Josh Bishop Reads

Teaching is not just data transmission. Not even data transmission from gifted and talented lecturers. Teaching is about sharing of loves so as to reorder the loves of the young.

R.J. Snell in “The Locale and Grace of Teaching”

Many of us discriminate on the basis of gender without realizing it. Because we were raised in a sexist society, we think our behavior is natural and acceptable, even when it is discriminatory. Women often do not realize the extent to which they do not participate equally in society, nor men the privilege that maleness bestows on them—a sign that the distinct roles have been internalized well during the socialization process. Most parents do not directly plan to harm their daughters by teaching them feminine roles.

Donna M. Gollnick and Philip C. Chinn in Multicultural Education in a Pluralistic Society, 7th ed.

A crucial fact in understanding racism is that whites see themselves as superior to persons and groups of color, and as a result exercise their power to prevent people of color from securing the prestige, power, and privilege held by whites… Many whites declare they are not racist… They take no responsibility for society’s racism.

Donna M. Gollnick and Philip C. Chinn in Multicultural Education in a Pluralistic Society, 7th ed.

We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had a private notion of children. Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.

Melissa Harris-Perry, qtd. by Tom Gantert in “MSNBC Host Who Said Kids Belong To Community Also Says Education Funding Desperately Inadequate”

Public education has taken on a life of its own. She has a specific character and a predictable personality. I contend she is animated by the father of lies.

Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg in “The Empress is Naked”

well people gonna talk about you when are doing good and still going talk when are doing bad or down know matter people going to talk b/c they are misery people that how people are program so keep smile girl

[Name redacted], commenting on Facebook

‘Look, Mom, I can detect oppression narratives in 19th-century New England literature while bringing myself to orgasm atop a pogo stick!’ the Allegheny liberal arts graduate can say, from the comfort of her parents’ basement.

Rod Dreher in “Lenten Observance At Allegheny College”

The modern educational system, on the other hand, stresses specialization and compartmentalization because, to quote Karl Marx, modern education is ‘combined with industrial production.’ That is, education today aims at the creation of workers or producers for the national economy, not the building of free people with full souls; the creation of specialists, not Aristotles.

Brian Phillips in “Math People, Humanities People, and the Partially Free”

The early church was privileged to watch classical, educated paganism collapse in its epistemological exhaustion. We have a similar opportunity, but we are currently squandering it.

Douglas Wilson in The Paideia of God

It is not what people can read; it is what they do read, and what they can be made, by any imaginable means, to learn from what they read, that determine the issue of this noble experiment. We have given them a technique of acquisition; how much comfort can we take in the way they employ it? In a society where expression is free and popularity is rewarded they read mostly that which debauches them and they are continuously exposed to manipulation by controllers of the printing machine… It may be doubted whether one person in three draws what may be correctly termed knowledge from his freely chosen reading matter.

Richard M. Weaver in Ideas Have Consequences