RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/09/american_education_is_rotten_from_top_to_bottom.html

In reading the “overview” of Dr. Jill Biden’s 2006 doctoral dissertation from the University of Delaware, I am reminded just how rotten, from top to bottom, are America’s schools of graduate education.  That a doctor of anything could write a sentence like the one that follows speaks to the historic worthlessness of most graduate programs in education:

Three quarters of the class will be Caucasian; one quarter of the class will be African American; one seat will hold a Latino; and the remaining seats will be filled with students of Asian descent or non-resident aliens.

An advisory committee had to approve this mumbo-jumbo. Apparently, none of the committee members noticed that when you add three fourths to one fourth, you’ve pretty much exhausted all the “fourths” available — all the seats as well.  Although the temptation is to write Dr. Jill’s dissertation off to the power of political pull, her dissertation, from my experience, represents something of a norm in the illiteracy, innumeracy, and race obsession of grad-level education.

My oldest brother, an exceptional high school principal, refused to pursue a doctorate in education — the key to becoming a school superintendent — because he thought the courses he took to get his Master’s a waste of everyone’s time.  My middle brother became a very good high school math teacher without getting any education degrees.  He simply retooled through a special quickie program after retiring as an engineer from Exxon.

On the other hand, an in-law, since deceased, did go on to get his Ed.D.  As a “doctor,” he quickly climbed the ranks and became a school superintendent.  Oh, one caveat: I took his Graduate Record Exams for him.  He could not have passed on his own.  My bad.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/the-intellectual-conformity-of-international-relations-faculty/

A dearth of conservative professors deprives students of crucial perspectives.

Americans may be repulsed by the fiasco in Afghanistan — a recent poll suggests only 25 percent approve of President Biden’s handling of the situation — but there is one constituency that fully supports his decision: the ivory tower. International-relations professors have been near-unanimous in their calls for American retreat from Afghanistan (and elsewhere.) When surveyed, fewer than 3 percent believed the war in Afghanistan is a top-three foreign-policy issue for the United States. In a May poll, nearly three quarters of international-relations faculty endorsed President Biden’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Similarly, 85 percent of professors approved of Biden’s handling of national security and 81 percent approved his approach to international human-rights issues. When the Trump administration temporarily called off peace talks with the Taliban in January 2020, a stunning majority of academics said the decision would have a negative effect on U.S. credibility with our allies, whereas today many argue the debacle will likely not damage U.S. credibility elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the academic debate about Afghanistan is the norm, not the exception. As survey after survey demonstrates, university faculty — particularly international-relations faculty — harbor worldviews that are wildly out of step with the American people and leaders of both political parties. Their worldview informs the courses they teach and the syllabi they assign. Absent greater exposure to more sensible and realistic points of view, we risk producing a generation that is out of touch and out of depth with the challenges at hand. From a totalitarian and expansionist Chinese Communist Party to a revisionist Russia to a murderously ideological Iran and North Korea, challenges to American leadership cannot be overstated. Given the generational nature of these challenges, one would think that our faculty’s priority would be to educate college students on these threats and equip them with the skills to emerge victorious, however defined.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/proof_that_modern_academic_leftism_is_insanely_stupid.html

I quickly realized as I shepherded my children through public school and college that leftists in education are incredibly uninformed to the point of abject stupidity. My kids became used to the fact that I would become almost incoherent with rage when I read through illiterate and factually inaccurate lessons or assignments from their teachers. However, I have never come across anyone as spectacularly uninformed as Dr. Linda ManyGuns who works at Mount Royal University, in Alberta, Canada. Dr. ManyGuns has declared war on oppressive capital letters.

What you must appreciate before getting into Dr. ManyGuns’ truly astonishing dive into stupidity is that she really is a faculty member at Mount Royal University, in Calgary, a public university with a $99 million (Canadian) endowment and over 14,000 students. Just this April, Mount Royal University proudly announced that she was its new “associate vice-president of indigenization and decolonization,” responsible for “providing vision, strategy, leadership and direction to advance indigenization and decolonization commitments.”

Dr. ManyGuns is a woman with a long, successful academic career as both a student and educator. In addition to the obvious qualification of being a “Blackfoot woman” and an elder for “the Buffalo Women’s Society and part of the Beaver Bundle Society,”

ManyGuns has a Bachelor of Arts from St. Thomas University, a Master’s from Carleton University, a law degree from University of Ottawa and a doctorate from Trent University. Her academic papers and projects are always on Indigenous subjects and informed by traditional knowledge.

