RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-democrats-education-lunacies

On Meet the Press Daily last week, Chuck Todd featured a small item about the 23 Democrats not planning on running for re-reelection to congress next year. Todd guessed such a high number expressed a lack of confidence in next year’s midterms, and his guest, University of Virginia Center for Politics Director Larry Sabato, agreed. “This is just another indicator that Democrats will probably have a bad year in 2022,” said Sabato, adding, “They only have a majority of five. It’s pretty tough to see how they hold on.”

On the full Meet the Press Sunday, Todd in an ostensibly unrelated segment interviewed 1619 Project author and New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones about Republican efforts in some states to ban teaching of her work. He detoured to ask about the Virginia governor’s race, which seemingly was decided on the question, “How influential should parents be about curriculum?” Given that Democrats lost Virginia after candidate Terry McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach,” Todd asked her, “How do we do this?”

Hannah-Jones’s first answer was to chide Todd for not remembering that Virginia was lost not because of whatever unimportant thing he’d just said, but because of a “right-wing propaganda campaign that told white parents to fight against their children being indoctrinated.” This was standard pundit fare that for the millionth time showed a national media figure ignoring, say, the objections of Asian immigrant parents to Virginia policies, but whatever: her next response was more notable. “I don’t really understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught,” Hannah-Jones said. “I’m not a professional educator. I don’t have a degree in social studies or science.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/a_law_school_forces_maoist_reeducation_on_a_professor_who_ran_afoul_of_black_students.html

Mao’s deadly Cultural Revolution germinated in academia when students embraced it and began to terrorize their professors by accusing them of anti-Maoist wrongthink. The movement lasted for a decade, during which hundreds of thousands to millions of people died, while China’s irreplaceable cultural and historical heritage was destroyed. We are experiencing a Maoist revolution in America and, as in China, academia is ground zero for the great terror. The latest example is being visited upon Prof. Jason Kilborn, a law professor at U. Illinois-Chicago John Marshall Law School, for using the “n” word, literally, as in “n____.”

Legal Insurrection has the whole story and I urge you to visit it for the details but I’ll give the short version here. I will precede it, though, with a short anecdote from my own years a few decades ago at law school.

In my torts class, the professor called upon an extremely shy young man to discuss a medical malpractice case that involved a woman complaining about injury to her vagina and anus during childbirth. When the student summarized the case, every time he came to those anatomical words, he choked. I’ve never forgotten the teacher telling the student, “When you represent a client in court, you must be able to speak firmly and without shame about anything that advances your client’s interests. There is no place for shyness or sensitivity if you’re to be a good lawyer.”

How things have changed.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nikole-hannah-jones-parents-shouldnt-decide-whats-being-taught-in-schools/

Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator and curator of the New York Times’s 1619 Project, said she did not “understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught” in schools, during an appearance on Meet the Press on Sunday.

“I’m not a professional educator. I don’t have a degree in social studies or science. We send our children to school because we want them to be taught by people who have an expertise in the subject area. And that is not my job,” she continued.

Hannah-Jones, who has promoted the integration of the controversial 1619 Project into public-school curricula, also decried the “outsized voice” of white parents in education policy, though she didn’t offer any examples.

The comments echoed Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s infamous gaffe during a September gubernatorial debate in Virginia. McAuliffe had declared that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Discussing McAuliffe’s position on Sunday, Hannah-Jones lamented that he was “panned,” for it, but defended him, arguing “that’s just the fact.”

Ironically, Hannah-Jones also submitted that schools “should teach us how to think, not what to think,” a common refrain of McAuliffe’s opponent, Republican governor-elect Glenn Youngkin — who relentlessly attacked McAuliffe for the gaffe — on the campaign trail.

Hannah-Jones’s interlocutor, Meet the Press‘s Chuck Todd, concurred with her that “at the end of the day, this politicizing of this, it’s clearly been weaponized.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/24/the-fightback-against-wokeness-has-begun/

One of the most significant events of 2021 was the revolt of frustrated and angry parents in Virginia, against the teaching of so-called critical race theory in local schools.

The revolt precipitated the shock defeat of a one-time Virginia governor, Democrat Terry McAuliffe, at the hands of Republican Glenn Youngkin in November’s gubernatorial elections. This was not just a serious setback for the Biden presidency, in a state the Democrats won easily in 2020; it also demonstrated, perhaps for the first time in the current phase of the culture wars, that the social-engineering efforts of America’s cultural elites can be contained – and perhaps even defeated.

The parents’ revolt certainly laid bare the arrogance of the cultural elites. This was personified by McAuliffe himself, who responded to parents’ concerns about their children’s education with undisguised contempt. ‘I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach’, he declared during a televised debate.

McAuliffe wasn’t alone in this. As the parents’ revolt spread throughout the United States, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) wrote a letter to the president demanding that parents’ protests at school-board meetings be treated as ‘domestic terrorism’. US attorney general Merrick Garland seemingly agreed with the NSBA, and called on the FBI to act against those parents threatening ‘school administrators, board members, teachers and staff’.

