In most cultures, family plays a critical role not only in the lives of children but in maintaining the stability of society. By family, it is meant a traditional family of parents with their biological children. However, there are now questions as to whether genetics should play a role in the family at all.

Definition

Biologism is defined as a preference for biological inheritance. In the context of this post, this means the preference for one’s biological children. Critics of biologism state that this is outdated, old-fashioned, and even prejudical against other children who may not have a family.

There are additional critiques in terms of the patriarchal structure of the traditional home with a need to decenter this normative view for alternative approaches. in simple terms, male-led families with biological children should not be considered normal as it excludes those who cannot experience this. Some have even suggested that people should adopt rather than have their own children as this shows an altruistic nature that may be best for the larger society.

There are several reasons why biologism is not supported. People have made comments that family structures have changed. Today, there are many non-traditional family structures and there are couples who cannot have children. In addition, even traditional means of having a family are challenged through such things as surrogacy, which makes it questionable in terms of who child the newborn baby is.

One question that is asked is should genetics even matter when somebody wants to be a parent. Generally, this innately matters and this is a major criticism. People against biologism believe that parents should love unconditionally regardless of genetics. The world should be inclusive no matter the relations between people. The goal is to ultimately move people beyond family to a concern for the planet. In other words, the planet should be equal to or more important than family relations. this leaves little room for the natural individualism and tribal connections people have had throughout history.

Not New

Despite how fascinating biologism is it might not be a new idea. Plato in his Republic spoke about the dangers of family. Essentially, Plato’s concern was that when people have families they will naturally put their family ahead of the state. When this happens strife and corruption are bound to take place as people fight for their families. By removing families, people should be focused on supporting the government instead. In other words, instead of people fighting other families Plato simply wanted governments to fight each other. Moving the level at which conflict occurs probably will not stop conflict from happening.

Of course, governments need children even if there are no families and Plato had a solution for this. People would “hook up” through a lottery system and any resulting babies would be raised by the state. Children would not know who their parents were and the parents would have no idea which children were theirs because there would be a lot of hooking up to the point that nobody knew who got which person pregnant. One caveat on this is that Plato’s idea was limited to the leadership of the state or what is called the elite. Regular people would in theory at least still have the ability to pair-bond and have children in a traditional sense. Fortunately, Plato’s ideas were never implemented nor is there any evidence that being single and detached from a family is a path to world peace,

Conclusion

The main concern with attacking traditional families and having children is that it is hard to find another approach that is common and equally successful if not superior. There are examples of societies that struggle when they deemphasized or removed families such as ancient Sparta and extreme forms of Communism. Families have been around for all of human history and as with anything involving people there are pros and cons. Just because bad things happen sometimes does not imply that the entire model should be thrown out. The ultimate point is that people should be able to choose for themselves whether they want to approach from a traditional or alternative means.

Mad studies and Sansim are a form of Marxism that looks at power dynamics between those who are considered “normal” mentally and those who are not. As with all other forms of critical studies, Mad Studies wants to overturn the status quo for an untested utopia that has not been proven to solve any of the existing injustices.

Mad Studies

Mad studies is a field of inquiry that rejects how mental health has been medicalized and has become a tool of the pharmaceutical industry. Madness should not be pathologized as there should not be any norms for mental health. Proponents of this point of view call themselves “mad.”

Mad proponents are convinced that there is a need to challenge the idea that people experiencing mental distress need to regulate or control their feelings. One of the reasons they make this claim is that people who do not fall within societal norms for acceptable mental well-being can be discriminated against because of these fall norms. For example, people may lose job opportunities, lose a job they already have, and face other obstacles to success because of the oppression that comes with having what others consider to be mental health issues. In addition, people who are considered mad are also often labeled incompetent and or dangerous.

Sanism

The act of discriminating against people because of their mental well-being is called sanism. When individuals are threatened with sanism they will try and hide their mental illness. Other coping mechanisms can include self-criticism in an attempt to place blame on one’s self. Mad studies are focused on challenging the status quo in regard to mental health.

Mad studies criticize several concepts that are a part of Western culture. Neoliberalism is one frequent target and neoliberalism is an economic and social focus on the the individual and the expectation of personal responsibility. As Mad studies is a child of Marxism means that it will have issues with economic policies focused on the individual. Another issue is with personal responsibility.

Mad studies do not support the idea that people should have to control their emotions and behavior at all times. If a person is having a meltdown at work the people around them should be patient and understanding of this challenge. To go one step further, some proponents of Mad studies believe that self-regulation is harmful.