For 11 years, ManyGuns was a professor in the University of Lethbridge’s Department of Indigenous Studies. She understands the importance of Indigenous students succeeding in their education and while serving as chair, updated the 45-year-old curriculum. Previously, as a waitress, high steel construction worker and chef, ManyGuns experienced discrimination and lateral violence but refuses to let it define her.

https://capx.co/why-we-are-reclaiming-history-from-the-distortions-of-critical-race-theory/

Writing history is about critical assessment, not the imposition of a political agenda
Critical Race Theory is a dangerously simplistic way of explaining both the past and the present 
CRT is lightweight, imprecise and totally unconcerned with an authoritative account of the past

In 1984 George Orwell wrote, ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’  The idea of controlling the past can be traced back long before the emergence of Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany. It is the backdrop to boastful inscriptions on the walls of ancient Egyptian temples at Luxor.

Today this idea has taken a new form. A way of reading the past is being imposed in universities, schools and wider society that is justified not by its historical accuracy but by its political message. The adherents of so-called Critical Race Theory (CRT) have no sense that the task of the historian is to expound the evidence, rather than to indulge in moralising jargon. They have no sense that it is important to engage in argument, rather than to impose one’s views. They have no sense that the dogma they are spreading is not taken seriously by very many historians. Or rather, it does need to be taken seriously by its opponents, for it is a dangerously simplistic way of explaining both the past and the present.

History Reclaimed is a new website that challenges the increasingly dominant dogma of the Theorists, and demands proper debate about the distorted view of history that lies at the heart of the new thinking. History Reclaimed supports the art of writing history as it has been written ever since the time of Herodotus in ancient Greece: collecting the evidence and assessing it before spinning any general theories about the nature of human development.

Interestingly, Karl Marx understood perfectly well the need to accumulate large amounts of data before moulding the arguments of Das Kapital. The days he spent in the imposing Reading Room of the British Museum were given over to serious study, as even those of us who reject his conclusions have to concede. By comparison, CRT is lightweight, imprecise in its use of terms such as ‘capitalism’, ‘imperialism’ and ‘colonialism’, and much more concerned with righting supposed wrongs in the past than in writing authoritatively about the experience of our ancestors.

At the core of the ideas that we are challenging is the notion that history has been moulded by the racism of white people towards black people. Racism is seen as an invention of white people in western Europe who sought to create worldwide empires through the brutal exploitation of the labour of black Africans. These Africans were transported in vast numbers across the Atlantic from the early sixteenth century right up to the nineteenth century, and no one can deny that their treatment was at best callous and at worst murderous. It is possible that as many as 12.5 million slaves were imported to the Americas, the largest number towards the sugar plantations of Brazil, others towards similar plantations producing sugar, cotton and tobacco in the Caribbean islands and in what became the United States.

In this interpretation, the oppression of African slaves was not merely based on pseudo-scientific ideas that different races possess different levels of intelligence. It is also argued that the Industrial Revolution that took off in 18th-century Britain was funded by the profits of the sugar industry, which depended on slave labour. The fact that there were more significant sources of capital in the agricultural transformations taking place in Britain is conveniently ignored. So too is the fact that the main source of slaves was African kingdoms that willingly sold their war captives.

https://www.city-journal.org/philly-suburbs-schools-adopt-critical-race-theory

Lower Merion Township’s beauty and wealth belie its proximity to the impoverished neighborhoods of West Philadelphia, which borders the township just east on Route 30. Being the first suburb on the Main Line, Lower Merion is home to many of the region’s wealthy residents. With a median income of nearly $140,000 per year has come an extraordinarily well-funded, high-achieving public school district.

The 83-percent-white township is also unabashedly progressive. The town has about 2.8 times as many registered Democrats as Republicans. The school board is run exclusively by Democrats. Local church lawns are filled with colorful T-shirts emblazoned with the names of black people killed by police. And shoppers at Suburban Square, a high-end local shopping center, are enveloped in the pride flags that decorate shops and sidewalks every few steps in the month of June.

But despite the town’s progressive vibe, a battle over local schools’ embrace of critical pedagogy is burgeoning. To try and understand this cultural conflict in a place where “wokeness” is part of the atmosphere, I spoke with public and private school parents and a person with experience on the school board, and I attended a meeting of local residents and Republican Party officials. All involved requested anonymity.

When local Republicans hosted a meeting in late June at a home not far from Lower Merion High School, about two dozen people stood in the living room, Rolls-Royces and Honda Civics alike parked along the ornate stone curb. Following a brief overview of local budget issues and political polling came the main issue of the evening: the school district’s left turn. Such terms as “race essentialism” and “transgenderism” were tossed around. Still, agreement on the origins and shape of the ideology that these people found themselves contending with remained elusive.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/soviet-jewish-schools-yeshiva-yevsektzia-schneersohn-yaffed-antisemitism-first-amendment-11630613080?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Mr. Margolin is a senior editor at Chabad.org.

