Claims that teaching Latin is racist make my mind boggle, says French minister leading ‘war on woke’

38 comments
  1. I hate it when easy bait is paywalled. Now I don’t know if they’re misinterpreting “we want to read other books too” as racism or if they found a crazy person and assumed that is what “woke” is.

  2. It’s racist unless you teach that it was invented behind-the-scenes by American Black and Indigenous Women of Colour, and that white Europeans merely stole the glory.

  3. At this point, word “racism” rapidly loses its meaning. Any time someone disagrees on any subject, racism can be invoked. Do not agree with certain religious practices? Racist. Do not like how certain language sounds? Also racist. You refuse to date someone, because of their personality or any other reason? If they happen to have skin tone different from yours, it is racist too. Refuse to read a book or watch a film because you think it will be boring, but writer happens to have other skin tone or ethnicity than you, even if you are not aware about author looks and background whatsoever? Someone out in the internet will call you racist for sure. And after that, real crimes, that have clear racist intents are disregarded, because of boys who cry wolf all the time.

  4. These politicians need a simple lesson. Stop feeding the trolls. If a small group of people make a dumb remark just ignore it, stop making stupid responses. Just gives more attention and drags it

  5. So the problem isn’t really teaching Latin and Greek but having them as requirement to begin with?

    *”Ancient languages have come under fire of late in the US, where Princeton University caused a stir in the summer by announcing that it was removing Greek and Latin requirements for classics majors to combat what it saw as discrimination.”*

    If they’re all still gonna study the old stuff while at university removing the pre-requisite seems sensible…

  6. most of those stories on woke culture are just lazy journalism in my opinion to get some easy clikcks. it’s probarbly just based on some random people on twitter

  7. This minister is in charge of Education. If he really wanted to do something about Latin, he could. But he doesn’t. It is just about appealing to far-right voters for the next presidential election.

    In fact, in France, we don’t have enough Latin teachers.

    A French youtube made a very nice video about it (in french of course): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKEB9xvuh0E

  8. Hello everyone, I’m French. This is Jean-Michel Blanquer, our Education minister. Don’t worry, he just loves having the media’s attention. I think he has something like 2% of approval rate with teachers.

  9. Step 1: Call something “woke”

    Step 2: Don’t elaborate

    Step 3: wait for all the fools to come defend you because they read “woke” and don’t bother reading reality (which shows the claim is bullshit or so incredibly insignificant)

    Step 4: Gain popularity

    Edit: Here I’ll give it a try, Sesame Street is woke, go talk shit about Elmo….. Oh [for fuck sake, it’s already been done. Literally can’t parody reality cause it’s already a joke](http://www.christianitydaily.com/articles/12329/20210622/sesame-street-goes-woke-introduces-same-sex-couple-for-family-day-episode.htm)

  10. Regardless, the latest brilliant idea of our minister of education consists in basically weaponizing the revival of teaching of Latin and Greek as an ‘antidote’ to ‘le wokisme’, which is twisted af.

  11. J-M. Blanquet is a joke. These last months he is going full populism against what he called “wokism”, every issue in France is caused by this ideology according to him

  12. For context, and as someone who did classics, there is a definite woke mentality in many scholars and departments. They spent a lot of their time in essence condemning the Ancient World ( mostly Greece and Rome) for various -Ists/Isms and blaming this for casting the Other (borrowing from thinkers like Edward Siad) as the oppressed class. A good introduction to how the Classics has transformed from being a study of the past (the origins of rational thought, European law, democracy) into being apologitics is by the noted Historian Victor Davis Hanson, “Who killed Homer”.

  13. Keep the insane toxic American identity politics out of Europe. Studying the classics and Latin has nothing to do with being white. It has everything to do with culture, which should be promoted.

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