pt 1 - HT to My Pet Jawa. Let's make this cretin's life/career exposed to sunlight, the great disinfectant! I'm not gonna snark cuz it will be too acidicAugustine Romero, director of Tucson Unified School District's ethnic-studies department, is nothing if not candid about his program.
Traditional history and civics courses, Romero argues, have "been highly ineffective to children of color." He has a better way.
That better way, as presented to students in Romero's increasingly influential program, is, effectively, revolution. Or, if that "R-word" strikes you as too edgy, resistance - a resistance against history and civics as traditionally taught, which Romero considers the product of "ultraconservatives."
"With the ultraconservative orientation, people want to believe that if you offer a naive, simplistic, color-blind orientation, that's the only truth.
"We transcend indoctrination because we offer multiple perspectives. It's a higher level of thinking."
If Romero's words sound politically anchored, they should. Romero happily acknowledges that he and all his instructors are "progressives," and he is contemptuous of teachers who resist admitting that all history instruction is political.
"Our teachers are left-leaning. They are progressives. They're going to have things (in their courses) that conservatives are not going to like," he told me.
"Their concern is that it's not their political orientation. To sit here and say teachers don't walk into the classroom with a political orientation, that's the furthest (thing) from the truth."
Romero is a confident man. Not unlike that self-assured aide-de-camp of Fidel Castro, Ché Guevara, whose romantic portrait has been hung in Romero's ethnic-studies classrooms.
Ché, too, believed the world was divided between progressives and ultraconservative reactionaries, many of whom he imprisoned and shot.
In one of Romero's TUSD classrooms, in fact, a video posted for a time on the Internet Web site YouTube showed at least four separate posters of the beret-capped Ché decorating the classroom walls. And a poster of Pancho Villa. And, yes, one poster of the godfather of the revolution himself, Fidel.
RTWT