Substack Notes, Vol. 8.5
May 13th - 16th
If someone thinks they were born in the wrong body and you hated their guts, and you really wanted to mess up their lives, maybe the meanest thing you could possibly do is agree with them.
from replies to:
We’re dying over here.
In Chicago, East St. Louis, Oakland, and many other places, people are struggling.
Our schools are failing to educate children properly, and our jails are filled with young men who never had a chance to realize their full potential.
Can we blame white people for these issues?
You certainly can, and many will support you in doing so.
Some might even reward you with accolades and financial gain for pointing fingers.
But let's be honest: these are our community's failures, and we need to address them.
We haven't even begun discussing the importance of raising children and the state of family life.
Talking about these issues is often seen as victim-blaming, but is it really?
Encouraging people to take responsibility for raising their children isn't blaming the victim; it's about fostering accountability and growth.
This is my perspective, and I'm open to the conversation.
Let's engage and find solutions together.
Upcoming film projects to watch out for…
“[T]eacher education works on two levels. The first is pleasant enough, perhaps even noble. It needs to attract the noble-minded, after all, as it certainly does not involve any prospect of material success. You learn that while you won’t be getting much money, you’ll be making a difference. Children are natural learners- everyone knows that, trust us. The problem is that our society distributes resources unequally, and some children simply don’t have what they need to learn. That’s where you come in. Through hard work and dedication, with your creativity and ability to design interesting and challenging lessons, you’ll help close those social gaps and give kids the ability to lead richer, more fulfilling lives, not merely materially, but intellectually, even spiritually. You will equip them for happy and productive lives in a multicultural liberal democracy.
A careful student-teacher might notice some very important and unsupported assumptions in all this, and might compare it to his (or more likely) her own experience and wonder about how true it is. But the people training you are experts, so perhaps your own memories of high school- of chaos, indifference, and anomie- are not the norm. You also learn at this point to not read too much subtext into your learning materials. The books and journal articles you’re assigned never seem to point to any substantive successes despite covering a span of time longer than you’ve been alive. Your training faculty speak as if they’re disruptive outsiders but, when you think about it, they’re saying the same things you keep hearing in your student teaching from the school administration there. Everyone keeps insisting that if only the system would adopt their ideas things would be better while maintaining all the while that those ideas already guide the system. You might remember learning from your history coach in high school how every communist revolution proclaimed itself the real thing- unlike its corrupt and deformed predecessors- despite advancing the same theories. Comrades, this time we need real differentiation, real inclusion, real best practices. You might also remember them all ending the same way.”
“If there’s one thing the public school system is good at, something every aspect of managerial neoliberalism is very good at, it’s rationalizing mediocrity, hypocrisy, and failure.”
