…English teachers have been developing literature curricula to meet the needs of their culturally diverse students. However, because in most cases these educators have not had at their disposal the interpretative techniques of postcolonial literary theorists, they have been relying, instead, for their reading strategies upon traditional literary theories. Unfortunately, when teachers employ New Critical, archetypal, feminist, or reader-response methods of literary analysis in their reading of multicultural literature, they are often unaware of the Eurocentric biases contained within these perspectives. This lack of understanding of their theoretical frame of reference can then lead teachers to encourage their students to accept uncritically problematic representations of various cultural groups as they encounter these representations in their literary texts. Postcolonial literary theory, on the other hand, encourages students to problematize Eurocentric representations of imperialism’s Others.
The goodies just keep coming, too:
9. Textual Power
A first step toward enabling students and teachers to situate themselves within textual terrains so that they can view dominant and subaltern cultures from both the center and the margins is to exercize what Robert Scholes calls “textual power” (1985). Scholes divides textual activities into reading, interpretation, and criticism:
In reading we produce text within text; in interpreting we produce text upon text; and in criticizing we produce text against text. As teachers of literary texts we have two major responsibilities. One is to devise ways for our students to perform these productive activities as fruitfully as possible: to produce oral and written texts themselves in all three of these modes of textualization: within, upon, and against. Our other responsibility is to assist students in perceiving the potent aura of codification that surrounds every verbal text. Our job is not to produce “readings” for our students but to give them the tools for producing their own. (p. 24)
Thanks for the link; it provoked the best belly laugh I’ve had all week.
If you live under the rule of law, have access to free public education, a functioning healthcare system, democracy and freedom of the press, you are experiencing eurocentric biases.
Take the case of Nobel laureate, South African author Nadine Gordimer. A life-long leftist, ANC party member while it was still banned in South Africa, ceaseless advocate for the rights of black Africans, had books banned by the apartheid regime. Guess what happened when the ANC took over? They banned some of her books, too. The reason? The book July’s People was considered “deeply racist, superior and patronizing.” Other critics say “…Gordimer’s post-apartheid advocacy on behalf of black South Africans, in particular her opposition to the government’s handling of the AIDS crisis, as a paternalistic and hypocritical white liberalism.”
No eurocentric bias there.
Kate, I operate a preschool…you can’t imagine the multiculti and artsy fartsy hoops we have to jump through.
When we were kids, we just had to leave the house for the whole day, get really dirty, have fun and be home on time for dinner.
Now the kids have to dress up like anyone but their parents and have art experiences that bore them numb.
And we get tested on it.
When I read the article at http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/News/2008/03/06/4932536.html the first thing that hit me was the person writing it does not understand the term warrior. A warrior would never do the things described there or allow them to happen. There is a difference between a warrior and the war-like.
I skimmed through the mass of what appeared to be primarily meaningless verbiage and reflected on the uselessness of literature courses in high school. What I would infer from this document is that post-colonial, anti-imperialist literature is to be favored which means that one should study just American literature. After all, in 1776 the oppressed American colonies threw off the chains of British imperialism and their Eurocentric statist weltanschauung.
It’s been a while since I had to deal with high school literature courses but I was fortunate in having a young idealistic teacher who thought students should determine what they studied. She may have reconsidered this after I was in her class. For my reading I chose Robert Heinlein, Arthur Clarke and Isaac Asimov and my creative work dealt with arbitrary precision arithmetic algorithms to compute e written in FORTRAN and English. I’m so glad that stuff is behind me now.
What the heck is “problematize?” I sense a “disconnect” between factual contextualization and fanatasticlinicality.
Speaking of Eurocentric literature…’wot’s wrong wi’ it, eh?’
http://www.bartleby.com/103/48.html
🙂
Speaking of Eurocentric, I still remember way back in High School we had a very left-leaning teacher who loved to celebrate anything to do with emancipation of slavery – we concentrated on all the possible atrocities that ever happened or even might have happened to (mostly black) slaves. Nothing about slavery in the non-European world mind you which apparently was widespread though no-one seems to have heard of it.
Except I was never taught about the reasons slavery was eliminated in the “British Colonies” the first place. It was always sort of an event that happened for almost no apparent reason. It just was – like someone woke up and realized it was all a bad dream.
