Abstract
This chapter returns to the idea that teachers lie, categorizes common types of falsehoods, and provides context that demonstrates how lying is integral to the educational system that we currently have. To progress beyond the apparent necessity of deceit, this chapter advocates a series of progressively critical steps: advocating for intellectual rigor through questioning, promoting embodied learning to resist easy answers, subverting curricula by disrupting teacher authority, and restoring the promise of education by crafting new curricula. Lacking a roster of dead white guys, this chapter instead addresses issues teachers are likely to encounter in their practice: artist stereotypes, productive uncertainty, talent, sensitivity, resilience, wait time, classroom management, accountability, and the myth of meritocracy.
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Notes
- 1.
Even if we still want to think that “lies” is perhaps too harsh a word to use, what we choose to teach is as important as what we leave out. That’s why it’s important to think about how our lies affect our students, the social histories that shaped those lies, and the pedagogies we can adopt as teachers to correct them.
- 2.
Or a few thousand words.
- 3.
Or expressing gender in a way that makes people uncomfortable.
- 4.
Or even sharing it privately with the wrong person.
- 5.
It’s more likely that it will be the parents or guardians of their students who do not understand.
- 6.
We should be careful to separate “thinking critically” from what often passes for “critical thinking” in schools. Critical thinking is an inwardly focused analytical approach to the world that relies on using logic to make informed choices and reasonable inferences. Thinking critically, also conscientização or consciousness-raising, is an outwardly focused approach that uses a deep understanding of the world to expose political and social contradictions and act to change them. Critical thinking reconstitutes the world as it is. Thinking critically imagines the world as it might yet be.
- 7.
Despite our supposed religious and spiritual plurality, there are many who so narrowly define concepts like “culture” and “religion” that multiculturalism becomes monocultural and religious freedom only applies to whatever Christian denomination has majority status.
- 8.
They’d have to complain anonymously because they were also at the strip club.
- 9.
Even being insufficiently opposed to the BDS Movement, Palestinian statehood, reparations for slavery, or otherwise protected but locally unpopular expressions of speech could be grounds for discipline or dismissal.
- 10.
Despite all this, education still has the potential to liberate the oppressed and radically transform our future.
- 11.
One possibility is that lying is necessary to the process of education. Those who hold this view often assume that students exhibit different degrees of “readiness.” Those who are “ready” for the truth can handle it, while those who are not will gain greater benefit from a convenient falsehood or oversimplification. I suspect, however, that the concept of readiness is compromised by issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. It is also developmentally questionable. When is someone supposed to be ready to learn that gay people exist, that education is unlikely to overcome the privileges of wealth, or that much of what they were taught in elementary school is entirely wrong?
- 12.
It’s fascinating to note how often the idiot artist stereotype is also paired with the overly educated pretentious perfectionist. Contradiction never stops a bigot.
- 13.
It isn’t “fixed” in either sense of the word.
- 14.
This is vital because of how frequently our known truths are demonstrably untrue. More often, we simply assume that something is true and provide sources and experiences that confirm our biases.
- 15.
Convenience and laziness are generally not avenues to understanding essential truths. Critical self-awareness is uncomfortable, difficult, and time-consuming.
- 16.
The idea that education cannot serve only a small subset of the population is vital to the American conception of public education: one that is collectively funded and available to all. It is especially important where education is compulsory.
- 17.
Oops.
- 18.
There are many whose focus on compliance, conformity, and control tells them that there is little more dangerous than students who will not blindly do what they’re told.
- 19.
There is a pernicious belief that the well-managed classroom is also an intellectually rich one. It may, in fact, be the opposite. Real learning can be physically, emotionally, and intellectually messy.
- 20.
Points off for late work is also more punitive for students who may be behind through no fault of their own. Even if it is their fault, are we there to punish them or create opportunities for learning? We cannot always do both.
- 21.
There is an analogy to Chemistry. J.J. Tomson proposed the “plum-pudding” model of the atom in 1904. Ernest Rutherford came up with the planetary model of the atom in 1911. Working with Rutherford, Niels Bohr expanded on that model in 1913 and introduced the idea that the orbits of electrons are quantized. The current model of the atom is that of a dense nucleus surrounded by a probabilistic cloud of electrons. It’s fairly standard practice to teach the older models, as older, less-accurate models nonetheless help us to see how we came to the idea of a nucleus surrounded by regions of increasing probability. Could we not teach RYB the same way—a marginally accurate, somewhat useable theory that helped point us in the direction of a more complete and precise understanding of color?
- 22.
The ranks of the unsupported include those who bypassed teacher education using a variety of bureaucratic means.
- 23.
All the same, I would rather be rude than racist.
- 24.
This assumes that administrators and other educational stakeholders have had time in the classroom. One of the features of the modern reform movement, however, is that the management of schools does not require experience as an educator but rather experience in “business.”
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Babulski, T. (2019). Conclusions. In: What Art Teaches Us. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27768-0_7
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