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Christopher Eastman-Nagle's avatar

When I did my teacher training in 1974, I was involved in an 'alternative' course which traded in what was then known as New Left (read early Woke). We read Freire as part of our attempt to find ideological praxis in the classroom.....you know, the pedagogy of the oppressed....

The course was a fraud and a dangerous one, because it broke down the very necessary authority/personal/sexual barriers between adult and child that should accompany pedagogy based around knowledge (and the knowledgeable) and those yet to learn the knowledge base, and who weren't knowledgeable. We lost sight of that in a welter of faith-based 'consciousness raising' that our students never properly understood, because they didn't know enough to do so.

We thought of (and treated) students as if they were equals. They weren't. The whole relationship created by our ideological fictionalizing was a fantasy and the students learnt little from so called radical 'teachers' who had never had any significant training in how to systematically structure knowledge properly for learning purposes. We had thrown away the baby with the bathwater and went by the seat of our untrained pants, using 'curriculum' that rapidly became inchoate and ineffective, as my cohort went up the system.

I learned more about pedagogy in my years in the part time citizens' army than I ever did at university; a lot more.

I look back on the period now with absolute mortification, because we started to screw up the education system in ways from which it has not recovered. And its legacy is incompetent as it is toxic.

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Rona Dinur's avatar

Crenshaw lied in one of her foundational articles (prior to the '91 article) about crucial things relating to the law.

She also confuses "intersecting" legal causes with "intersecting" oppressions or disadvantage, and "intersectional" group categories, throughout her discussion.

This whole movement is based on entirely bogus scholarship.

https://ronadinur.substack.com/p/the-legal-megalomania-of-intersectionality

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