Campus Reform – by Toni Airaksinen
A University of Washington-Bothell professor who trains aspiring K-12 teachers is publishing a book that advocates for “Marxist and socialist ideas” in education.
A Marxist Education: Learning to Change the World will be published on June 5 by Haymarket Books, and is authored by Wayne Au, a long-time social justice educator who teaches classes in the UW-Bothell School of Educational Studies.
The forthcoming book—a preview of which was reviewed by Campus Reform—frames the adoption of Marxist and socialist values as a much-needed strategy for educators to help students resist capitalism, white men, the U.S. President, and much more.
“These dire times have sparked an upsurge in activism that is heartening and full of revolutionary potential, and I think a new generation of teachers could build upon this radical momentum by helping their students explore and consider Marxist ideas,” Au writes in the opening chapter.
“And here is the thing: after all these years, Marx and Marxism still provide the sharpest analysis of how capitalism functions at its most fundamental levels of production, profit, and exploitation,” he adds.
While Au notes that his father was a communist, he cites time spent at The Evergreen State College as especially crucial to his development as a “radical” teacher, saying the school introduced him to books such as Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
The book’s penultimate chapter—“Curriculum to Change the World: Developing a Marxist-Feminist Standpoint in the Politics of Knowledge”—elucidates strategies that educators can adopt to teach in the Marxist tradition.
One of these strategies is the adoption of “Marxist-feminist standpoint theory,” writes Au.
Standpoint theory, he explains, “comes from the basic understanding that power and knowledge are inseparable,” and is predicated on an acknowledgement of how the “ruling capitalist class” shapes what children learn and are expected to learn.
“As an orientation towards understanding the world, standpoint theory thus openly acknowledges that the social location of the oppressed…is the best vantage point for understanding society because it can provide a clearer, more truthful view of how society functions,” he asserts.
According to the author, acknowledging this can help teachers decide what should be taught to students in place of curricula that have historically been shaped by “the interests of capital as well as white men in universities.”
A Marxist Education will be published in print by Haymarket Books, a “radical, independent, nonprofit” Chicago-based book publisher.
Campus Reform reached out to Wayne Au by email, but did not receive a response in time for publication.
This is interesting.
The public fool system is already operating under a pure marxist agenda and has been since John Dewy formulated his assembly line procedures for “education.”
What do you call teaching children abortion/condom education, LGBTQ rights and activism? What do you call teaching school children how to fill out income tax forms. What do you call teaching children altered history, math and science? What do you call OBE (outcome based education), “Goals 2000”, Bush’s “No Child Left Behind,” and “common core” if not pure marxism by just another name?
wy arent we shooting yet?
I find it fascinating that groups of people are “wired” a certain way…let me explain:
As an educator for 25 years, a big part of my task was to learn how to relate to the student…find out their life’s experience, hobbies, etc. then use analogies and such that they could relate to best in order to get the light bulb on quick and easy. What I figured out over the years is that 99% of engineers needed to be spoken to and taught in one particular way, because of the way they processed information. Pilots, same thing…right down the list. The backgrounds of my students were vast from NASA rocket scientists, neurosurgeons, landscapers, housewives, CPA’s, …the full gamut of people. The curious thing for me was that EVERYBODY who viewed the world in a certain way all gravitated to a specific profession. For instance, EVERY CPA that I ever taught learned in a very specific manner and I had to modify my speech and delivery to accommodate that learning style. My methods worked extremely well and the students were very pleased with the way in which I delivered the information.
So now, I’m scratching my head over this stuff in the article. WHY are people who believe socialism, Marxism and liberalism ALL wired to want to teach? It started with college professors being the liberal types and now it has trickled down into high schools and primary schools. I wonder what it is about these commie hippies that makes them desire a teaching degree?
PS. I was teaching racing schools, high performance driving schools, drifting schools, police driving schools with students 18+ .
Communist infiltration…… It has nothing to do with the desire to teach.
The education system, both public and private, is as much under Zionist control as the news. About a decade ago they did away with tenure, to make sure they could fire any professor who wasn’t willing to support the commie agenda.
Communism and perversion is all that’s taught in school these days, and anything American is racist, evil, antiquated, and oppressive.