RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/race-bottom-language-standards-richard-l-cravatts/

When the prescient George Orwell observed that “There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language” he may not have been anticipating what is taking place with educators who have allowed their obsession with racial justice to influence how they maintain standards in their teaching methods and pedagogy.

Last July, for example, as the country was embroiled in race-motivated riots and social unrest over the death of George Floyd and others, The Conference on College Composition and Communication (an affiliate of the National Council of Teachers of English) released a set of demands to achieve what they termed “Black Linguistic Justice.” The document had the curious name “This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!” but the message was clear: that the purported violence against Black people by police on the streets of America reflected the same alleged racist situation in schools. “As language and literacy researchers and educators,” the demand document read, “we acknowledge that the same anti-Black violence toward Black people in the streets across the United States mirrors the anti-Black violence that is going down in these academic streets.”

Not content to have a single standard by which the English language is taught, these social justice charlatans demanded, first, that “teachers stop using academic language and standard English as the accepted communicative norm . . . .” Why is that? Because standard English, something that should be and is color blind, in the minds of these activist educators “reflects White Mainstream English!,” presumably a situation that is untenable. Black students should not have to choose between Black linguistics and standard English usage, they contend, something they refer to as “code-switching,” because “this is linguistically violent to the humanity and spirit of Black Language speakers.” Instead of having all students learn one standard of English usage, these activists wish Black students to think of conforming to standards as something that is inherently racist, and the educators demand that Black students be constantly reminded of their victim status, that “we must teach Black students about anti-Black linguistic racism and white linguistic supremacy!”

The dissidents use pseudonyms and turn off their videos when they meet for clandestine Zoom calls. They are usually coordinating soccer practices and carpools, but now they come together to strategize. They say that they could face profound repercussions if anyone knew they were talking.

But the situation of late has become too egregious for emails or complaining on conference calls. So one recent weekend, on a leafy street in West Los Angeles, they gathered in person and invited me to join.

In a backyard behind a four-bedroom home, ten people sat in a circle of plastic Adirondack chairs, eating bags of Skinny Pop. These are the rebels: well-off Los Angeles parents who send their children to Harvard-Westlake, the most prestigious private school in the city.

By normal American standards, they are quite wealthy. By the standards of Harvard-Westlake, they are average. These are two-career couples who credit their own success not to family connections or inherited wealth but to their own education. So it strikes them as something more than ironic that a school that costs more than $40,000 a year—a school with Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right hand, and Sarah Murdoch, wife of Lachlan and Rupert’s daughter-in-law, on its board—is teaching students that capitalism is evil.

For most parents, the demonization of capitalism is the least of it. They say that their children tell them they’re afraid to speak up in class. Most of all, they worry that the school’s new plan to become an “anti-racist institution”—unveiled this July, in a 20-page document—is making their kids fixate on race and attach importance to it in ways that strike them as grotesque.

“I grew up in L.A., and the Harvard School definitely struggled with diversity issues. The stories some have expressed since the summer seem totally legitimate,” says one of the fathers. He says he doesn’t have a problem with the school making greater efforts to redress past wrongs, including by bringing more minority voices into the curriculum. What he has a problem with is a movement that tells his children that America is a bad country and that they bear collective racial guilt.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/failure-city-public-schools-lost-generation-jonathan-turley

Tiffany France is understandably upset. She is a mother of three who works three jobs to support her family.

Her 17-year-old son failed 22 classes in Baltimore and was late or absent 272 days over his first three years of high school. 

As recently reported, France’s son almost graduated near the top half of his class at Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts after failing every class but three in four years. He has a 0.13 GPA. She thought her son would be graduating from the school in June.

According to Fox45 News “only one teacher requested a parent conference, which France says never happened.”

France ultimately had to pull her 17-year-old son out of the school and enroll him in an accelerated program to allow him to graduate from high school in 2023.

Her story is tragically all-too-familiar. The coronavirus pandemic led to the closure of an already failing public school system, as evident with France’s children.

We have a lost generation of kids who have neither the education nor the trained skills to succeed in society.

As teachers’ unions fight to keep schools closed, the true cost is being felt by students who are racking up failing grades, dropping out of virtual classes, increasing drug use, and, in rising numbers, committing suicide. 

Watching this happen to the public schools has been particularly hard for some of us who are ardent supporters of public education.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dividing-by-race-comes-to-grade-school-11615144898?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

My awakening to the new orthodoxy began during this past summer of discontent. In mid-June, a few weeks after the George Floyd protests began, the head of Riverdale Country School, the New York City private school my wife and I entrusted with the education of our two young children, sent a memo apologizing for unspecified past wrongs. “We have the responsibility to use our privilege to fight for change,” he explained. “We are also free to shift some aspects of our culture more quickly than other institutions and organizations.”

In September, at the first assembly of the year, instead of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and singing “America the Beautiful”—longstanding school traditions—the head of the lower school announced that the “theme” for the year would be “allyship.” He then played a video in which the school mascot told students, ages 5 through 11, to “check each other’s words and actions.” The lower-school head had earlier written that “it is essential that parents/caregivers and educators acknowledge racial differences (as opposed to a ‘colorblind’ stance)” and offered reading recommendations such as Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility.” Families at Riverdale are encouraged to join school-sponsored “affinity” groups to bond with people from their ethnicity or skin color. One is called simply “the POC,” short for “parents of color.”

At this point in the story, perhaps “lived experiences” become relevant. I am half Mexican and Yaqui, an indigenous tribe native to the U.S.-Mexico border region, and half Jewish. I spent the first year of my life on a commune in Berkeley, Calif. Growing up, I was aware that I had darker skin than my mother and my classmates, but I was never taught to define my identity by the color of my skin. My mixed background and ancestry made me feel like nothing more than a typical American.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/woke-math-is-coming-to-a-classroom-near-you/?itm_

Not even algebra is safe from the social-justice warriors.

