A Loyalty Test for the American Educator

Le résumé fourni par la source

During the early years of the American Republic, an important strain of American popular culture helped establish the idea that there was something fundamentally un-American about those who put too high a value on intellectual community, book smarts, and cultural sophistication. Popular texts like “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) depicted schoolteachers in particular as arrogant, untrustworthy, undemocratic, and at some level, disloyal to fundamental American values. Today, too many Americans have bought into the notion that schools are morally suspicious and ill-equipped to introduce students to complex ideological and intellectual issues. These suspicions of intellectual community are surprisingly—and ironically—reinforced in popular films that celebrate educator heroes. The formula for many of these films—such as Dead Poets Society (1989), Dangerous Minds (1995), and Freedom Writers (2007)—is to celebrate an educator-hero as an American icon while disparaging intellectual community more generally, a formula that they inherited from Little Women novels. These texts affirm the stereotype of most schoolteachers as arrogant, undemocratic, Ichabod-like tyrants while celebrating the rare alternative to the norm as the real American hero. At one level, such narratives celebrate the possibility that truly motivated educators can thrive in oppressive institutional environments, but on another level, they reinforce the dangerous belief that educational institutions and the intellectual communities they support are instinctively hostile to freedom and learning.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.