Others attempted to dismiss this parents-led rejection of woke pedagogy as a Republican stunt. Former US president Barack Obama told Virginia voters to ignore what he called ‘trumped-up culture wars’, and dismissed parental concerns as ‘fake outrage’.

These attempts to denigrate or dismiss the protests ignore their main driver – parents’ concern about the academic and moral education of their children. Many adults may silently put up with manifestations of woke culture in everyday life, but they will react when they realise their child is being encouraged to adopt values antithetical to their own.

This is not confined to the US. Parents in Great Britain and other parts of the Western world are also confronted by similar attempts to inculcate a woke worldview in their children.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/12/22/no_critical_race_theory_in_schools_heres_the_abundant_evidence_saying_otherwise_808528.html

Mary Nicely, who is now second-in-command at the California Department of Education, went on her personal Facebook page this summer to denounce conservatives who oppose teaching critical race theory in schools as “yet another White right and education reformer distraction.”

Nicely also reposted a newspaper column in July defining critical race theory as a key used in law schools to expose racism in the legal system: “It is taught, if at all, in law school — not high school.”

Randi Weingarten, teachers union leader: Her denial about critical race theory in schools is at odds with the evidence.

Her claim echoed other education experts, like Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who tweeted: “We could explain until our last breath that CRT is not taught in K-12, but the actual definition of CRT doesn’t matter anymore in these debates.”

These denials, which have been amplified by many news organizations, are at odds with overwhelming evidence – documented by class lessons, school curricula, focus groups, teacher surveys and public statements by educators – that CRT is not only taught in class, but is also heavily promoted by the K-12 education establishment.

Some high schools are already teaching lessons and units on CRT, where students write papers demonstrating their facility with applying the theory, while other schools are introducing CRT concepts, such as systemic racism, white privilege, microaggressions, implicit bias and intersectionality.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/its-time-abolish-teachers-unions-larry-sand/

The above caveat about government unions – usually known by the kinder and gentler “public employee unions” – was not issued by the Koch Brothers or Donald Trump. The statement was made by none other than progressive icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Additionally, George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO for 24 years, once stated, “It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government.” Both men understood that the very nature of government makes it wrong for its leaders to enter into negotiations with any union. When government unions negotiate, they often sit across the table from people they helped put in office with generous campaign contributions. And when these unions go on strike, they walk out on the taxpayer.

In the private sector, if a business is forced to pay its workers more money, those costs are passed on to the consumer. If the cost of a product is raised too high, the purchaser can choose to go elsewhere. Most unions get this and realize they can’t bargain for excessive salaries and perks. But some unions push things too far and ultimately price their members out of a job. An example of the latter is the United Auto Workers, whose exorbitant demands drove car buyers to Japanese models and automakers to produce cars elsewhere, thus sending Detroit down the road to ruin.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-17/harvard-drops-standardized-test-mandate-for-several-more-years

Harvard College is dropping its requirement for SAT or ACT scores for future applicants as young as those currently in 8th grade.

“Students who do not submit standardized test scores will not be disadvantaged in their application process,” William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at the Ivy League school, said Thursday in an emailed statement. 

The pandemic has altered the way colleges evaluate applicants. Several others, including Columbia University, Amherst College and Cornell University, previously announced the tests would be optional for current high school sophomores, and the University of California system scrapped them entirely. 

The current admissions cycle is the second for which students have been able to apply to Harvard without needing standardized tests. The scores are one factor among many considered, Harvard said in the statement. The school, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, also announced that it had accepted 7.9% of the 9,406 students who applied under its non-binding early action program.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/12/27/against-world-history/

It’s good to study other cultures; that’s not what progressive educators want.

With culturally leftist school­ing only lately ranked as a top-tier political issue, conservatives have yet to take full measure of the woke education threat. Beyond better-known dangers such as critical race theory, the 1619 Project, action civics, and lessons in gender fluidity lies the “world-history movement” — educators bent on forming a generation of “global citizens” who reject both American patriotism and any sense of indebtedness to our Western heritage of liberty.

For decades, the world-history movement has quietly advanced in the slipstream of higher-profile changes in curriculum. The battle over National History Standards for the United States in the mid 1990s — a breakthrough mo­ment for the education Left — focused on the U.S.-history component of the proposal. Critics largely ignored the equally troubling, and thoroughly globalist, National Standards for World History. The 2014–15 battle over the College Board’s revisionist AP U.S. History and AP European History frameworks did much to highlight their globalist underpinnings. Yet widespread adoption of the still more radical AP World History course went largely unnoticed.

This fall, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem rejected draft state-history and civics standards that mandated political protests (“action civics”), short-shrifted high-school U.S. history, downplayed America’s British heritage, and left the role of religion in American history largely unacknowledged. Yet no one even noticed that the draft standards’ adoption of the College Board’s AP World History approach had ef­fectively eliminated the study of West­ern civilization from South Dakota’s schools.