After the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks launched a harsh war on religious education throughout the Soviet Union, with devastating consequences for Judaism. To avoid accusations of anti-Semitism, Soviet attacks on traditional Jewish schools, known as cheders or yeshivas, were led by the Yevsektzia, the militant Jewish sections of the Communist Party, whose members were often more ideologically zealous than their gentile counterparts. In an effort to win Jewish hearts and minds, in January 1921 the Yevsektzia organized a particularly grotesque episode called the Trial of the Cheder.

Held in Vitebsk, the six-day show trial was similar to the medieval disputations with which Jews had contended for centuries. “Experts” on education and hygiene testified that the cheder was backward and dirty. The spectacle quickly devolved into a blatant attack on Judaism.

Despite a valiant defense by Vitebsk’s Jewish community, the verdict was a foregone conclusion. Every cheder in Vitebsk was ordered to close. In the early 1920s, more than 1,000 cheders were closed in the U.S.S.R.

My grandfather’s Jewish education was terminated at a second-grade level by this crackdown. Born in Ukraine in 1920, my great-grandparents wanted him to receive authentic Jewish schooling. Even as communism destroyed their world, they persisted and sent their young son to a cheder.

“I barely got past alef beis”—the Hebrew alphabet—“and it was closed,” my grandfather told me shortly before his death last spring at 100. “Some teachers were arrested or shot, others scared away. Before long it was all gone.”

https://quillette.com/2021/07/12/almost-four-decades-after-its-birth-the-diversity-industry-thrives-on-its-own-failures/

JULY 2021

Campus diversity advocates have pulled off their greatest coup to date: They have declared “diversity” to be a freestanding academic discipline, thus injecting their bureaucracy-heavy apparatus into the very heart of the academic enterprise. As of this month, Bentley University, a business-oriented liberal arts school in Waltham, Mass., will offer a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Sciences degree in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). By all accounts, this is the first undergraduate major dedicated to churning out more diversity bureaucrats and consultants. It will not be the last.

The BA track in DEI studies will prepare students for non-profit and community-based work by focusing on “theoretical approaches to social justice,” according to Bentley. The “sciences” track emphasizes the “importance of DEI in organizational strategy,” for students heading into the private sector.

Designing the new major was relatively easy, and would be easily replicable at other schools, its architects said. Bentley created just one new “foundational” course, while repackaging Bentley’s existing social justice-themed offerings under the DEI banner. “You may be surprised to find that your campus is already well on its way to forming a DEI major,” said sociologist Gary David. That is an understatement. Bentley is relatively conservative compared to other liberal arts colleges, yet was already awash in courses such as “Race and Racism in U.S. History” and “Gender and the Law.”

Bentley offers pragmatic justifications for this new academic field. The diversity-consulting business is white hot, having been turbocharged by the death of George Floyd. Any large corporation that had not yet hired an in-house diversity manager rushed to correct that omission in 2020. Other firms, already supplied with internal inclusion specialists, brought in outside diversity outfits to double down on their efforts to root out their own institutional racism.

“Diversity and inclusion roles have increased 71% globally over the last five years, with median salaries ranging from $84,000 to $126,000,” notes a Bentley communications staffer. “The racial justice movement has further accelerated demand, and industry experts predict continued exponential growth well into the future.” And Bentley’s newly minted diversity graduates will be well-positioned to meet what the school describes as “this burgeoning business need.”

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2021/08/31/some_american_students_can_only_spell_f-a-i-l-u-r-e_791974.html

The U.S. Department of State is giving $275,000 in grants to organizations in Bolivia and Guatemala to teach people English.

The United States has a vested interest in having more people around the world speak English and the $100,000 for Bolivia and $175,000 for Guatemala isn’t exorbitant. However, many students in America can’t pass remedial reading tests.

The national average for fourth graders in public schools in 2019 is having 65% of students reading at or above basic levels and 34% at or above proficient.

Not exactly a high bar, students in 28 states test above the national average.

That includes in New York, Wisconsin, and Rhode Island, where 66% of students read at or above basic levels and in Kentucky, Maine, North Carolina and Indiana, where 67% of students read at or above basic levels.

The lowest levels of basic reading skills are seen in Alaska and New Mexico (53%), Louisiana (55%), Washington D.C. (57%), Alabama (58%), West Virginia (60%), and Texas, South Carolina, and Arizona (61%).

No state tops 45% of fourth graders reading at or above proficient.

Alaska, New Mexico, Louisiana and Alabama all have below 30% of their fourth graders reading at proficient levels.

Eighth graders fared better, with the national average being 72% of eight-grade students reading at or above basic levels. The national average for proficient dropped to 32%.

While 32 states have eight-grade students reading above the national “basic” average, only one state, Massachusetts, enters the 80 range (81%). Again, no states exceed 45% of students reading at proficient levels.

It should be an embarrassment that American children are struggling in reading.