Curious about why this actually happened I looked in books, (we had no internet back then) and learned about the Abolition movement in Britain led by strong religious men, their reasons based in this evil thing called Christ (anything Christian was subtly evil according to my left-ist teacher and I was influence by that thinking for quite a while), scientists, and community and political leaders, including some black men as well who were emancipated in Britain at the time due to a simple British court.
These people fought for years to end slavery and influence public opinion with this thing called Reason and Logic as well as Christian values.
We never celebrate that. We never celebrate the reason slavery has been abolished in this the modern age. Ever. The Age of Reason is bad.
Its always you’re bad because you’re white, and you’re a European. Nothing your culture has ever done is worth learning about or being proud of (not advocating white supremecy here notice how I feel like I have to still apologize whenever I say anything good about “European values”).
Its like I started everything, the world was this civilized utopian place before I was born.
“If Hoxby and Peterson were right in asserting that markets were enough to fix our education woes, then the ed schools wouldn’t be the disasters that Hirsch, Ravitch, and others have exposed. Unlike the government-run K–12 schools, the country’s 1,500 ed schools represent an almost perfect system of choice, markets, and competition. Anyone interested in becoming a teacher is completely free to apply to any ed school that he or she wants. The ed schools, in turn, compete for students by offering competitive prices and—theoretically—attractive educational “products” (curricula and courses). Yet the schools are uniformly awful, the products the same dreary progressive claptrap. A few years ago, the National Council on Teacher Quality, a mainstream public education advocacy group, surveyed the nation’s ed schools and found that almost all elementary education classes disdained phonics and scientific reading. If the invisible hand is a surefire way to improve curriculum and instruction, as the incentivists insist, why does almost every teacher-in-training have to read the works of leftists Paolo Freire, Jonathan Kozol, and William Ayers—but usually nothing by, say, Hirsch or Ravitch?”
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_instructional_reform.html
Public education systems = institutionalized child abuse
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm
“Every Child in America entering school at the age of five is “mentally ill”. ….because he comes to school with certain allegiances toward our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these “sick” children well by creating the international child of the future.”
-(Chester M Pierce MD, Chairman of UNESCO public educators conference Denver 1973)
“”Scientific societies are as yet in their infancy. . . . It is to be expected that advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries. Fitche laid it down that education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished.” – (Bertrand Russell)
I wish educators and literary writers in the education field would get it right, for once. Its, “Post-Colonic Literary Theory”.
how do we spell bullshit children?
WHAT!!#@$%!@#*%$#!!
The “educators” can’t even write English FGS.
‘Somebody’s cousin, niece, sister, brother, neighbour needing to make some money was hired to put out this drivel. Hey, they’re being paid by the hour and as they don’t have a clue what they’re talking about, they’d better use obscure words and pretzel-like arguments to pull the wool over the eyes of the bureaucrat who’s paying them the BIG BUCKS.
To think that my hard-earned tax dollars (far too many, especially with two kids to put through university…that tax break will come just as they’re graduating, like all of the other tax breaks my husband and I keep missing by a year or two) are paying for this crap.
Pass me my smelling salts…
“High” School has all new meaning now that free injection sites instead of the strap is available. Sniff glue with the principle day, and young lovers of any sort day. Higher education progressive style is great.
langmann: “These people fought for years to end slavery and influence public opinion with this thing called Reason and Logic as well as Christian values.”
Thanks for that. I’ve fought this fight too–to have this little-known fact mentioned in my children’s history classes, that it was Christians in England–Gladstone chief among them–who spearheaded the abolition of slavery, at great personal cost to themselves, to no avail.
To add insult to injury, students think that slavery, mysteriously, came to an end and have no idea of the sacrifices Christians made to see that this happened. These brave and principled people have been deep-sixed by the “educational” establishment because they are DWEMs (Dead White European Males and, horror of horrors, Christians to boot.)
I never got anywhere with my kids’ teachers when, first, I’d congratulate them on doing a unit on slavery: ‘good thing for students to learn about, then, second, would ask them if they were going to teach their students about the Abolition Movement in England, headed by Christians.
