I’m teaching a course on radical politics this semester, and today we’re going to be discussing “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.” I am the specter haunting public education.
I’ll update later on with how well it’s received.
Update: it went well! They were critical–they’re critical of everything, which is part of the fun of the job–but also very sympathetic to the critique. They had a lot of excellent examples of, in particular, digital technology playing out the problems in capitalism that Engels identified.
It was a while back, but the basic gist of it was that I should be encouraging more friendly games (which, I did, we frequently played games that were more about cooperation than competition) and that someone could get hurt playing such a violent game
The kids wanted to play regular dodgeball and I gave them gaga-ball as a suitable replacement, I also didn’t make anyone play who didn’t want to or didn’t feel comfortable doing it
The worst that could have happened was someone tripping over the ball, which could happen in any game that’s played with a ball