The Creed According to the Legal Academy: Nihilistic Musings on Pedagogy and Race Relations (original) (raw)
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Gershon, W. S. (2022). A curriculum of lying, choking, and dying. In B. Wozolek (Ed.), Black LIves Matter: in US Schools: Race, Education, and Resistance (pp. 125-139). SUNY Press
All groups and individuals educate their children and do so according to specific sets of sociocultural values that establish what is normal and acceptable. What is taught is political-a choice of one idea over another as well as the weight given each possibility. Education, then, is as much about what is taught as what is overlooked and about sociocultural understandings as much as academic content-political decisions, emphases, and normalization. The field of curriculum studies conceptualizes educational ways of being and knowing as forms of curricula-pathways and trajectories for the dissemination and reception of knowledges across all forms of delivery and contexts, including, but not limited to, schooling. Continuing an unfortunate and long-standing trend in United States education, one of the central tenets we teach our children is a curriculum of lying, choking, and dying. While this may seem deeply pessimistic, overstated, or biased, as this chapter documents, such a characterization of US curriculum at the onset of this millennia is indeed metaphorically and literally the case. For example, how we teach pedagogy to future educators, and how teachers attend to their students, is through lesson plans with measurable goals and objectives. Seeming to ring the bell of common sense on its surface, these are tools intentionally created toward specific eugenics ends by Franklin Bobbitt, a man who is in many ways the father of US education and a proud, self-avowed eugenicist. Or, as but 125