The teachers, themselves, seemed to have no clue about how slavery was ended in the 1800s, had no idea that it was Christians who had instigated it, and once I’d put an end to their ignorance, had absolutely no interest in or intention of apprising their students of this historical reality.
Historical reality no longer exists in our schools. It’s make-it-up-as-you-go and it all depends upon what fashionable notion is in the ascendency at the Board of “Education” in any given year.
It’s an appalling situation, and leaves our young people open to every kind of institutional abuse as well as to being easily manipulated, brainwashed, and bamboozled by unscrupulous hucksters…er, politicians, lib-left teachers, MSM hacks, because they haven’t a clue about their history or the history of their country.
Too many “educators” today are know-nothings (brainwashed themselves) on the cash-for-life gravy train public “education” has become.
One could weep…
Looks like something from the “Post-Modern Essay Generator”
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
I know of a school in the inner city, where most of the streets are named after the British founders of the city, who were also responsible for the establishment of democracy in Canada, nearly 200 years ago. It is on this foundation that the children at this school, mostly disadvantaged immigrants, have found themselves in this country, living on public assistance.
Black History month is celebrated basically all year—Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks appear to be the patron saints—and Chinese New Year looms large for a month, and any other kind of diversity is noted, except any related to white, British, Christian: no mention of Ash Wednesday amidst all of the above, usually including the WASP neighbourhood schools, as well, where African drumming assemblies take precedence over honouring any Christian holy day or festival.
Honestly, what hypocrisy: all the teachers I know are delighted that two four-day work weeks will soon be upon us: Holy Week, with Good Friday off and then Easter Monday off the next week. The few observant Christian teachers left in the system—we’re a lonely lot—will spend a good part of these “holidays” at church. The vast majority of teachers and students (whoops: “learners”!)—many of other faiths or none—will just have four days off.
At this point, teachers and students, of other faiths or none, get off both the Christian holidays AND their own. ’Interesting, isn’t it, that the host culture gets short shrift here. Frankly, I’m very tired of this not so soft, but ever so sanctioned, bigotry—for bigotry it surely is.
I think perhaps it’s time that non Christians, working on the public purse in a system which disparages both our Judaeo-Christian foundations and the Christian religion, forfeit their days off. Perhaps if this were proposed, these people might discover a “latent” respect for the founding—and up until now sustaining (but we’ve almost overdrawn our moral capital)—culture. Wouldn’t that be a nice change?
When I click on that link it is a London Free Press article re: London woman’s leg mutilated by cannibals who ate her friend. Yikes.
Jebus and we wonder why kids graduate from highschool yet they can’t read or do math past the grade five level. Hello that has to be the most absurb assertion I ever read, can the leftards speak Englais??? Honestly enough with this touchy feely crap, eduacate our children and stop the indoctornation of socialist ideology.
Eurocentric, does that mean having indoor flush toilets and lifespans longer than 45 years?
If so I’m for it!
Leftist Educators’ Motto: “Encouraging Students to Problematize Eurocentric Representations of Imperialism’s Others Since 1984!”
“At the same time, the students’ use of postcolonial reading strategies can help them to become more effective intercultural communicators as they cross cultural borders by carrying out collaborative responses to literary texts with students whose heritage differs from their own.”
This may prove difficult when students commonly arrive in high school unable to read. Or count. Unless its counting joints or crack lumps. It is also difficult to instill a “post-colonial” reading strategy in a student who values books primarily as kindling.
The above observations are of course horribly Eurocentric.
He mentions Edward Said’s Orientalism.
At the moment, I happen to be nearly finished Ibn Warrag’s Defending the West. It is a utterly devastating refutation of Said’s poisonous envy-hatred dripping diatribe which in my view ruined a whole generation. Said, the faux “Palestinian” refugee and poseur.
If you, like me, find yourself stumbling around in a bit of eye-rubbing daze mumbling “What the hell happened?” you will find the answer in Warraq’s splendid book. I’ll be getting this one for both daughters, one of whom’s eyes lit up a few years back when I was trying to remember Bernard Lewis’ name when she exclaimed, “Do you mean Edward Said!?!”.
“This may prove difficult when students commonly arrive in high school unable to read.”.
Or with you know, chunks torn from their leg as a result of attempted cannibalism. But we insensitive Eurocentrists wouldn’t want them to think any less of their “culture” for it….