Other supporters of Mad people have stated that Mad people should be in the workplace to provide mental diversity. In other words, the workplace should include a wide variety of people with different types of mental health from people who can control their emotions and reason to people who have no control of themselves and cannot reason. This is considered a balanced workplace for Mad people.

Conclusion

It is a trying situation for anybody who is experiencing mental health issues. However, how well such people can be included in society depends on the situation. It is unwise to bar Mad people from society completely as it is equally unwise to include them completely without examining the circumstances.

This post is a summary of the article “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy” by Gloria Ladson-Billings. One of the major contributions of this paper is attempting to define examples of culturally relevant pedagogy in the classroom of several teachers.

Problem

The problem addressed in this paper is multifaceted but can be summarized as follows. The author claims that success is defined in school for minorities by adapting their behavior to the expectations of the teacher and majority culture. For the author, this is poorly defined as meritocracy. The concern with adapting culturally for minority students is that they are not being affirmed in their own culture.

Galdson-Billings continues by stating that schools are guilty of reproducing the current system and thus reproducing the inequities of the existing system. This is a common critical pedagogy critique of the existing educational system. Therefore, students need to develop an awareness of the inequity in school, which calls for the development of a critical perspective or critical consciousness as explained by Friere.

With this background, the author shares the following proposition when she states that pedagogical practice needs a theoretical model that deals with student achievement and the affirmation of minority students’ cultural identity while also developing a critical perspective for challenging inequities in school.

The proposition above addresses the following problems

1. Student achievement of minority students
2.  Cultural affirmation of minority students
3.  Development of a critical perspective
4.  The need to challenge inequities in school

To put it simply, the other is looking for evidence of the propositions mentioned above in her research.

Questions

Galdson-BIllings lays out the following questions that she wants to answer in this paper.

1. What is student success?
2.  How can academic success and culture complement each other in settings where student alienation characterizes the school experience?
3.  How can pedagogy promote student success that critically engages larger social structural issues?
4.  What are the implications for teacher preparation generated by this pedagogy?

Notice in question two the use of the word “alienation.” Alineation is a term commonly used in Marxist literature to mean a feeling of estrangement or being marginalized. There is an assumption in this question that students are feeling alienation even before any data is collected.

In question three, the word “critical” is used. Again, the word “critical” has a different meaning and it means to question and oppose power dynamics. In this question, the author is looking for a specific predetermined answer rather than exploring the data

Methodology

Gladson-Billings collected data from 8 teachers who were considered to be excellent teachers. The method of data collection was done through participant observation in which the author was actively involved in the classes that she visited.

There were four phases to the data collection.

1. Ethnographic interview of the 8 teachers.
2.  Participant observation of the teacher’s teachings 3 days a week for 2 years.
3.  Videotaping of the teachers (this was in the 1990’s)
4.  Teachers observing each other videotaped teaching.

There was no direct explanation of how the data was analyzed but it can be assumed that this was a qualitative study and the result section is focused on summaries and the occasional vignette to provide support for propositions the other shares.

Results

Among the findings, the author shares that students struggle to achieve academic excellence while showing cultural competence. This may be due in part to who has the power to define academic excellence, which the author thinks is unjustly given to the majority culture.

Another major finding is that teachers must help students to understand and critique social inequities. The need to challenge social inequities goes back to the critical pedagogy viewpoint of the paper. Students must become activists to challenge the existing system. The author then shares several examples of students becoming involved in community activism through the support of their teachers.

The author then shares three propositions that emerged from her research.

1. The culturally relevant teacher’s conception of self and others
2.  How culturally relevant teachers structure social relations.
3.  Culturally relevant teacher’s conceptions of knowledge.

Proposition one stresses the beliefs that the teachers of the study had about students. These excellent teachers believed that all students could succeed, that teaching is an art, that they were members of the community, and that teaching was a way to give back to the community.

Proposition two is focused on social relations. Excellent teachers believed that social relations should be fluid, show connectedness, develop a community of learners, and focus on collaboration and responsibility towards each other all for critical consciousness. On the last point, the relations are developed to be aware of injustices in terms of power dynamics another key part of Marxist thought.

Proposition three addresses conceptions of knowledge or epistemology among excellent teachers. For these teachers, knowledge is not static, which implies it is relative and not fixed, teachers need to be passionate about learning and knowledge, scaffolding is necessary, and there should be multiple forms of assessment.

According to the author, culturally relevant teachers are teachers who demonstrate these propositions in their classes. The goal is to be culturally relevant for developing a critical perspective in the students.

Conclusion

For someone who is looking to understand what critical relevant teaching is this article is an excellent source. Not only is it defined but the author can provide examples from actual teachers in the classroom. Therefore, anybody can implement these examples and be able to show that they are a culturally relevant teacher.

