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Are Your Teachers Telling You the Truth?
Is America a racist country?
Is the earth heading for climate catastrophe?
Should we Discriminate in Favor of Blacks and Against Whites?
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/how-social-justice-education-coddles-young-minds/
Increasingly popular curricula don’t just miseducate our kids. They prepare them poorly for adulthood.
A parent, Ndona Muboyayi, recently told Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic the following story about her son:
“My son has wanted to be a lawyer since he was 11. Then one day he came home and told me, ‘But Mommy, there are these systems put in place that prevent Black people from accomplishing anything.’ That’s what they’re teaching Black kids: that all of this time for the past 400 years, this is what [white people have] done to you and your people. The narrative is, ‘You can’t get ahead.’”
Such stories are becoming more prevalent today, with the rise of what are often referred to as “social-justice educators” in the classroom. These teachers are typically concerned with equity in education — how to reckon with the unequal distribution of resources and services to achieve equal educational outcomes across students. Many believe that education is intersectional: “We cannot talk about schools, without addressing race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, and politics, because education is a political act,” wrote Crystal Belle, a teacher-education director at Rutgers University–Newark. Their goal, as Belle put it, is to use “curriculum as a primary mechanism for making the world a more equitable place.”
This goal sounds nice. But too often in practice the perspectives of these teachers regarding race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, and politics take precedence in teaching and learning over eliciting and developing the worldviews of their students. Such teachers shield students from practices, ideas, or words that they perceive as harmful, and punish students who inflict harm.
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, in their article and subsequent book The Coddling of the American Mind, call this “vindictive protectiveness.” According to Lukianoff and Haidt, vindictive protectiveness creates “a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.”
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/05/02/an_open_letter_to_swarthmore_president_valerie_smith_145684.html
Dear President Smith,
Thank you for your “Reflections on Yesterday’s Verdict,” which you sent to Swarthmore students, alumni, faculty, and staff on April 21 and posted on the college’s website. Prompted by the announcement that Derek Chauvin had been found guilty of murdering George Floyd, you offered brief thoughts on the connection between liberal education and racial justice, social movements, and political change. As a Swarthmore graduate grateful for the long-ago introduction that the college provided me to liberal education, and as an observer of American politics troubled by the nation’s widening schisms, I read your message with great interest.
In the spirit of my Swarthmore studies, your reflections have left me with a number of questions. They revolve around the relation between politics and liberal education.
Your message asserts that “[a]lthough the verdict can never truly bring justice for Mr. Floyd and his family, it signals the impact of a powerful social movement.” You summon us to join in that social movement, stating, “We must dedicate ourselves anew to the struggle for lasting, meaningful change” in America to bring about “a more just, equitable, and safe society.”
You envisage a distinctive role for colleges and universities. “As an institution of higher learning, Swarthmore College is committed to contributing to that change — by continuing to foster an environment in which students can engage in deep, thoughtful, and frank conversations about the challenges facing our society,” you write. “This shared and vital work can and will continue to ensure we provide a transformative liberal arts education grounded in fearless intellectual inquiry.”
https://www.city-journal.org/elementary-schools-go-woke
Many American parents may assume that culture-war battles over critical race theory and “wokeness” are fought on legitimate terrain, involving such matters as how high school students can best grapple with our nation’s complex past. Perhaps they think that the suddenly ubiquitous topics of gender identity and preferred pronouns rankle only those parents who are old-fashioned in their thinking. If only. America’s youngest students are being bombarded with classroom activism and indoctrination that is inappropriate not only developmentally but for public school systems in general.
The contemporary obsession with identity has made its way into elementary school policy, curricula, and standards approved by state boards. While we continue to see poor reading and math scores, schools spend money and time confusing and shaming other people’s children. Many educators and elected leaders have good intentions; they believe deeply that they are part of a necessary and long-overdue movement to teach racial literacy, social justice, equity, and antiracism. But as virtuous as these terms may sound on their face, they mean something else in far too many classrooms. American schools are teaching young children race essentialism: reducing them to identity groups, putting them in boxes labeled “oppressor” and “oppressed,” and often inflicting emotional and psychological harm.