Isn’t the Congo that place that the UN has been “fixing” since 1956? But really, as it relates to the education system and multi-culti equivalence, I just ask: “So why did the immigrants come here in the first place?” The idea that all cultures are equal is simply preposterous. Cultures are complex and will have varying strengths and weaknesses along a spectrum of goals and objectives, but they most certainly are not equal as it comes to various yardsticks such as economic success, family cohesion, individual freedom and, yes, happiness; particularly as it relates to opportunities for self expression between the two genders (or even the trans-gendered for that matter). “Eurocentric” cultures attract large numbers of immigrants because, while we’re far from perfect, there’s a lot we’ve gotten right. The proof is in the migrant flow. After all, how many refugees are flooding out of Europe/North America and into Africa?
@ bath + lookout:
Thanks for that. It was amazing when I started looking for the answers and I asked several teachers and not one was able to give me a convincing answer. Only one guy said parliament ended it – and was close to being correct. One teacher even told me that slavery still existed in Canada since my dad had to work.
The first book I found that actually had the right answer in it, I was actually convinced was Christian propaganda – that was how well our teacher had trained us. It wasn’t until several sources kept saying the same thing that I realized what really happened. We have lost a lot, no one cares to learn this stuff because its just not “cool” anymore. I understand why people want to learn about Martin Luther King (but not his namesake) because he was a larger than life figure however a bunch of 18th century white guys and a few black men are given no credit or respect.
As an aside I have several teacher friends, who are not left-ist mindbots. Not all are the same and I don’t want to portray teachers in a bad light.
I am not going to apologize for being Eurocentric, since my ancestors were European. Of course they would tell you that they weren’t European, they were English. Since we now live in North America, I would like to think that I am North Americo-centric.
Not much call getting an Afrocentric education in north America where there aren’t many careers in subsistence farming and witchcraft.
Its interesting to note that when I use the word Eurocentric the spell checkers tells me its wrong and suggests Afrocentric as a correction. This must be some kind of a plot!!
What I find even more startling than Greenlaw’s bovine ruminations is the lfpress article…its publication, not its contents. The fact that this got published bodes well.
Kate – this must really be bothering you (as it should), because you almost never make a “hey dummies, THIS is the point” comment after posting.
OK, so let’s throw it open for discussion: for those culturally assured conservatives of libertarian and individualistic bent, how do we respond to such a barbaric and degenerate culture? Do we leave them to their own devices, or do we go all colonial on them and impose civilization?
What should we do?
@ Tenebris
Take up the White Man’s burden–
The savage wars of peace–
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to naught.
As a libertarian myself I’m generally of the opinion that they need to figure these things out themselves. At least it seems like every time we try and help we get condemmed by everyone anyway.
Sorry re: my above post poem is “White Man’s Burden” – Rudyard Kipling
Perhaps imposing ‘civilization’ isn’t such a bad idea…especially in/on Africa.
http://www.forbes.com/2008/02/24/pollution-baku-oil-biz-logistics-cx_tl_0226dirtycities_slide_3.html?thisSpeed=15000
New Speak insanity to beat down the best and prop up the worst of humanity.
The descendants of white Europe has given us the modern world. Starting with the Greeks and the concept of freedom, democracy, medicine and more.
Contrast those achievements with the state of Black Africa or most of the Asian world.
This topic is unbelievably loaded that I don’t even know where to start or stop.
Only some sort of insanity can explain the doctoral dissertation by Jim Greenlaw.
This post is actually all about the lib-left, atheistic, secular humanists having used up pretty much all of our European-Judeo-Christian moral, ethical, spiritual, and common sense capital as they go on a spending spree to end all spending sprees, which will totally bankrupt their coffers–well, ours, really. Feel free to add any other capital they’ve just about sucked out of our society.
I keep getting the image of someone sitting on the branch of a tree, in the cooling shade of its foliage, saying what a crummy, rotten, stinking tree it is while another of his/her cronies is taking an axe to the root. S/he’ll soon be a splat on the pavement, but has no idea…
Our ancestors are rolling over in their graves…
Seems that Greenlaw went to school for a long time so that would learn how to fracture and break up the language so that he can rearrange it in such a way as to make you feel that he is a wise man, all the while saying nothing useful.
