I'm going to try to stay cool-headed here. But Stanley, you're going in the wrong direction. If you knew anything about my "critical pedagogy movement," you'd know that education is the designated apparatus for raising up the repressed, not for helping them understand that Lolita is the great novel of kitsch Americana motels.

I thought we had already agreed to disagree, Paolo. I think humanities are about the human condition, not to take students to the streets on contemporary issues of Marxism and post-colonialism. It's such a comedown!

That's because you are the oppressor in the oppressor-oppressed binary.

Likes this.

'Fraid I'm going to weigh in here, too, Stan—if I may. People gain a lot more power by knowing the horrors of racism and colonialism than from finding out that Coleridge smoked opium before he wrote "Kubla Khan"—cool as that is.

I'm also one for "class activism." Sorry :(

Feeling a little ganged up on, guys. If we don't concern ourselves (deeply) with the craft of prose, syntax, subject-verb agreement usage, composition, and the whole writing process/product thing, who will?

If we're lucky, no one.

Education just reveals the all of society's inherent inequalities, Stanley. We need students to get some cultural literacy, too. Everything has political consequences. You white male of privilege. I hear you drive a Jaguar…

Actually, it's a Porsche.

Good for you. Off to occupy New Haven…

I have some sentences to parse. My fave du jour: "If God didn't want them sheared, he would not have made them sheep." Maybe these words will console my distraught graduate student