Op-ed: The art of domination
Those professors among us who teach from the perspective of the oppressed are often tasked with un-teaching what our students learned before arriving. As we know, the education system is a crucial site of social (re)production, fully complicit in the art of domination. Children learn that our American hands are clean and our rule is just. To inculcate each new generation of patriots, Cowboys (or Cubs) fight Indians, “good” guys are pitted against bad hombres, super-predators, terrorists, the axis of evil. A children’s textbook in Texas refers to African slaves as migrant “workers.” Hegemony is secured in the rewriting of history. The original sin has been erased.