- Gay
- Lesbian
- Education
- New Right
- Cultural Center
- Oppression
- Neoconservatism
- Respect
Carlson argues that gay students have been oppressed and made voiceless by the dominant culture and teachers in public education have a responsibility to give them a voice.
EVIDENCE
"Willard Waller, in his 1932 classic The Sociology of Teaching, argued that homosexuals should not be allowed to teach for several reasons. First, employing a disease metaphor, he argued that homosexual teachers represented a danger to their students since 'nothing seems more certain than that homosexuality is contagious'" (237)
-Making homosexuality sound like a disease makes homosexuals seem like diseased people that need to be cured, less than human even. This further isolates the gay community and therefore silences their voice.
"A statement recommending the inclusion of 'references to lesbian/gay people in all curriculum areas' was eliminated. Heather Has Two Mommies was taken off the suggested reading list." (250)
-here we see the dominant culture clearly silencing an attempted voice of the gay community. As if the children will be tainted by the homosexual virus.
"but we have a responsibility as public educators in a democratic society to engage them in a dialogue in which all voices get heard or represented and in which gay students and teachers feel free to "come out" and find their own voices"
-This statement shows Carlsons opinion of placing responsibility on the teacher to let people who are gay have a voice in their classroom
COMMENTS
I found this article to be the most controversial of all the texts we've read so far. I found my self questioning my own opinions on the matter and taking into account subconcious thoughts that i never really was fully aware of. "Do i think homosexuality is a disease?" "How do you know if someone is really homosexual, or just confused? How do they know?" "If homosexuality is a natural thing and not made by the minds of people, then why have I not heard about homosexuality 1000 years ago in history? Has my education been a filtered one, making sure that I did not know of homosexuality so that i would think of it as a fad, or a mental disease, and that homosexuals are really just sexually experimental, morally lacking, confused people? This by far is the hardest issue to deal with. This is the heaviest item in the invisible knapsack.
2 comments:
Your comments are raw and real. What makes this the heaviest issue in the knapsack? How is it the the other things -- race, class, gender -- seem to get easier in ways that gayness doesn't?
You know what, I think that race, class, and gender are all in the knapsack also. Just, now, the topic of gay is really coming into our society. I think Carlson, was talking more on the gay subject than all four of them. Now that I have taken this class, it's actually pretty interesting how we can still be connected on these issues. We are or at least have been affected by these issues, and everyday too. We might not talk about it everytime a gay person is in front of you but you know that these discriminatory issues are still around. Even the example of when I was younger I was trying to understand if I could look/act like a boy. My mom said, "you can tell by the facial features-eyelashes, eyes,..." On these subjects you know what to find and how to react.
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