Today I missed a professional development workshop- a continuation of this year's focus on anti-bias antiracist teaching. If you haven't been living in a bunker, you know that across school districts, corporations, and most organizations in between, these trainings have been all the rage. Consultants, racially focused training manuals and curricula, initiatives, protocols.... We have embarked on a full fledged attack- mission equality, or rather, equity. And I'm not opposed to that in any sense, except in the sense that I see glaring contradictions between the superficial efforts to create a more just, inclusive society, and the removal of any authentic ways to achieve that. Namely, the slow death in schools, and society as a whole, of the humanities. How many books does the average adult, and average student, read per year? What books do they read? Does this matter? YES. The old English teacher adage, "show don't tell," illustrates why. Be lectured about how you need to understand the experiences of others, or become immersed in the story of someone with a different life experience than you. What's more likely to facilitate greater compassion and more authentic understanding? To combat stereotypes or single-storied perceptions of demographics different than your own? We live in a country where literacy rates are dropping and have been for a long time. COVID was a distractor and convenient scapegoat, but the downward trajectory was already there. We need to read more stories, be exposed to more art, more music, that ignites the humanness through which we identify our similarities and build greater capacity for empathy- to see, hear, and feel the experiences of others through creative mediums that bring others to life. Inability to take other perspectives is at the heart of societal discord at nearly every level. The great irony of current efforts to combat lacking humanity, is the simultaneous devaluing of the humanities. Kids are reading later. Reading less. Maybe even reading not at all. We have been told, in many cases, that full texts are too much even at the high school level. The great tech boom and the focus on STEM, at the cost of writing and literature, particularly in higher education, is reflective of a society that has made a value judgment- industry calls, and tech is where it's at. Who even needs a human writer when we've developed AI? Today I finished Yaa Gyasi's Transcendent Kingdom. Gyasi is a phenomenal writer, and her themes and characters allow a reader to get lost in the complexities of being human- of grappling with identity, with race, with culture, with faith, with family, with history, with the inherent desire to understand things in a world and as a species that can never have all the answers. ABAR trainings aim to tell us who's bad and who's good; they tell us how all of one group feels and how all of another group feels; they are inhumane in their lack of acknowledgment of individual identities or varied experiences. Give me Gyasi or Adichie or Ng or Whitehead or Ward, or so many others, and give me a society that cultivates readers and values stories as the most powerful way to see each other as human. And to act accordingly.
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