RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/leftist-bureaucrats-and-foundations-are-displacing-republican-government/

Last week I laid out the nightmarish plan by the Illinois State Board of Education to turn the state’s schools into leftist indoctrination camps. Never in two decades of writing on education have I seen a more extreme or pernicious proposal than the “Illinois Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards.” The only good thing to be said about this episode is that it shows us what to beware of. The Illinois-teaching-standards outrage is the endgame of the coming push for expanded “civic education” at the state and federal levels. More than that, the ultra-woke Illinois teaching standards, and the bogus Illinois “civics” law they build upon, are case studies in the hijacking of representative government by leftist bureaucrats and foundations.

Typically, when we think about the out-of-control growth of the administrative state, we mean the federal bureaucracy. Well, the “Illinois Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards” are the product of an out-of-control state-level bureaucracy. Relatedly, the misnamed Illinois “civics” law (it should have been called the “mandatory Alinskyite-activism law”) effectively ceded control of the state’s “civics” education to a batch of woke Chicago foundations.

In 2018, I wrote here about an important study by Emmett McGroarty, Jane Robbins, and Erin Tuttle, Deconstructing the Administrative State: The Fight for Liberty. That book went further than most critiques of the administrative state, because it showed how the growth of federal bureaucracy had subverted independent government by the states. The “Illinois Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards” take us to new level, however. They show that even states have begun to cede their legislative authority to leftist state-level bureaucrats eager to usurp the lawmaking power.

https://freebeacon.com/campus/parents-at-elite-nyc-school-push-back-against-facult

Parents whose children attend an elite, private New York City prep school are pushing back against the faculty’s litany of antiracist demands, which would force students to learn critical race theory.

In an open letter to the Dalton School community, a group of parents expressed “loving concern” over the school’s “abandonment” of liberal-arts education in favor of an “anti-racist curriculum.” They asked Dalton to suspend newly developed lessons rooted in critical race theory, return to former curriculum standards, and hire an independent ombudsman to conduct a survey among students, parents, and alumni about the school’s antiracist measures.

“Love of learning and teaching is now being abandoned in favor of an ‘anti-racist curriculum,'” the parents wrote. “Every class this year has had an obsessive focus on race and identity, ‘racist cop’ reenactments in science, ‘de-centering whiteness’ in art class, learning about white supremacy and sexuality in health class. Wildly age-inappropriate, many of these classes feel more akin to a Zoom corporate sensitivity training than to Dalton’s intellectually engaging curriculum.”

Months of racial unrest sparked last year by Black Lives Matter led dozens of schools, particularly expensive, private institutions, to weave lessons in critical race theory—the notion that laws and society in the United States are inherently racist—into school curricula.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/28/leftists-want-the-next-ted-cruz-or-josh-hawley-exiled-from-name-brand-universities/

The American gentry seeks to squash conservatism, the free speech ethos of the university system, and intellectual diversity in our country.

An article titled “Instructing Insurrections: How UChicago Can Avoid Creating the Next Ted Cruz” was published on Sunday in “The Chicago Maroon,” a nearly 130-year-old left-wing student newspaper at the University of Chicago.

Replete with obnoxious Ivy League elitism, the article reads like an instruction guide on how to undermine the university’s renowned “Chicago Principles,” which guarantee free speech and open discourse on campus, and how to gaslight conservative students in the classroom. It is also a direct attack on the “Chicago Thinker,” an opposing conservative student newspaper I co-founded this summer, which is the solo voice on campus deviating from its woke orthodoxy.

“We’ve seen the consequences of elevating hateful rhetoric—we have seen it now in the highest echelons of power,” writes student author Kelly Hui. “It begins in our classrooms,” where the Ivy-educated Cruzes and Josh Hawleys “are given the tools they need to acquire and keep power, even if it means promoting fascism and white nationalism.”

“The next Ted Cruz could be walking through the quad right now,” warns Hui. “The future Josh Hawley might be playing devil’s advocate in your [sociology] class. We can prevent such radicalization by reexamining the Chicago principles and prioritizing safety over absolute free speech.”