Dog Latin

Marxism, and to a lesser extent Feminist theory, doesn’t fly too well with most people in the United States in my experience. Decades of cold war and government propaganda have made it difficult to separate Marxism the theory from Marxist or communist forms of political dictatorship. What results from this unstable cocktail of half-knowledge and staid political stance? Well, I can at least say that I’m just the slightest bit scared to mention Marx in the classroom when it doesn’t pertain to a historical or dead vision of Marxist thought. Even feminism, with its primary message of gender equality, goes against the grain of organizations such as Focus On the Family, or the Southern Baptist Convention, two groups who hold no small amount of sway in my Marietta, GA bible belt environment. Now I’m not one to back from a challenge or hold off on my beliefs, but as teachers we are held to the fact that we are teaching people’s children and that many of these people aren’t going to be too hot about their child coming home and proclaiming that Hamlet is a bourgeois mouthpiece. Call me crazy, but I’d be the slightest bit relieved to see something about the ethics and law behind teaching Marxism in these books on Marxist theory in the classroom. Before any discussion of Marxism begins in the classroom, don’t we need to come to terms with its implications and divorce it from its status in our culture as an enemy? More importantly, how do we even begin to do that?