While today’s teaching methods have certainly not improved students’ standardized test scores, tomorrow’s students may shock and surprise everyone with their knowledge about the politics of obesity.
Leftist educator and FOB Bill Ayers noted in a discussion forum in a recent issue of Radical Teacher that “practically anything, from the lofty to the mundane, can be the subject of serious inquiry.” He noted, for example, that Gov. Huckabee’s dramatic weight loss inspired Arkansas school officials to pose students’ BMI index results on their report cards.
To Ayers, this provides an opportunity for turning obesity into a social problem that could place him and the students against the “machinery of control.”
Ayers noted that his body of inquiry would include finding information on whether obesity is “correlated in any way to income, class, race or gender” . . . and asking if “exercise facilities are available equally across communities regardless of income or property values.”
And, if school vending machines are selling fatty and sugary snacks, are vegetables available too?
Instead of being locked into the machinery of control, the professor sees himself taking “a stand with our students in a search for meaning and a journey of transformation.”
Deborah Lambert writes the Squeaky Chalk column for Accuracy in Academia.