This post will provide a summary of the the article “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education” written by Gloria Ladson-Billings and William F. Tate IV. This paper is significant in that it proposes the idea of considering critical race theory as a key component of education.

The authors assume that anybody who reads this article is already aware of what critical race theory is. In short, critical race theory suggests that the world should be seen through a lens of power as it pertains to race. What this means is that those who have power use race to hold down and oppress those who are of a different race. This is most commonly used in the context of whites vs. blacks in the US.

In terms of the actual article itself, the authors clearly share the following propositions as the main ideas they will address in the paper.

1. Race continues to be significant in the US
2.  US society is based on property rights rather than human rights
3.  The intersection of race and property creates an analytical tool for understanding inequity

Proposition One

The first proposition is almost an axiom of someone who supports the Critical Race Theory view (CRT). Race will always be a major issue in the US because CRT believes that essentially everything begins and ends with a race dynamic. Almost all actions of injustice for blacks and justice for whites are connected with the dynamic of power differences based on race.

What is unique to the first proposition in comparison to the others is that they include several meta-propositions as listed below.

• Race is un-theorized
•  Class and gender cannot explain all the differences in school experience and performance

What the authors mean by race being un-theorized is that much of the ideas of Marxism, which laid the foundation for CRT, were developed by White Marxists who were focused on class rather than race and that they oversimplified race. Therefore, theorizing race involves adding nuance to Marxist thought in relation to CRT. For the authors, race is the main construct to consider when explaining inequity. To simplify, theorizing race means explaining the role of race in education in relation to experiences and performance of minority students primarily black students.

The second meta-proposition of the authors is that class and gender cannot explain all the differences in the academic performance of students. The authors support this point with studies about differences in academic performance and behavior when controlling for class and gender. Race must be a part of the explanation in terms of inequity in the educational experiences of students.

Proposition Two

The second proposition the authors share is that the US is based on property rights rather than human rights. The authors support this point with the reality that in the days of the early republic, only land-owning capitalists had full participation in society. They follow this with the point that a government that is focused on property rights is not concerned with the human rights of individuals since not every singe person holds property.

Governments tend to be pragmatic in that the focus on property rights is because property can be taxed. It’s hard to hide land and other large resources so the government protects property in exchange for protection of the property. The rich have generally paid more in taxes because they have more wealth that they develop from their property (or capital if this term is preferred).

The poor are hard to track and often have a smaller obligation in terms of taxes. To tie property rights to education the authors make the next point that places where there is better property have better schools because these schools get more money to spend. For the authors, this is a form of inequity. In other words, the areas of town with more money should share this money with other areas of town that have less. Better property does not imply a better education because all people are equal.

Proposition Three

The third proposition is not stated directly but the thrust of this proposition is a conclusion based on the previous two. Proposition three uses the idea from proposition one about race not being theorized and proposition two about property rights to state that the cause of poverty (lack of property) combined with poor schooling (lack of nice property) among blacks is a form of structural racism. Structural racism is a system within society that fosters racial discrimination.

From here the authors present several interesting ideas. The first is that white privilege is a form of property that is transferable, can be enjoyed, affects reputation, and can be excluded. In terms of transfer it is meant that whiteness can be transferred by having people accept certain norms (acting white). For enjoyment, it is meant that get to enjoy certain advantages in their education (better teachers, etc.). For reputation, things identified as nonwhite are stigmatized. Lastly, for exclusion, resegregation through such things as tracking or gifted programs is also a form of whiteness as property because these programs generally exclude black students according-to the authors.

Multicultural Paradigm

The authors then pivot to a light criticism of multicultural education. Multicultural education is the idea of getting all cultures to mutually respect each other. No culture is superior to any other culture. The authors critique multicultural education for not ensuring justice and becoming part of the existing system. The authors call for a radical critique of the status quo and thus of multicultural education. An incremental approach is never going to work for bringing change. CRT supporters generally disdain the current system and prefer radical change to incremental approaches to solving what they consider are systemic problems.

The authors go on to state that multiculturalism is attempting to please everybody, which is a futile effort. They then state that they are believers in the philosophy of Marcus Garvey. Garvey is famous in part for attempting to move African Americans back to Africa unsuccessfully.

Conclusion

Ladsen-Billlings and Tate provide an excellent introduction to CRT with their emphasis on the theorizing race within the classroom, pointing their views on the focus on property in a capitalist society, and showing how property and race combined can lead to inequality. The authors also state the need for radical change and call on current efforts through multicultural education is be inadequate. Whether this is right or wrong is left to the reader.