I haven’t been the biggest fan of Phoenix New Times writer Stephen Lemons lately for his pro-Sound Strike stance, but it’s nice that he came down to Tucson to actually try to understand the ethnic studies debate, something the people actually making the decision on a state level can’t seem to be bothered to do:

In his finding against TUSD’s ethnic studies, signed a day before the law actually went into effect, Horne slams acclaimed academic Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, from which seniors in ethnic studies classes read excerpts.

Horne calls Freire a “Brazilian Marxist,” which he was. He also was jailed by Brazil’s military junta in the 1960s, forced to flee the country, and ended up a professor at Harvard and, later, moving on to Geneva, Switzerland.

If Horne had bothered to read and understand Freire’s work regarding the philosophy of education, he would have realized that more than anything else, Freire was a humanist, and he was influenced by an intensely repressive political system, one that might well have killed him if he’d stayed in his native land.

Moreover, if you start excluding works of those influenced by Karl Marx, you’d have to rid your library of a truckload of modern authors: John Reed, Jean-Paul Sartre, and John Steinbeck, to name a few.

Ultimately, both Horne and MacEachern have taken an anti-intellectual stance, one described, ironically, in Freire’s book.

Freire writes: “Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”

This article appears in May 12-18, 2011.

The editor of the Tucson Weekly. I have no idea how I got here.

5 replies on “The Phoenix New Times Visits Tucson’s Ethnic Studies Controversy”

  3. I am white and I grew up in South Phoenix and on East McClintock. Needless to say, those were economically poor areas. Most of my friends were hispanic and I never recall any of them calling themselves Mexican – or at least very often (my very first girlfriend in third grade was hispanic-name was Evette). They always called themselves American as I also did since I am a first generation American. Some of my friends went into the military and some to college and some did neither. What I remember most fondly is all of us believing in the promise of America – liberty, equality, self government, and the chance to do something to change our lives and be something more than our parents generation. I taught at a high school in Arizona for a year before I went to graduate school (first in my family to do so) and I remember most of the football coaching staff (I was a coach) being hispanic. I remember one coach who was born in a railroad car by migrant parents who came to America for work and a better life for their children. He played football as an undergrad and went to graduate school and his sister also. He and countless others love America – sure, it isn’t perfect, but it is pretty good and I and them certainly do not want it to become Aztlan or Mexico or anything else.

  4. Thank you, Jac, for your story. It reminded me of my childhood. I was the first to go to graduate school too.

  5. Is that how you learned to lie, cheat and deceit Sharon? We’re so proud of you out here.

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