Finally, on Feb. 8, 2022, at 4:05 p.m., Wickenkamp scored a Zoom meeting with Superintendent Laurie Noll. He asked the question he felt lay at the heart of critiques of his curriculum. “Knowing that I should stick to the facts, and knowing that to say, ‘Slavery was wrong,’ that’s not a fact, that’s a stance,” Wickenkamp said, “is it acceptable for me to teach students that slavery was wrong?”
Noll nodded her head, affirming that saying slavery is wrong counts as a “stance.”
“We had people that were slaves within our state,” Noll said, according to a video of the meeting obtained by The Post. “We’re not supposed to say to [students], ‘How does that make you feel?’ We can’t — or, ‘Does that make you feel bad?’ We’re not to do that part of it.”
She continued: “To say, ‘Is slavery wrong’? I really need to delve into it to see is that part of what we can or cannot say. And I don’t know that, Greg, because I just don’t have that. So I need to know more on that side.”
In addition to his very important point, quite a few of those majors he listed as having the highest pay, also have the highest unemployment and underemployment in the first 5 years. So, you get a business analytics or chemical engineering degree, but can’t find a position in your field, so you work some other job to pay the bills. We’re setting students up for failure in so many ways.
Once college was seen as a way to increase lifetime income it was almost inevitable that it would morph into a kind of high-end job training. Intellectual pursuits can’t withstand the force of money. Once the job training was in place it was inevitable that every student go to college, even those who weren’t being well served by being there. Getting your students into “good” colleges and universities became the way to score high schools.
No one is well served by this state of affairs.
Ok, $2.2 million dollars. Now I’m wondering how much they “saved” cutting all those other programs, and how much more they’d earn renting facilities out for someone else. Hell, megachurches and other organizations rent arenas for $20,000 a day/night. Or, we could imagine an option like…Valparaiso Villas.
If only we’d go back to focusing on “real” literature and stop worrying about who is going to be doing english (ie, only elite white men should be doing it, because the poors are more concerned about making a living, and it’s understandable that they should not care about the humanities and instead should become investment bankers)…
But hey… cheer up, since the humanites are thriving over in communities colleges, being taught by underpaid, under appreciated adjuncts!!! /s
Or, we could imagine an option like…Valparaiso Villas.
