I have only the most tangential experience with that sort of educational environment; I was in college when the very first black studies and "Chicano studies" (that's what it was called at UCSD in 1970) courses were coming into the curriculum. Elementary and secondary schools might have been starting in the same direction; I wasn't in contact with them, so I don't know.
In my last few years at a corporate job, we were all sent to "diversity training," and it was basically harmless tedium, nothing like the "yelling class" your link describes. My most vivid memory of it was of one of the instructors putting up a chart of our "diversities," where we could write into a circle words for things that made us distinctive, and filling it in—and her "diversities" were things like "woman" and "mother" and "professional" and "consultant." So I raised my hand, and commented that the things she had put down were not particularly unusual traits, but were presumably traits that were personally important to her, and asked if she wanted us to define ourselves in terms of what we thought was important about us, or of what we thought was unusual about us, and she said, "fill it out according to what you think the instructions mean." So I left it blank, and when she came to me, I said, "I have an unusually strong need for explicit definitions" and stopped.
It sounds as if this course was taught in a college, and to students who chose to be there, though they may not have known what they were getting into. That changes the dynamics from the "mandatory high school program" that I assumed.
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zvi and
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Date: 2009-04-30 12:38 am (UTC)In my last few years at a corporate job, we were all sent to "diversity training," and it was basically harmless tedium, nothing like the "yelling class" your link describes. My most vivid memory of it was of one of the instructors putting up a chart of our "diversities," where we could write into a circle words for things that made us distinctive, and filling it in—and her "diversities" were things like "woman" and "mother" and "professional" and "consultant." So I raised my hand, and commented that the things she had put down were not particularly unusual traits, but were presumably traits that were personally important to her, and asked if she wanted us to define ourselves in terms of what we thought was important about us, or of what we thought was unusual about us, and she said, "fill it out according to what you think the instructions mean." So I left it blank, and when she came to me, I said, "I have an unusually strong need for explicit definitions" and stopped.
It sounds as if this course was taught in a college, and to students who chose to be there, though they may not have known what they were getting into. That changes the dynamics from the "mandatory high school program" that I assumed.