The woke Left are holistic, totalitarian, and systemic. Everything is political and the faunt of politics and society as a whole is education. This is why politics, for them, must be political.
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One way that woke activists were able to take over the education system and get away with it was to make the claim, phrased in various different ways, that education is and always has been utterly political.Woke activists politicizing education,
A thread 🧵 pic.twitter.com/x78aRJYFAO
— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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They claim education is always political. This is why you often see articles in academic journals dedicated to education that say thing like: “education is inherently political,” “education was always already political,” “teaching is a political act,” and so on and so fourth.— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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As such. Critical Social Justice activists in education set about developing a theory of teaching in which the values, goal, agenda, perspective, worldview, and ideology of Critical Social Justice/wokeness are built into the fabric of how teaching is done.— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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This idea is deeply flawed, but it persists because the woke theorists in education do what woke theorists always do: marry the truth to a lie. So we must pull out the kernal of truth that they have, and divorce it from the lie that they have weaved into their argument.— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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in wokeness, “political” does not just refer to things that go on in the political realm, but in fact refers to anything that has an impact on politics, social order, social hierarchies, or who has social power. Anything that has any impact on society is thus “political.”— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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Armed with this view of the world, the woke think that the goal of education is teaching students how to view the world through the lens of Critical Social Justice/wokeness.— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
And how this all end up affecting education is frightening.
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The woke theorists have reasoned that if all education is political, then it is a perfectly good move to use the education system to create political activists who will agitate for the preferred political outcomes of the woke left.— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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Woke education theorists believe that k-12 classroom is and ought to be the "site of political struggle." They believe that the k-12 classroom is and ought to be a battlefield where the political war over the mind of children ought to occur. pic.twitter.com/NtSv5eVtk4— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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They think that children ought to be taught the woke political worldview right from the get go. There is a reason why Ibram X. Kendi wrote a book called “Anti-Racist Baby”; because even babies are not to young to be socialized into woke ideology. pic.twitter.com/nSjUCKr2O0— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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they believe it is appropriate to get children to accept and internalize woke ideology. For this reason one criteria for successful teaching according to wokeness is the degree to which they succeed in using the classroom to create the political change they want.— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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the reason this argument has gotten traction in spite of it falseness is that The Critical Social Justice scholars are trading on an ambiguity in the word political. There is a legitimate way ( in a benign and obvious sense) in which education is in a way political:— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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We have to choose what will be taught is school, how it will be funded, how it schools will be set up, ets. In the sense of “education decisions are made by elected official which we can throw out of office if we don’t like their decisions,” education is political.— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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This is not how the woke see education. They see education as a place of political struggle and political battlefield where they are entitled to try to advance their political ideology by indoctrinating their students into wokeness.This is not how education should be done.
— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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Most people see education as the place where children are taught the skills required to make it in the larger world. The goal of the teacher is to teach children reading, writing, arithmetic, critical thinking, and civics (how our liberal democracy is supposed to function).— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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With all that on the table we can highlight some of the problems with the woke view of education.The first objection to woke education theory comes to us (again) from John Searle who wrote this about the challenges to the liberal vision of education: pic.twitter.com/WrUol1iprq
— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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This is exactly correct. It does not follow from the fact that everything might have unintended political consequences that the criteria for education assessment is political. Politicizing educations turns university classrooms into factories of political indoctrination.— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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Even if I accepted everything was political in the way they say it is, they still need to provide an argument for why woke politics ought to be the politics taught to children. But the woke can’t make an objective argument in favor of injecting their politics into classrooms— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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The woke have accepted a postmodern view of the world which makes nearly everything about power and self-interest. If everything is really mask for political power, self-interest, cultural biases, hidden agendas, power-seeking, and clout chasing, then any argument the woke…— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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A second problem that arises for woke theorists comes from their adoption of postmodernism. One of the most radical Critical Theorists of education, Henry Giroux, writes this in speaking about his friend and mentor, the Marxist critical theorist Paulo Freire: pic.twitter.com/B5tgFLqotG— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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Giroux highlights three things that are very important in the work of Freire:1. No transcendent ethics
2. No epistemological foundations
3. No political teleology.
— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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The problem with having no transcendent ethics is that if there is no transcendent standard of right and wrong Freire has no objective reason why we should accept his moral prescriptions. By what standard does Freire make his moral judgements, and should we accept them?— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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If Freire accepts that there are no epistemic foundations which anchor knowledge claims then we have no reason to accept Freire’s claims about education, society, truth, knowledge, democracy, or anything else. Put simply, Freire is making a number of truth claim while denying…— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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Freire has his own political program with its own goals and ends, and he asks that we all participate in achieving these goal and ends. He then tells us that there are no transcendant ethics, no epistemological foundations and no political teleology.— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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If that’s that case then Freire can provide no objective reason for us to accept his political program, and all the only motivations for accepting his program is subjective moral convictions, naked self-interest, or the pursuit of political power.— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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The objections that Critical Social Justice launches against the liberal vision of education can also be turned back on the woke vision for education. The arguments they use to undermine the liberal vision for education also undermines their own.— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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Given that absolute neutrality in the sense of giving every idea and every view equal time is not possible (here are too many ideas and not enough time in a day, or in a lifetime, to give every single idea full and proper treatment) what are we to do?— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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We ought to do is give children the skills needed to think about the world and to engage the world thoughfully and carefully with an eye to truth. We want to create a system that incentivizes the search for truth and rewards those who do the best job of pursuing the truth.— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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We do not want to accept the relativistic and nihilistic claim that all ideas are equally valid and that saying some ideas are better than others is nothing more then a mask for power. What we want to put together the best possible ideas that we can.— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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If you have given up on saying that some things are better then others, and some things are worse, if you have given up on which work has the quality and which work does not have the quality then you have given up on the whole idea of education.— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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The woke argument for politicizing the classroom rests on the idea that all education is political right to it’s core, and that therefore the primary goal of education is to teach politics. As we have seen, this idea rests on a number of bad and self-refuting arguments.— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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The goal is to teach students how to think critically and clearly so they can become competent, thoughtful, productive members of society. Only once they have those skills are they capable of freely engaging in political thought and action in a thoughtful and careful way— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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The woke have it exactly backwards, truth is not political…Politics is downstream of truth.— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
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I wrote a more detailed version of this essay on Sub/stack, complete with sources!Please have a read, and support me with a free or paid subscription. I sincerely appreciate it.
Thank you for reading😀😀😀https://t.co/5e0W9eDpP7 pic.twitter.com/zF5XJeYX4u
— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023
That version can be read here.
If you want to defeat the woke Left, you have to pull them out from the root, and that root is firmly planted in education and the pedagogy.
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