The Theft of Education

New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 26

Education is being stolen from our kids and our society. In fact, for the most part, it has been stolen already. The way it's being and been done is through using something that is known as the "generative themes" approach, which derives from the work of the Marxist educator Paulo Freire. Generative themes are supposed to generate particular kinds of political conversations in the context of presenting some other kind of educational lesson. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay shares (with permission) Jennifer McWilliams's example (https://www.jennifermcwilliamsconsulting.com/) of a seemingly benign and innocuous second-grade word problem in mathematics class to show how a simple subtraction lesson can be turned into any number of political conversations about poverty, race, sex, gender, sexuality, family, parental authority, and environmental issues or climate change by a manipulative teacher-activist using the Freirean generative themes approach. This is what we are up against. This needs to stop.

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