From personal experience during the communist rule in the eastern part of Europe, it is clear that Greenlaw has perfected the art of going on and on and saying nothing, a kind of windy sophistry.
Of course ‘Eurocentric’ is a well known newspeak word, that is used to beat over the head those, whose ancestors or who themselves came from Europe. It is a kind of masochism that many succumb to, lest they be called racists, chauvinist or some other newspeak word.
This is a brainwashing technique, where you have to accept without a question that it is better for you to know of how this guy from Burkina Faso is using his skill to combat poverty, than to learn that the absolutely crushing weight of today’s knowledge, developed through no fault of their own, by European and North American culture. Even this Greenlaw character is apparently part of the ‘Eurocentric’, although he obviously enjoys the masochism and making a living doing it.
Full honor to the teachers that are commentators here. Thought the teachers as a group have a problem. Their union is absolutely in front of march to fascism/socialism that in due time will became full fledged tyranny, if the plebeians will not stop it. They will not and cannot act as individuals if they want to remain teachers. They cannot tell the rulers of their union that they think other, than the official union demagoguery and remain teachers. It is quite understandable that you don’t rock the boat, if you look at the pay, the benefits and the pension plan. Looks like we are stuck with the official story and go with the flow.
Of course Ontario’s Liberals led by Education Minister Kathleen Wynne have the solution for one problem, school violence. More bureacrats are needed, another $43 million to hire additional social workers and psychologists across the province to stop the violence before it starts. There, that should solve the problem, who knew it was so simple.
This woman, a former trustee who refused to balance the board budget as required by law, believes, as a true leftist, only spending more money to create or increase bureaucracies is the solution to everything, NOT.
In answer to Tenebris’ questions: “how do we respond to such a barbaric and degenerate culture? Do we leave them to their own devices, or do we go all colonial on them and impose civilization?
“What should we do?”
Personally, I think we should stand up on our hind legs and roar, “I’M MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE” at every opportunity.
Can you imagine what might happen if we of European extraction, on whose ancestors’ shoulders rests the proud democracy Canada once was, stopped cowering in the corner, for fear of being called “racists” and “bigots,” and stood up for what we know is actually historical FACT in Canada? Young people, who are mostly confused about their history, might thank us, because deep-down, they know something’s really wrong, and they seem helpless to do anything about it.
We could give them some of the tools they need to begin to turn things around: historical facts, knowledge, wisdom, courage of our convictions.
A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. Stand up and start walking…
langman: what happens though when they leave their country, come to ours and learn to fly 757’s into skyscrapers?
Kathleen Wynne, a full blown socialist, and lesbian, to boot, is, like the other Ontario Liberals, stuck on stupid.
When I see that the Student Behaviour Codes of the Province of Ontario include both posted consequences for anti-social and other pathological behaviours (demonstrated by a critical mass of students—certain groups are statistically over represented) which are actually carried out, I might think the educational apparatchiks are finally getting serious. But, as they, including most social workers, want the teachers involved to always “make nice”, no matter what the insubordination to outright criminal behaviour of the worst miscreants and their usually worse parents, I don’t see any chance of serious change here. E.g., As long as the dysfunctional family structure of certain segments of the population are propped up by government $$ and their progenies’ atrocious behaviour continues to be appeased, special schools—that are very likely to reward such pathologies—will simply add to the long list of failures they’re being created to address. Stuck on Stupid. It’s enough to make a grown person cry. (Trying to be an accountable educator these days is like walking upstream in molasses in January—with leg irons . . .)
As I’ve said before, my altogether Eurocentric approach with a host of challenged, many non WASP kids—high academic standards, no excuses, and “Do what you’re told and behave like a civilized human being” if you know what’s good for you—has been consistently highly successful over the long run. Certain parents and panty waist—is there any other kind?—administrators may not be overly fond of me, but the kids are and we work very well together, indeed!
As I’ve recently said, and batb has confirmed in this thread, in the West, our public systems have used up most of the moral capital bequeathed to us by our industrious, European, mainly Christian forbears. The account’s nearly empty now and moral pygmies run the show. What a travesty, turning very quickly into an unmitigated, probably irreversible, disaster.
