By Selwyn Duke
For quite some years now, the term “narrative” has been common in political circles. It generally has a negative connotation as it’s used to reference a storyline — an often largely fictional one — advanced by some ideologically driven entity for political gain.
This is why I saw a red flag Friday when, while writing an article on how leftist indoctrination permeates even conservative states’ schools, I read a line that what a common modern pedagogy dictates is necessary to be a “culturally responsive educator” (read: an educator responsible for cultural revolution). Two prerequisites for it, related the Federalist, are “the rejection of colorblindness and replacing instruction about facts with narrative stories.”
Now, the narrative-story technique can be very powerful and is often used in journalism. For example, a writer may open a piece with a tale about some person whose experiences relate to the article’s topic. A variation on this is to detail and portray sympathetically an individual whose plight, or what is characterized as such, serves as an anecdote in support of a policy the author is advocating, either explicitly or implicitly.
