Chapter 2

After WWII veterans were able to enter college due to the GI Bill. These veterans were academically prepared for college. The skills these men learned in high school were not adequate, and other students resented their presence. Fast forward to Sputnik and America losing the space race, and Kennedy along with many other politicians believed that the answer to America’s lack of scientists and mathematicians (MILITARY MIGHT) would be to strengthen America’s schools.

During Reagan the “lax” conditions of America’s public schools put the nation “at risk.”
Focusing on science, math, and technology.

The Kennedy Administration emphasized physical education standards in schools, which can be seen as the “feminization” of teaching and the emphasis on the “masculizaiton” of the student body. Pinar believes that there was only interest in the white student’s body, not “the body of young black men.” Kennedy tried to instill “freedom, toughness, and courage.” Female physical fitness was useful so girls could meet a boy.

In the late 40’s and early 50’s there was a widespread fear of homosexuality.in society and media.

Most teachers until recently were women. Teaching was one of the only occupations deemed “acceptable” for women. However men made the curriculum.

“The Civil Rights movement, animated by student-led organization such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) - intensified the racialization of education in the (white) public mind, where desegregation was fought both in school buildings and in school textbooks.”

The Racial Politics of Curriculum Reform –
Racial tensions in the United States have deeply affected out schools and curriculum. In the 1950’s “racial violence in the United States amounted to complicity with the Communist plot.” This helped fuel both racial division, anti-intellectualism, and anti-communist propaganda.

“By resisting the inclusion of important African Americans in school textbooks, these same European Americans were insuring that America would have no future to be proud of.”

Students and the Civil Rights Movement
The struggle for civil rights was for the most part led by students. One group that was a big party of the civil rights movement was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Pinar chose to focus onn this group because it is the “most student-affiliated wing of the civil rights movement.” The SNCC was the “shock troop” of the civil rights movement. The SNCC focused on political rights for African-Americans. The SNCC was strengthened by activisms in Mississippi during the summer of 1961. (Freedom riders). The SNCC was important in the move to desegrate lunch counters and achieves social reform.

Protesters of the Vietnam War movement learned a lot from the South.

Freedom Schools
SNCC worked Charles Cobb envisioned schools in the South that actually supported academic freedom. The curriculum was devised by educators, clergymen, SNCC workers, in NY in 1964 and included usual school subjects plus contemporary issues, cultural expression, and leadership development (history of civil rights struggle) There were evening classes, day classes, classes that accounted and for a summer farming schedule. Freedom schools were part of a larger social goal of establishing integration and trust amongst races.

“In the United States,” Lesko points out, “the remasculinizing of schools includes a number of features: the spread of competitive sports; higher standards through increased testing; a more rigorous curriculum; zero-tolerance policies; and redoubled efforts in math, science, and technology.” Nowehere is this reactionary and racialized remasculinization more obvious than in the American South.

The Significance of the South

Unfortunately “Place” has been largely absent from the curriculum. Psychoanalysis would suggest a “place” is a form of social psychoanalysis; it permits the student to emerge as “figure,” capable of critical participation in a historical present widely ignored and denied.”pg 94 Curriculum was “standardized in response to a mass entry of immigrants from 1890-1930 as well as “the great migration” of southern blacks north, in search of economic opportunity and to escape lynching/” 94.

The south has a history of slavery, segregation, violence, and relative poverty. We separate ourselves by race, gender, and class. By understanding and examining our social situation it may be possible to advance our current situation.

II – Racial and sexed bodies contains information about the sexuality of black men and women in the realm of the south and slavery. Phillis Wheatley was a gifted poet in the late 1800’s-early 1900’s. She was educated as an “experiment” to see if “Africans could be said to be human in the European sense” and were “culturally human.”
This chapter talks of slave rebellions, Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth, and Anna Julia Cooper. There are 2462 recorded lynchings of African Americans, most of whom were men. Lynching was often sexualized violence, involving sexual mutilation, and happened because an African American acted “sexually” towards a white woman. There is a myth of black male rape and white women. Often lynching was “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized an “keep the nigger down’ “ (Wells 1970, 64)

Modern day – Clarence Thomas likened Anita Hill’s accusations and the court proceedings to “high tech lynching.” Racism requires political and pedagogical action.