T he British author Douglas Murray has lately argued that intersectional social justice represents the most serious ideological threat to the liberal order since the end of the Cold War. Even a few years ago, his thesis would have sounded overblown, but no longer. Events have conspired to vindicate him.

Take the phenomenon of woke math, for instance. As Catherine Gewertz laid out in a piece for Education Week late last year, more and more teachers in K–12 classrooms are introducing left-wing intersectional agitprop into math lessons. Progressive talking points on subjects like policing patterns and campaign-finance reform are being used to supply students with numerical data that is then used to teach multiplication, division, algebra, and the like. Gewertz describes one such initiative, developed in Seattle, as attempting to supply “a framework . . . that weaves questions of power and oppression into math instruction, along with explorations of ethnic identity.”

This infiltration of leftist dogma into education is troubling for several reasons. First of all, it shows just how seriously intersectional social justice takes itself as a comprehensive agenda for social change. Totalitarian ideologies work by supplying an intellectual filter through which all of life is sanitized and presented to people as something uncomplicated and easily understood. This is why the force and momentum of political ideologies is always centripetal, drafting every extraneous facet of social life into the service of the party agenda. The notion that something might be intelligible or worthwhile independent of how it fits into this agenda — that there might be metrics of measuring truth or beauty other than those prescribed by the regnant ideology — is therefore threatening. To combat the threat, ideologues tend to make war on everything that could be construed as apolitical or politically neutral. For example, this is how the Stalinist commissar N. V. Krylenko responded to chess players in the Soviet Union who wanted to keep politics out of the game:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/cornell-west-and-stealth-anti-semitism-harvard-richard-l-cravatts/

As evidence of what the late Professor Edward Alexander has called “the explosive power of boredom” in rousing the liberal professoriate to its ideological feet, Harvard’s own Harvard Divinity School professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy, Cornel West, recently wondered out loud why the university might have denied him tenure. His explanation: that because he is a relentless critic of Israel, and because he thinks so highly of his academic accomplishments and record, it must be his pro-Palestinian leanings that spooked the Harvard committee making his tenure decision. “This is my hypothesis,” West said, “because given the possibilities of why they would not be even interested in initiating a tenure process, what else it could be?”

Ignoring the possibility, of course, that the reason he was not offered tenure has more to do with his uneven academic reputation and credibility than with his criticism of the Jewish state, West conjured up a familiar trope of Jew-haters: that if you condemn Israel and denounce its policies and behavior, you potentially have to pay a high reputational price. “The problem is that [critiquing Israel] is a taboo issue among certain circles in high places,” West said. “It is hard to have a robust, respectful conversation about the Israeli occupation because you are immediately viewed as an anti-Jewish hater or [having] anti-Jewish prejudices.

Criticism of Zionism and Israel is, of course, an issue about which Professor West and others have many notorious opinions, but which are being threatened, in his view, through the suppression of Palestinian solidarity and an unrelenting cataloging of the many predations of Israel. Professor West’s implication is that on this one issue—criticism of Israel—the sacrosanct notion of “academic freedom” is being threatened by those pro-Israel opponents who wish to stifle any and all speech critical of the Jewish state. West goes even further, suggesting that Jewish power “among certain circles in high places”—and those who are afraid of it on the Harvard campus—is so pervasive and influential that it shapes tenure decisions and plays a role on who advances academically and who does not.

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/the-brave-new-world-of-children-s-propaganda/

The other day I was sent an Instagram video of a little boy having story time on his mother’s lap. The little boy was precious, the time spent on his mother’s lap special, but the choice of reading material was… “woke.”

The selected story was The GayBCs by M. L. Web. “A is for Ally,” repeated the little boy, “B is for Bi, C is for Coming Out, D is for Drag.” His mother praises him after he finishes the book, asking, “Are you a ‘woke’ toddler?” Parroting her words, the little tot proudly proclaims, “I’m ‘woke.’”

Such “woke” reading selections are par for the course as educators, politicians, and society at large seek to lead children through our world’s challenges. The recent release of Renaissance Learning’s “What Kids are Reading” report underscores that educators and authors are now seeking to teach young children about “social equity issues, climate change,” and other political trends. As such, the report promotes “woke” titles like Black Brother, Black Brother, which deals with inequitable treatment people with different skin colors, and other books dealing with charged political issues such as immigration and gender identity, including Come On In: 15 Stories About Immigration and Finding Home and Trans Mission: My Quest to a Beard.

Judging by these examples, it seems the “woke” steamroller is actively coming for the next generation. But it doesn’t have to run over our children. Knowing its methodology is one of the first steps to preventing its destructive ways.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/new-york-public-school-urges-parents-be-white-sara-dogan/

A public school in New York City has provoked a firestorm of outrage by asking parents to become “white traitors” and promote “white abolition” in an effort to allegedly fight racism.

The controversial letter was sent by Mark Federman, principal of the East Side Community School in New York City. It included an “ethnography of whiteness” written by Northwestern University associate professor Barnor Hesse who ranks all whites on a color-coded scale of “The 8 White Identities” which range from “White Supremacist” to “White Abolitionist.”

““There is a regime of whiteness, and there are action-oriented white identities. People who identify with whiteness are one of these,’’ Hesse explains in an introduction above the list.

The 8 “White Identities” are then helpfully defined.

A “White Supremacist,” Hesse asserts, believes in a “Clearly marked white society that preserves, names, and values white superiority,” whereas an individual belonging to the category of “White Voyeurism” would not “challenge a White Supremacist” but still “desires non-whiteness because it’s interesting, pleasurable” and has a “fascination with culture (e.g., consuming Black culture without the burden of Blackness”).