As I was reading Gottesman’s final thoughts and advice to Critical Pedagogues in the the conclusion to The Critical Turn in Education, I found myself coming back to two conclusions of my own:
Critical Pedagogy is a cult (not exactly an original identification given its connection to Critical Social Justice).
It’s shocking how honest they are about it.
While I’m clearly not the intended audience for this book, I was more than a little surprised in how explicitly the goals are stated along with how clear the connection is to Marxism (an ideology that, lest we forget, has left hundreds of millions dead). Given that Critical Social Justice relies on useful idiots to obscure this connection, it surprising that Gottesman would be so honest about it in a book that anyone can order from Amazon. Frankly, it reads more like a manual to help cult members become better cult members. The advice found in the conclusion only reaffirmed that impression. In closing, Gottesman gives the following guidance to those who wish to further the movement of Critical Pedagogy:
Read Broadly
Read Closely
Publish Broadly
Focus on Teaching/Learning
On the face of it, most of this seems like reasonable advice for educators: who could object to being a better reader or focusing on teaching? But upon examination, this only shows how thoroughly Critical Pedagogy tortures the meaning of words. When Gottesman gives the advice to read “broadly” and “closely” he means to within the corpus of the cult writings. He does not advise people to understand Classical, German, Liberal, Progressive, or any other pedagogical traditions by reading those works—he indicates only sources within the framework of Critical Pedagogy should be read, and, of course, referenced in their publications.
Gottesman as much as admits that he has no intention of considering other models of education, even for the purpose of showing how they are wrong. The only ideas to be considered are those that have been acknowledged as sufficiently Critical (Marxist). The admonition to “publish broadly” is nothing new and has turned educational scholarship into a morass of countless papers that hardly anyone reads but each of which makes sure to reference other papers in critical pedagogy to overwhelm opponents with the sheer quantity of garbage published in “professional” journals (James Lindsay is the best source I know for just a few examples of the kinds of publications that pass for scholarship in this field).
When Gottesman instructs Critical Pedagogues to focus on Teaching and Learning, it is once again a bait and switch. Remember, Critical Pedagogy views consciousness raising as the essential cognitive act in education. By “teaching” and “learning” he means: “practice critical pedagogy.” This means engaging in classroom activism to attempt to induce a critical (e.g. class, racial, sexual, queer, etc.) consciousness in both teachers and students. What seems like an instruction to focus on education rather than activism is actually an abuse of language that demands exactly the opposite.
For Gottesman, and others who have internalized a similar world view, Critical Pedagogy is synonymous with education rather than being a particular approach to education. For them, the essential challenge is to get students to see the world the correct way, not train their minds.
A recent example of this was brought to my attention on Holly’s Substack in an essay by a writer named Jessica Wildfire, who holds a PhD in English. Holly did a thorough takedown of Wildfire’s piece here, so I won’t be saying much about the specifics. But I do want to point out that Wildfire’s critique of American Education is what it looks like when a mind has been thoroughly saturated by the worldview of Critical Pedagogues. The piece offers not evidence, but assertions. Assertions that teachers are underpaid, assertions that creating an amazing educational system would be easy, assertions that test scores are meaningless. And assertions that the villain responsible for it all is, wait for it…capitalism. Setting aside whether not one agrees with any of Wildfire’s claims, it’s clear that she believes that she not only has no responsibility to provide justification for any of them, rather she thinks that if only everyone would just acknowledge the evils of capitalism the situation would work itself out perfectly. In other words if everyone would be as smart as she is and just agree with her, we would reach educational utopia.
This is what cult thinking and behavior looks like, and the ones writing the cult manuals aren’t even bothering to hide that their entire purpose is bring about a form of cult indoctrination. And it’s everywhere in American schools.
In what the late Saddam Hussein once dubbed “the great Satan,” roughly two-thirds of the United States enlisted military corps is white . . . The fat, bulbous U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin once confirmed in a 93-2 vote of the U.S. Senate, immediately embarked on a whirlwind media tour of duty, telling the pseudo-secular sycophants in the state-controlled tabloid press and state-controlled television talk show circuit about how the U.S. Army is full of bad racist white men.
Senior Defense Department leaders celebrating yet another Pride Month at the Pentagon sounding the alarm about the rising number of state laws they say target the LGBTQ+ community, warned the trend is hurting the feelings of the armed forces . . . “LGBTQ plus and other diverse communities are under attack, just because they are different. Hate for hate’s sake,” said Gil Cisneros, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for personnel and readiness, who also serves as DoD’s chief diversity and inclusion officer.
And now the U.S. Army is doing ads begging for more young white males? What happened?
Even with a full-on declaration of war from Congress, and even if Gavin Newsome could be cheated into the Oval Office by ZOG somehow, with Globohomo diversity brigades going door-to-door looking to impress American children into military service, they will be met with armed, well-trained opposition, the invasion at the Southern border is going full tilt, and the drugs are flowing in like never before.
Get ready for it . . . the fat old devil worshipping fags on Capitol Hill, on Wall Street, in Whitehall, and in Brussels are in no shape to fight a war themselves, and most Americans are armed to the teeth with their own guns . . . NATO hates heterosexual white men . . . they said so themselves . . .
https://cwspangle.substack.com/i/138320669/nato-an-anti-white-and-anti-family-institution