A post by Pat
The smart people are going to study and define hate then teach the kids how to be agents for social change. What could go wrong?
Political Correctness was an amusing loony left notion in the beginning, giving male names to hurricanes, spelling “woman” “womin”, quirky things like that. It got seriously irritating when we had to drop Christmas for The Winter Festival, but PC kept rolling along. It continued getting worse over the years while we all learned to self-censor our thoughts and actions to the point of getting 13 people killed at Fort Hood. Sane people think it’s finally time to pull back from PC. The radicals think it’s time to kick it up a notch. They want to formally define hate within society and develop a comprehensive program to “educate” the young to be social change agents.
The idea for Hate Studies came out of Gonzaga University in 1997. The initial premise, as usual, sounds worthy.
Why do we hate? Academics seek answer in new field
What makes hate tick?” Mohr, director of Gonzaga’s Institute for Action Against Hate, wondered. “How can we stop it?”
Gonzaga founded the institute a decade ago after some black law students received threatening letters. It has since started a Journal of Hate Studies, hosted a conference and offered its first class on hatred last spring.
The hope is that other universities will follow suit, said Ken Stern of the American Jewish Committee in New York, who has been involved in the effort. “We wanted to approach hate more intelligently,” he said.
The goal of Hate Studies is formally set out in Hate Studies Through a Constructivist and Critical Pedagogical Approach
- Establishing a field of hate studies has been proposed as one means of analyzing hate and developing effective methods of understanding, combating, and controlling it
- As society is seeking solutions to hate, institutions of higher learning have the opportunity to test theories and develop explanations and strategies related to limiting hate’s impact on society. In essence, just as higher education is influenced by general society, it likewise has the opportunity to influence society.
- An intensive interdisciplinary study of hate can provide answers and remedies for domestic and international expressions of hate.
- Though defining hate is difficult, just as defining terrorism and genocide is problematic, a hate studies curriculum can bring disparate views on hate together to expand our understanding not just of hate, but also of terrorism and genocide so that we can develop holistic and effective methods to combat them.
- By encouraging the study of hate, researchers can create theoretically grounded responses to acts of hate that assist individuals, activists, and governments in their work to limit the spread of hate to a new generation of people.
- Through the creation of a hate studies curriculum, the field offers the opportunity for much more than a simple uniting of different disciplines. The hate studies curriculum encourages students to challenge injustice and oppressive tendencies within themselves, others, and the community. It prepares students to be active participants in democratic processes. A hate studies curriculum engages in “educational practices that help students look at issues in broad social contexts, hone their abilities for deep and critical inquiry, constructively consider multiple viewpoints and perspectives in dialogue with others, and engage in socially just actions”. Through such practices, students will be prepared as citizens who understand, appreciate, and acknowledge their role as social change agents. For if students do not become change agents through the study of hate, then such study is irrelevant and meaningless. .
- To create a curriculum that rises to the challenge of creating socially aware and active students who are willing to challenge hate, it is necessary to use theories of learning and education that are based on how students learn and are concerned with providing students with the skills and abilities to question the underlying assumptions and biases of what they have learned or are currently learning.
And just who would have taught the students “the underlying assumptions and biases of what they have learned”? Mom and Dad? The Church? You get the idea.
The goal is to create an academic home where a variety of disciplines, including history, psychology, religious studies, anthropology and political science, can be brought together to focus on hate. It’s the same sort of effort that led to the creation of disciplines like black studies or women’s studies, Mohr said.
Such academic efforts are not without controversy. Some skeptics fear they are little more than attacks on the dominant power structure.
“This stuff tends to be one dimensional and presumes the guilt of an archetypal white male,” said Glenn Ricketts, spokesman for the National Association of Scholars.
With all the political conflict in the United States, it can seem that hate is on the rise. Some people seem to hate President Obama. Some hate Muslims. Some hate homosexuals.
“We can change,” Mohr said. “There has to be hope.”
HOPE AND CHANGE. That’s all we need to hear about this insidious idea. I hate it.
Talk radio is already identified as hate mongering, teapartyers are racists, white males are hate incarnate. I think we can see where Hate Studies is headed. Which will be identified as an expression of hate by the Hate professors and justifiably be “controlled”. Rev. Wright’s sermons or Hate speech straight from Bible to bumpers?
Orwell wrote about the two-minute hate. Academia wants to turn it into a full-time study.
As an English major, I always thought Orwell was too heavy-handed to be taken seriously. Was I wrong. What’s scary is that no one sees this taking shape, and the very people who “love Orwell” in the universities also voted for Obama. Thanks for pointing it out. Academia has turned into an indoctrination machine.
Sounds to me like a course in Liberal Projection. Because it’s how they feel, and what they do, everyone else must also feel and do it.
They wouldn’t want to live in the same world they’re trying to create for everyone else.
And the Christian principle of “Hate the sin by love the sinner” is just hate speech. But, for militant homosexuals to protest Churches is okay.
I also don’t like the way PC speech seeks to redefine things. For example, “underpriviledged”. How many “priviledges” is one supposed to have? And “entitlements” instead of “welfare”. What makes anyone think they are “entitled” to free food, etc.?
My biggest problem with PC speech is how it all goes one way.
This is post modernism at its worse. This a century long destruction of education. This started with John Dewey, who believed that education is not about gaining knowledge but about groupthink. Everything centers around the group (i.e. society is the standard).
Yet again our colleges and universities are setting the bar as low as possible with their anti-intellectualism. Looking to history the Nazis biggest supporters were Germany’s colleges. Most of the SS were PhD’s. Germany was the most educated society in Europe. And with the Communists, Lenin was an attorney!! These murderous ideas came from intellectual elites. They mangled minds in Germany and Russia. And they will mangle minds here in the U.S.