition one’s view of the whole enterprise. Occasionally one needs to step out of the river in order to see it. I was particularly concerned with two things: the educational “crisis” and digital tools for education. The crisis in public education is leaving some (usually the poor) with a limited education and view of the world, while offering critical thinking, skills, and training to the wealthy and the poor who have managed to succeed in the crappy educational system . Of course not all those eligible take advantage of the opportunities offered to them and the presentation of those opportunities is not always as well done as it should be. Nevertheless I was coming to see that we were offering a “tracked” educational system of which I was seeing only those tracked for the management or skilled class. Continue Reading