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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

> The best teachers don’t just keep teaching. Instead, they use their pedagogy as protest:

I hope not.

I think teachers should teach to the status quo and let students when they are older or their parents make the decision about what they are going to protest, and what changes they are going to push for.

In general, I think students, especially young students, should be shrieked from the ugliness of life as much as possible so they can focus on learning the educational and social skills that will help them in life. Teach to give them the tools so that they can make their own decision when they get older.

Otherwise, if teachers are really using their pedagogy as protest, expect to see even more erosion of support for the public education system, and even more fracturing of the social bonds as schools are chosen , not for their ability to educate, but whether what they indoctrinate matches up with their parents’ wishes.

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That statement is taken way out of context. The full quote is below.

>The best teachers don’t just keep teaching. Instead, they use their pedagogy as protest: They disrupt teaching norms that harm vulnerable students. In my years in the classroom since 2001, I’ve learned something about how to do this. I call it reality pedagogy, because it’s about reaching students where they really are, making sure that their lives and backgrounds are reflected in the curriculum and in classroom conversations.

Basically this comes down to teaching to your audience, not blandly regurgitating content. It's recognizing that changes in that curriculum and school materials can move too slow to reflect research and reality.

Hear hear.

This pattern of people leveraging their professional position as a platform for activism is questionable, but debatable, in general. But being entrusted to teach children requires exactly that, trust. If school systems lose the trust of parents, and eventually their larger communities, they're done.

If schools can be reasonably viewed as attempting to indoctrinate children, there will be a massive backlash. People will put up with a lot, but their children are generally off limits.

Interesting, but isn't it the reverse? I don't think education can be really free from politics. Thus, if teachers are not allowed to take up "activism" on an individual basis, and are forced to "toe the party line", then that's exactly indoctrination of students, no?

This is a rephrasing of the "everything is political" argument. No, teaching math is not.

I would argue that even teaching math is somewhat political. Examples:

1. What is the teacher's take on students making errors - Do they immediately correct them? Do they give the student the time to come to a contradiction themselves, but possibly confuse them and other students? Something else?

2. What is the teacher's take on mathematical knowledge - is it there to be discovered, or to be created? How much of math is already known by academics and how much is still in the future? Do they teach concepts as fully given, or as challenges for the students?

Each of these and many other aspects of teaching could influence the student's view of authority and their own agency.

Basic maths is pretty much the only pure discipline I can think of, unfortunately. Indeed I cannot think of any reason for politics to influence math teachers.

There are still people today in the US who consider teaching evolution a step too far. In the US one of the major parties considers modern climate science off limits because they disagreed with its conclusions.

Then you get into history and literature and it’s almost impossible for politics to not influence what should be taught and how it should be taught. Yes, the teachers should still primarily be trying to impart kids with the tools to analyze things and seek knowledge themselves, but some topics are just too human to believe that they can be taught from a completely apolitical perspective.

Or perhaps we need to open up dialog and admit the reality that teachers can have an unfair political/ideological impact on impressionable children and come to a good solution that mitigates that. Right now it seems to be a bit of a "free-for-all" for teachers to within the bounds of the curriculum, inject and pepper their lessons with politically leaning views. Taking that away doesn't mean we have to "impose" the status quo onto kids.

Maybe it just means that we need to ensure politically proportionate representation when it comes to teachers, and have the conversations flow naturally with a balance. Maybe it means that we have to specifically put down rules for teachers to no delve into any political/ideological topics/opinions and to only teach the subject matter. That one would be a good start, and it's not immediately obvious that it would be indoctrination of children.

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