@ Doug:
“langman: what happens though when they leave their country, come to ours and learn to fly 757’s into skyscrapers?”
I never said we don’t punish the people who are trying to harm us. All I said is that if they want to kill each other, I’m not sure how much we can help to prevent it. It seems when we try we get called “imperialists” and we become targets. Organizations like the UN created to solve these problems have become ineffective corrupt bureacracies.
I think they’re going to have to figure out how to get to democracy and free speech, property rights etc. like we had to… many years of struggle.
“how do we respond to such a barbaric and degenerate culture?”
Posted by: Tenebris at March 9, 2008 1:25 PM
Perhaps one of the first things should be done away with in this case is, that ‘we agree to disagree’. That is escapist nonsense.
If your argument is valid and superior to that of your opponent’s and you agree to disagree then your argument is not worth of opening your mouth.
To combat silliness, especially if it is a national silliness is something you have to have strong constitution for. You have to be prepared to answer to all kinds of deceiving questions and attacks on your person.
It is possible with wit and experience to disregard that. If you are prepared to handle that, you are on your way.
ET has a very good handle on this. Notice how many times ET was attacked with personal insults and never gave in, with a breezy confidence answers the point at hand. I would suggest that you look at that.
Just another reason to home school.
My learners spent Saturday afternoon at Fort Rodd Hill looking at 6″ disappearing guns and concrete loopholes. We had a great time, learned a little about the history of the British Empire and the geometry of range finding. I fear I forgot to tell my boys that Imperialism was bad nor did we discuss “the Other”. Perhaps another day.
Kate said: “Or with you know, chunks torn from their leg as a result of attempted cannibalism. But we insensitive Eurocentrists wouldn’t want them to think any less of their “culture” for it….”
Well Kate, in certain circles Eurocentrism is viewed as a far bigger problem than mere cannibalism.
Like leaving little girls to freeze to death in their diapers because you’re too drunk to realize its -50C out, Cannibalism is just a natual aboriginal reaction to the eeeeeviles of European Imperialism crushing their unique sense of self and equally valid culture. Those meanies.
So really, its all Queen Victoria’s fault that poor girl is limping. I’m sure if she just recontextualizes her experiences in a post-colonial literary study she will feel much better about missing three pounds of thigh meat.
In other news, blowing up Palestinian refugee camps is only bad when Israelis do it.
From the link:
“… an alternative both to a politics of blame and to the even more destructive politics of confrontation and hostility… As he considers the ways in which schooling helps to perpetrate the static notion of identity, Said observes that students need to spend… more time studying how states, groups, and individuals interact productively: We are all taught to venerate our nations and admire our traditions… A new and in [Said’s]opinion appalling tribalism is fracturing societies, separating peoples, promoting… uninteresting assertions of minor ethnic or group particularity. Little time is spent not so much in ‘learning about other cultures’ – the phrase has an inante vagueness to it – but in studying the map of interactions, the actual and often productive traffic occurring on a day-by-day, and even minute-by-minute basis amoung states, societies, groups, identities”
– ‘learning about other cultures’ has an “inane vagueness” to it!
– This approach is an alternative to a “politics of blame”!!
– and resists the promotion of ‘”static identities” and “uninteresting assertions of minor ethnic or group particularity”!!!
I think this isn’t quite what we thought. The quoted section along with descriptions in the essay of metis, native, and, well, Other students interacting makes me think that this approach could actually leave behind the ‘promotion of static identity’ that treats natives as an endangered species to be preserved in state from the depredations of Whiteness – and as an enduring example of the origional imperial sin thereof. (in this way, some peoples attitudes towards natives resembles arabic treatment of palestinians – useful only in how they can be set against another racial group – be it Isreal, or Dead White Males)
Whatever the apparent agreement of the author with the theory that the concept of race is what keeps non-white – and female (however that works) – literature out of the patheon of great literature, and although the portion quoted stands out from the rest, this approach to history is not just different in degree from the previous fashionable colouration of the facts, it is a difference in kind – and, rejecting both the “politics of blame” and a paternalistic treatment of natives, its our kind.
