South Carolina high school English teacher Mary Wood was reprimanded last school year for teaching a lesson on race. She began teaching it again this year.
Mary Wood walked between the desks in her AP English Language and Composition classroom, handing out copies of the book she was already punished once for teaching.
Twenty-six students, all but two of them White, looked down at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a memoir that dissects what it means to be Black in America — and which drew calls for Wood’s firing when she tried to teach it last year in her mostly White, conservative town. Wood crossed to a lectern and placed her hands on either side of a turquoise notebook, open to two pages of bullet points explaining why she wanted to teach Coates’s work.
“That book that you guys have, it deals with racism,” she said on a recent Tuesday. “It’s going to be something with which you’re unfamiliar. That you need to spend time to research to fully understand.”
Wood stared at her class. She tried to make eye contact with every teenager. Anyone, she reminded herself, might be secretly recording her — or planning to report her.
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Plus, both teachers believed the book, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is superbly written: a master class in the deployment of rhetorical devices. There was no better way to teach children how to formulate their own arguments, they thought.
“It teaches kids a different perspective, [it] teaches kids how to write well,” Wood said in an interview. And “it’s the right thing to do.”
This isn’t activism. It’s honesty.
You’re correct that it’s honesty. Honesty becomes activism when the truth is banned.
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I associate activism with an agenda. Activist may or may not be dishonest, but if they are they justify is by the righteousness of their cause.
Teaching children reality in school is not an agenda.
An agenda is a plan or program, often ideological in nature. If your ideology is that children should be taught the truth, then acting in accordance with that ideology is following your agenda. And if you act to teach children the truth in defiance of the prevailing agenda to teach them falsehoods, then that is inherently activism following said agenda.
The concept of an agenda is not inherently good or bad. It is simply following what you believe in through pre-planned actions. Buckling your seat belt is part of an agenda. You take action in line with the ideology that a seat belt will prevent you from flying through the windshield in the case of an accident, because you believe that becoming a lump of meat on the asphalt is worse than whatever injuries you could get from wearing the seat belt. Other people may have opposing views (maybe they want to be crushed into lumps of meat, idk), and not wearing a seat belt is part of their ideology.
The belief that somebody having an agenda is inherently a bad thing is yet another part of the anti-intellectual agenda to bully people into obedience by taking words with important meanings and rendering them into useless fear mongering that can be used as a lash against anybody who dares to speak out. The same thing that happened to “woke” and “politically correct.”
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It was also done explicitly within the bounds of the law.
So I wouldn’t call it activism either.
School policy isn’t “law” and can be threatened and changed given a shift in who holds power over the school system. Just because she currently has “protection” doesn’t mean she isn’t taking a risk with her actions. Policy and law also does nothing to protect her against an individual or group who may decide those regulations don’t go far enough and take “justice” into their own hands.
What do you think making this distinction achieves? Cause it sure as shit doesn’t help spotlight courageous action taken in the face of adversity. What we don’t need is people dismissing the problems and dangers people like this face, trying to ignore them in the name of some perverse “neutrality”. That isn’t helping.
Activism implies the advancement of an agenda. Reality and the acknowledgement of reality is not an agenda.
When someone else is actively trying to hide or obscure it? It absolutely is activism. You insisting this shouldn’t be noteworthy only serves to dismiss the risk to their financial and/physical well-being that people like this willingly take on.
In short, you’re not in anyway benefiting the truth, and are in fact diminishing the efforts being made to preserve it.