Yeah, and in light of all the tribal violence around the world, we should stop covering Romeo and Juliet. We should just leave it at studying the subtext nuances of Dr. Suess. Oh wait. He has a troubling background too. We better stop teaching math as well. A lot of pushback on that subject and it makes people feel badly about themselves. Can’t have an education that makes you uncomfortable. god forbid.
Right? Like we need to really start realizing that being uncomfortable can actually be a positive thing. Allows us to push past our norm and open our minds to different perspectives. We might not always like it. We might not always understand it. But we learn something, whether it be about ourselves or others.
I saw this post (https://beehaw.org/post/531244) about logical fallacies earlier and this is a classic “slippery slope” fallacy which I don’t believe will be a productive line of discussion to go down regarding debating this topic.
I think the focus is more on whether we should be forcing children to be exposed to racial slurs in this manner in educational settings and not on the broader “should we remove everything that is uncomfortable from educational settings”.
When I did my GCSEs this was a book that we studied (this was over a decade ago now so this may have changed/my memory might be fuzzy) but the focus of our course syllabus wasn’t on the sensitive subject of racism (which may be more suited to a different class like history or politics rather than english) but overall themes of “dreams”, “lonliness”, and “companionship” as well as how the characters and language highlight these themes. These themes are partially tackled from the perspective of people of colour and women living in the 1930s which is why these slurs appear.
I’m not the most well-read person but surely there must be other literature out there which is suitable for studying at this level which doesn’t include slurs?
Yeah, and in light of all the tribal violence around the world, we should stop covering Romeo and Juliet. We should just leave it at studying the subtext nuances of Dr. Suess. Oh wait. He has a troubling background too. We better stop teaching math as well. A lot of pushback on that subject and it makes people feel badly about themselves. Can’t have an education that makes you uncomfortable. god forbid.
Right? Like we need to really start realizing that being uncomfortable can actually be a positive thing. Allows us to push past our norm and open our minds to different perspectives. We might not always like it. We might not always understand it. But we learn something, whether it be about ourselves or others.
I saw this post (https://beehaw.org/post/531244) about logical fallacies earlier and this is a classic “slippery slope” fallacy which I don’t believe will be a productive line of discussion to go down regarding debating this topic.
I think the focus is more on whether we should be forcing children to be exposed to racial slurs in this manner in educational settings and not on the broader “should we remove everything that is uncomfortable from educational settings”.
When I did my GCSEs this was a book that we studied (this was over a decade ago now so this may have changed/my memory might be fuzzy) but the focus of our course syllabus wasn’t on the sensitive subject of racism (which may be more suited to a different class like history or politics rather than english) but overall themes of “dreams”, “lonliness”, and “companionship” as well as how the characters and language highlight these themes. These themes are partially tackled from the perspective of people of colour and women living in the 1930s which is why these slurs appear.
More information can be found here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/z8q3dmn
I’m not the most well-read person but surely there must be other literature out there which is suitable for studying at this level which doesn’t include slurs?