Lawmakers’ fixation on limiting race lessons won’t help students
Well, it’s not as if no one saw this coming.
In 2014, a Pew survey warned that massive numbers of blue and white-collar workers would be replaced by robots and technology. And now, Fedex is inching toward that reality. It is buying more robots.
The logistics giant, which employs more than 30,000 people in Memphis, may increasingly look to rely on metal to do what flesh once did; to move and sort small packages and to drive vehicles.
But this may not just be Fedex’s future, or the future of blue-collar work.
As robots become more advanced, and as companies increasingly rely on artificial intelligence, even white-collar workers like managers, insurance adjusters, consumer loan underwriters and customer service representatives could find themselves rendered obsolete by technology.
“This is going to happen in ways that people can’t anticipate,” said Nat Irvin II, futurist and assistant dean for Thought Leadership and Civic Engagement, Management and Entrepreneurship at The University of Louisville.
“Even in these white-collar jobs, people in legal professions, management professions, AI is going to come for them as well...”
But the thing that technology can’t replace, Irvin said, is human imagination. Which means that educators shouldn’t be cut off from using lessons that could pique the imagination students need to solve problems.
Yet by passing laws that make it difficult for teachers to include race in their lessons, and by making it easier for parents to challenge a book as being profane because a character uses a curse word, Tennessee’s legislators have done exactly that.
Let’s say, for example, a teacher
wants to teach lessons on how enslaved people used songs like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” to convey coded escape messages, or how they used their imagination to devise those messages.
Such a lesson would achieve two things: Get students to think about how others have confronted horrible situations in the past and look at ways to apply those problem-solving skills to situations they may encounter.
But now, using that example could put a teacher at risk of being accused of teaching Critical Race Theory — which GOP lawmakers outlawed in 2021 and which they defined as a morass of vague edicts, such as forbidding lessons which make a student feel guilt or anguish because of his or her race, and other ridiculousness.
No matter that the lesson on enslaved people’s escape codes, as opposed to a dry, uninspiring one, might motivate students to build an imagination that could ultimately be used to solve a problem that AI can’t solve.
Then last month, after the Mcminn County School Board made national headlines in January for banning the graphic novel, “Maus,” because its members felt that it was more important to spare eighth-graders from a few curse words and the depiction of a naked woman than the lessons of the Holocaust, Gov. Bill Lee signed a law requiring that school libraries periodically review books for “age-appropriateness.”
Problem is, if local school districts have the last say, they may be swayed by loud and ignorant forces who will push to remove books that depict people whose lives and struggles – and lessons – they’d rather not know about.
Then, there’s Lee.
He has invited Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in Hillsdale, Michigan, to open 50 charter schools in the state. Those schools would focus on civics education – namely whitewashing history to play down slavery and other horrible aspects of America – with the goal of imparting patriotism.
Unfortunately, when a school says its goal is to boost patriotism, that’s usually code for propaganda. And propaganda, imagination and critical thinking usually can’t coexist.
To be sure, Lee and state lawmakers have worked to boost technological training in the state - including proposing a new school in Haywood County to train students to build electrical vehicles at the new Ford Motor facility.
But while technology may create jobs for those students, even that technology could evolve in a way to make what they learned obsolete.
That’s why the key to all students being able to adapt to that reality are lessons and books that encourage them to think.
Students should have no shortage of lessons or books which show how people of various races and circumstances facing various predicaments used their thinking and their imagination to survive or to thrive.
A teacher shouldn’t have to worry about losing her job if someone accuses her of teaching CRT because she used Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to be confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, as an example of how strategic thinking can be used to avoid verbal traps being set by racist senators.
“Our greatest gift for the future will be our imagination, and that gift will come from [a variety] of reading,” Irvin said.
And while some proponents of these laws claim they’re shielding students from profanity and obscenity and hurt feelings, in the long run, these laws will hurt the students they claim to be protecting.
These laws will ultimately stifle them in competing in a changing labor environment; one that will require them to outthink and out-imagine the machines, and not just follow orders.
Because the robots will already be doing that.