p.s. “The teachers, themselves, seemed to have no clue about how slavery was ended in the 1800s, had no idea that it was Christians who had instigated it, and once I’d put an end to their ignorance, had absolutely no interest in or intention of apprising their students of this historical reality.” – batb
Interesting, isn’t it. I read an article, I think in Reader’s Digest, about a woman of african decent who had her ancestry traced and found her ancesters included black slaves and black slave traders. She found this very intersting, and met with descendents of both in Africa. The history of non-white slave traders, however, is of no interest to white liberal teachers who are only motivated by the narrative of what awful things “we” did. Who is “we”? It’s white people. There is nothing more “Eurocentric” than a history of slavery that sees only Europeans as culpable actors – ignoring European virtue simply makes it a different flavour than the positive Eurocentric viewpoint they imagine they are opposing.
I think finding a way to explain to these teachers that they are actually telling a story about an “us” that is a race will convice them to deracialize what they teach long before they would out of respect for such trivialities as historical accuracy and perspective. Seeing “us” as the immoral actors and “them” as the always innocent victims is racial chauvanism no less than seeing “us” as the heroes. I’d rather us mean Canadians – all of them.
I’d like to see some English as a Second Language person read that load of crap. He’s harder to comprehend than Stephane Dion. OK, maybe not, but has he translated it into Urdu yet? If not, why not? Is it because he’s Eurocentric?
If his point is to be inclusive, then why so many syllables? To be inclusive, he needs to write at a grade 4 level. Make a few spelling mistakes, so the gangsta rapper wanna-be’s feel more at home.
More pseudo-elitist babble from another self-loathing white liberal looking for love in all the wrong places.
“Greenlaw’s bovine ruminations” and academic bafflegab are the poster children for the need for reform in liberal arts colleges. Our society spends billions on so-called education programs which turn out thousands of Greenlaws and then turns them loose to indoctrinate the next generation. (Alternatively, some sinecure is found for them within the bowels of some “Human Rights Commission” where they can beaver away at destroying our values in some other way.) This virus has pretty well overwhelmed its host, and if we don’t find the right medicine soon, it will be all over for “Eurocentric” society and the inherited capital of its many past achievements.
It will be very difficult, if not impossible, to reform the liberal arts in Canada and in North America generally. In another thread, I suggested, somewhat facetiously, that we abolish the liberal arts institutions and replace them with compulsory military service. That may sound a bit extreme, but if they cannot be reformed and brought back to their original purpose, which is the opening of minds, not their indoctrination, then we might as well close them for a generation or so. At least compulsory military service might provide a sense of purpose and actually lead to the development of some useful skills for young adults. After all, we can’t all be organizers against global warming or leaders in the “anti-racist” movement.
langmann – I admit to cleaning the Kipling out of my earlier post, as well as some really black puns, because I did not want to distract from the point.
We need a vigorous response to multiculturalism, and only one is possible: multiculturalism is sheer suicidal foolishness as best, evil incarnate at worst. It is inarguable that my “culture”* is superior to all others. I’d adopt another, if this were not so.
*Of course, we now have the issue of what constitutes culture. The milieu we currently inhabit as a society? The mindless consumeristic frenzy hawked by Hollywood? I see little moral difference between that and cannibalistic tribalism.
My 2cents: we clean up our own mess before we deal with that of others. For the so-cons among us, that would be removing the beam from our own eye, before looking for the sawdust in our neighbours.
If this feeble doctoral thesis is representative of Greenlaw’s writing skills, my father, who dropped out of Grade 8 in 1923 was immeasurably more literate. It’s unbelievable that his barely comprehensible drivel made it past his reviewers, and that he was actually awarded his doctorate.
It’s horrifying that the man who wrote such crap is now teaching ENGLISH to prospective teachers who will, in turn, pass their acquired semi-literacy down to our children and grandchildren.
How many generations of “literary degeneration” will it take until our society loses the capacity to communicate intelligibly? How do you repair a collapsing educational system, and who will do it?
“How do you repair a collapsing educational system, and who will do it?”
That’s easy! You stop FUNDING it. If nobody is paying for it, they stop doing it.
As to who will do it, the Conservatives will if I have anything to say about it.
I’m with Jay.
We’re teaching six grades this year. We avoid ALL the initiatives of those educated beyond their intelligence.
lookout:
What does Kathleen Wynne being a lesbian have to do with it?