If this sounds extreme, that’s because it is. It is not happening everywhere—but it is happening enough to have juiced a multibillion-dollar, nationwide industry. Sometimes the source is a rogue teacher whom the principal and superintendent admit they are trying to rein in; but increasingly, it is simply public officials implementing approved policies.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/04/29/founder-of-nyts-discredited-1619-project-honored-with-prestigious-unc-job-n1443684
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the founder of The New York Times‘s discredited “1619 Project,” will join the faculty at the University of North Carolina (UNC), where she earned her master’s degree.
“This is the story of a leader returning to a place that transformed her life and career trajectory,” Susan King, dean of UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism, said in a statement on Hannah-Jones’ new gig. “Giving back is part of Nikole’s DNA, and now one of the most respected investigative journalists in America will be working with our students on projects that will move their careers forward and ignite critically important conversations.”
Hannah-Jones will join UNC Hussman as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism. Knight Chair professorships, endowed by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, bring top professionals to classrooms to teach and mentor students.
“The Knight Chairs are highly-respected news leaders who bring insights about journalism and support elevating it in the academy. Their work contributes to keeping communities informed and democracy robust,” Karen Rundlet, journalism director at the Knight Foundation, said in the statement. “Nikole Hannah-Jones is an outstanding addition to this group of leaders.”
Yet Nikole Hannah-Jones’s brainchild has an ugly track record. “The 1619 Project” tried to flip American history on its head by arguing that America’s “true founding” came with the arrival of the first slaves in Virginia, not with the Declaration of Independence. Scholars immediately raised objections and the Times has issued a series of stealth corrections tacitly admitting that its project was based on a lie.
The 1619 Project twists American history along the lines of Marxist critical race theory, reframing many aspects of American life as rooted in race-based slavery and oppression, including capitalism, the consumption of sugar, and America’s rejection of 100 percent government-funded health care. The project goes right to the heart of America, featuring graphics crossing out “July 4, 1776” and replacing the founding date with “August 20, 1619.”
Until September 2020, the 1619 Project website had announced that the project “aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” In September, the Times stealth-edited the website to remove the claim about 1619 being America’s “true founding” and the project’s founder, Nikole Hannah-Jones, told CNN that the project “does not argue that 1776 was not the founding of the country.” Psyche!
Historians have criticized the project for twisting the truth. For instance, there were black slaves, and black freedmen, in America for about a century before 1619. Whoops!
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-backlash-against-bad-history-11619822062?mod=opinion_lead_pos2
Education in America is still mainly a state and local enterprise, and thank heaven for that. Look no further than the Biden Administration’s plan to use federal grants to urge states and local schools to teach bad American history like the New York Times “1619 Project” in classrooms.
Thirty-nine GOP Senators led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wrote Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on Thursday expressing “grave concern” with his “effort to reorient the bipartisan American History and Civics Education programs” from “their intended purposes toward a politicized and divisive agenda.”
This includes the destructive 1619 Project, which seeks to replace 1776 with the year slaves first arrived in North America as the country’s true founding. Prominent historians, including many on the political left, have criticized the 1619 Project’s many mistakes, not least its claim that preserving slavery was the driving force behind the American revolution.
The Cardona effort is bound to roil the culture wars and is the opposite of President Biden’s pledge to unify the country. Mr. Cardona should take the McConnell letter as good advice to cashier his history project. The backlash he’s courting will do no one any good.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/education/2021/05/big-chalk-and-the-shrinking-of-young-minds/
The headline on the front page of today’s Australian (May 1, paywalled) doesn’t mince words, ‘A nation of cretins: class revamp fail’, the report beneath it detailing what the pedagogic poobahs of the post-modern education Establishment wish to do to the national curriculum and, mercifully, that state and federal education ministers aren’t keen on the proposed emphasis on what might be termed the Three As — Aborigines, Alarmism, Activism.
The Australian quotes University of Queensland emeritus professor Kenneth Wiltshire as calling for the abolition of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, whose proposed ‘reforms’ were released this week for public comment. According to Wiltshire, “We will create a nation of cretins awash in a world where they have no understanding of the history of civilisation, human thought, human philosophy, values or principles.”
