RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/02/math_the_latest_battleground_in_the_war_against_truth.html

In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, set in the superstate of Oceania, the government propagates the absurd equation 2 + 2 = 5. Through steady indoctrination, and under the ever-watchful Thought Police, the citizens accept it as an unquestionable truth. The equation symbolizes the extinction of free thought in repressive totalitarian societies: facts, truths and objective reality are subordinated to political will and twisted to serve the authoritarian goals of the Party and its leader, Big Brother.

Something similar is happening in many American schools. An eerie Orwellian shadow is being cast over math instruction. The focus is insidiously shifting from arithmetic, geometry, and algebra to critical race theory, ethnic studies, and intersectionality. Ridiculous as it may sound, an objective field of knowledge is being thrust into the realm of social experimentation. Students are being taught not how to think but what to think. Instead of developing critical thinking skills, today’s math classes stipulate that students hold particular views about the world and instruct them on how they must extinguish what is posited as “wrongthink.”

Across America, math teaching practices that were considered essential are suddenly being condemned as racist, requiring students to display the steps in solving a problem is now deemed white supremacist; teachers’ corrections, and even the concept of a correct answer, are considered suspect or undesirable; polite interaction, raising hands before commenting or asking questions, and maintaining order in the classroom are viewed as reinforcing paternalism and condemned as “power hoarding.”

This idiocy has swept, among others, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the fruit of the worst practices of monopolistic capitalism but now quick to align itself with left-liberal, pseudo-egalitarian causes. The foundation is providing more than $140 million to ‘A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction,’ an organization of 25 educational institutions that contend that math is synonymous with white supremacy and upholds “capitalist, imperialistic and racist” views. Pathway offers a five-part toolkit and videoconferences to make educators “reflect on their own biases” and commit to advance math “equity” by understanding that students of color use math differently than do white students.

https://www.city-journal.org/lockdowns-impact-on-mental-and-physical-health

At the start of the pandemic last year, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti chose “safer at home” as the motto for his lockdown policies. If the past year has shown us anything, it’s how misguided that notion is. Lockdowns have created not just economic devastation for America’s small businesses, restaurants, museums, and zoos. They have also taken a significant toll on the mental and physical health of everyone from small children to the elderly (while doing little to contain the virus itself). To get a sense of this, compare two states that took opposite approaches: New York and Florida.

Despite the hysteria about how bad things were in Florida and the Biden administration’s recent threat to restrict travel to the state, statistics suggest that you’re better off in the Sunshine State. Currently, Florida has 224 people per 1 million in hospitals for Covid-19; New York State has 338 per million, or 50 percent more. In New York, blacks are 2.3 times more likely than whites to die of Covid; in Florida, blacks are equally as likely as whites to die. Governor Andrew Cuomo’s disastrous policies have resulted in much higher mortality rates in New York’s nursing homes than in Florida’s.

The lockdowns themselves have also been deeply destructive. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Florida saw a 4.6 percent drop in employment from December 2019 to December 2020. New York’s drop was more than twice that, at 10.4 percent. To judge by recent news coverage of businesses fleeing New York for Florida, it’s possible that a number of those jobs simply went from one state to the other.

The pandemic’s toll on physical and mental health has also been severe, no doubt related to these economic losses but also caused by the severe isolation people experience under lockdown. At the beginning of the pandemic, Florida entered a brief lockdown phase in the same way that New York did. As a result, both states saw a severe decline in the number of cases reported to state child-abuse hotlines.