RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/math-can-cause-collateral-damage-to-society-professor/Some things in life are objective and rational, and that’s perfectly okay.

According to a new textbook written by a professor at the University of Exeter, learning mathematics can cause “collateral damage” to society because it “provides a training in ethics-free thought.”

“Reasoning without meanings provides a training in ethics-free thought,” Paul Ernest writes in “The Ethics of Mathematics: Is Mathematics Harmful?” — a chapter of his book The Philosophy of Mathematics Education Today.

In an abstract for the book, Ernest claims that although he does “acknowledge that mathematics is a widespread force for good,” “there is significant collateral damage caused by learning mathematics.”

According to Ernest, this “collateral damage” happens in three ways. First, he argues, the styles of thinking involved with mathematics are “detached” and “calculated” ones, which value “rules, abstraction, objectification, impersonality, unfeelingness, dispassionate reason, and analysis” — which he claims “can be damaging when applied beyond mathematics to social and human issues.”

The second problem, he explains, is that “the applications of mathematics in society can be deleterious to our humanity unless very carefully monitored and checked.”

“Money and thus mathematics is the tool for the distribution of wealth,” he writes. “It can therefore be argued that as the key underpinning conceptual tool mathematics is implicated in the global disparities in wealth.”

Finally, Ernest claims, “the personal impact of learning mathematics on learners’ thinking and life chances can be negative for a minority of less successful students, as well as potentially harmful for successful students.” Ernest continues to explain that math is often viewed as “masculine,” and that that can essentially make it difficult for women to deal with learning it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/humanities-education-harmed-by-faculty/

Fewer and fewer students choose to study the humanities these days and the main reason is that the field has been overrun by “progressive” notions. Those notions, of course, were introduced and spread by the faculty, eager to create lots of dedicated revolutionaries.

In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Mark Bauerlein examines the sad illness afflicting the humanities. Specifically, he looks at a recent statement put out jointly by the Association of American University Professors and the American Association of Colleges and Universities. “The incapacity of the experts and professionals who wrote the statement to understand why their own diminishment has happened is abundantly in evidence,” he writes.

The learned folks who wrote the statement are utterly blind to their own role in the decline of this once-grand field of study.

This paragraph of Bauerlein’s nails the problem exactly:

Today’s liberal arts professors have a different relationship to their subjects. Joy, wonder, awe, and inspiration are missing. The professors aren’t merely uncomfortable with Paradise Lost and Parsifal. They vigorously point out the sexism and racism of those works. But they even denounce earlier practitioners in their own fields, too, the New Critics, for instance, for their backward notions. We were told that opening the canon to women and persons of color was a positive and happy development, but that was only part of the project. The professors also had to denigrate the tradition, a turn proven by the dismissive label ‘Dead White Males.’ They got rid of the honorific term civilization and replaced it with culture, and then with cultures, which, they believed, eliminates the implication of the old term that some societies are civilized and others are savage.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/alumni-from-elite-new-york-city-high-schools-unite-to-fight-admissions-changes-1529522342?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=1&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

As soon as Albany posted provisions that would eliminate the admissions test for eight specialized public high schools in New York City at about 10 p.m. one recent Friday, heads of the alumni associations of Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science began trading late-night emails and phone calls.

They sprung into action to keep the test. They released a joint opposition memo. They dispatched a lobbyist to plead their case with state lawmakers. Brooklyn Tech alumni have sent legislators thousands of emails to argue for the test, says Larry Cary, a labor lawyer and head of the Brooklyn Tech Alumni Foundation.

Their argument: The sought-after schools should be far more diverse but the proposed changes would introduce subjective measures and could admit students who aren’t prepared for the schools’ academic rigor.

Mayor Bill de Blasio is championing the bill, saying that using only one exam to select students has been an unjust barrier to talented black and Latino teenagers. The Democratic mayor, whose son graduated from Brooklyn Tech, wants to admit applicants based on a mix of course grades and state exam scores, so that the top 7% of eighth-graders from each middle school citywide would get offers. In time, by Mr. de Blasio’s estimate, about 45% of offers to these eight schools would go to black and Latino students, up from 9% now.

The measure is expected to be debated in the winter legislative session that usually starts in January. The alumni groups say they will devise a battle plan during the summer.

“We want to make sure we have a seat at the table to craft a viable solution that preserves the academic integrity of specialized schools,” said Christina Bater, president of the Bronx High School of Science Alumni Foundation.

Advocating to keep the test has brought together alumni associations from three high schools that have long been rivals, competing for who had the most chess trophies, robotics triumphs and science awards (Bronx Science has eight Nobel Prizes, Stuyvesant has four and Brooklyn Tech has two.)