Misery, they say, loves company, but there is scant comfort in knowing that Australia’s schools are not alone in promoting the fashionable and politically correct memes of the day at the expense of genuine learning. In New York, the rot became too much for one father, Andrew Gutmann, to tolerate. Reproduced below, his open letter to the board of Manhattan’s Brearley School, where tuition runs to around $50,000 a year. Switch the proper nouns and he might well be writing of Australia’s educational malaise and the long-marchers of Big Chalk who are perpetrating it. — rf
https://www.wsj.com/articles/radical-parents-despotic-children-1448325901
“Liberal Parents, Radical Children,” was the title of a 1975 book by Midge Decter, which tried to make sense of how a generation of munificent parents raised that self-obsessed, politically spastic generation known as the Baby Boomers. The book was a case study in the tragedy of good intentions.
“We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling,” Miss Decter told the Boomers. “While you were the most indulged generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned to your own meager devices.”
Meager devices came to mind last week while reading the “Statement of Solidarity” from Nancy Cantor, chancellor of the Newark, N.J., campus of Rutgers University. Solidarity with whom, or what? Well, Paris, but that was just for starters. Ms. Cantor also made a point of mentioning lives lost to terrorist attacks this year in Beirut and Kenya, and children “lost at sea seeking freedom,” and “lives lost that so mattered in Ferguson and Baltimore and on,” and “students facing racial harassment on campuses from Missouri to Ithaca and on.”
And this: “We see also around us the scarring consequences of decade after decade, group after group, strangers to each other, enemies even within the same land, separated by an architecture of segregation, an economy of inequality, a politics of polarization, a dogma of intolerance.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/words-may-not-be-spoken-about-black-law-students-richard-l-cravatts/
” The diversocrats on American campuses may recoil at the notion that their efforts to achieve racial equity have unintended, even harmful, consequences, but suppressing the speech of and punishing those who reveal some of the defects of affirmative action is a serious violation of academic freedom, not to mention the willful blindness of progressives who seem to care more about appearing virtuous than they do about contributing to actual constructive social change.”
As one more bit of evidence that universities have become “islands of repression on a sea of freedom,” Georgetown University’s Law Center is currently experiencing paroxysms of anti-racist fervor after two adjunct professors teaching a joint negotiations class, Sandra Sellers and David Batson, were unknowingly recorded bemoaning the low academic performance of their black law students.
“I hate to say this,” Sellers is recorded as saying to Batson in the 43-second video clip made in February that both professors thought was a private conversation, “I ended up having this, you know, angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are blacks. Happens almost every semester. And it’s like, ‘Oh, come on!’ You know? I get some really good ones but there’s usually some that are just plain at the bottom. It drives me crazy. Of course, there are the good ones . . . but come on . . . .”
Once the offending video clip was posted on social media, the Georgetown Law campus erupted with howls of indignation, rage, and calls for the termination of both Sellers and Batson.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/top-ten-most-racist-colleges-and-universities-2-toptenracistuniversitiesorg/
#2: Smith College
Smith College proudly portrays itself as a progressive haven. Slogans featured on the university website urge students to “be prepared to push boundaries” and tout “an education as distinctive as you are.” But Smith’s commitment to “anti-racism” failed a crucial test. When an African-American student falsely accused several white working-class staff members of racial discrimination, the college blindly accepted her racially-tinged narrative, even in the face of much evidence proving the opposite.
The triggering incident occurred during the summer of 2018. A black student, Oumou Kanoute, reported that she had been harassed by white employees of Smith College while she was merely eating her lunch in a campus dormitory lounge.
“I am blown away at the fact that I cannot even sit down and eat lunch peacefully,” she wrote in a social media post that went viral. “Today someone felt the need to call the police on me while I was sitting down reading, and eating in a common room at Smith College. This person didn’t try to bring their concerns forward to me, but instead decided to call the police. I did nothing wrong, I wasn’t making any noise or bothering anyone. All I did was be black.”
Kanoute went on to generalize her experience into a larger narrative about being black at an elite college: “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman of color.”
The problem with her narrative? It’s not remotely true.
