RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpublicaffairs.com/articles/2021/02/03/civics_and_history_education_is_at_a_crossroads_658767.html

In the current academic climate, teaching social justice has become more important than content. This is especially true in the fields of history and civic education. For example, teacher training at the University of Illinois is centered around social justice, as more than one student teacher has related to me during informal interviews. Where once the emphasis was on such topics as Bloom’s taxonomy and classroom management, social justice topics seem to have taken precedence.

If alarm bells are not going off in your head right now, they should be.

Those of us who teach history or civics, whether at the high school or collegiate levels, are at the forefront of this battle. (Yes, it is not incorrect to call this a battle.) History is oftentimes in conflict as those who want to forward a political agenda are often pitted against those who seek to teach honest historical inquiry so that students, through prudent study, can arrive at their own conclusions.

History is not wrong. Those who teach it with a bias in order to forward a set of political ideals are.

Historiography, the way history is researched and told, has tentacles of different stripes based largely on time period. The Ancient Greeks and Romans told their histories in an effort to influence morality and what they considered to be the qualities of good men. Eventually, days and dates were included so as to preserve the great deeds of kings and queens for posterity’s sake, with critical histories being published only after the death of a monarch.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/02/child-suicide-covid-19-and-the-unions/
If teachers and their unions are truly concerned about dead kids, they should get back to work before the suicide rate for young people goes any higher.

The teachers’ unions’ resistance to opening schools is killing kids . . . literally.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about six percent of U.S. children aged 6 through 17 are afflicted with autism, severe anxiety, depression, trauma-related mental health conditions, and other serious emotional or behavioral difficulties. Due to forced school lockdowns, many of these children who depend on schools for access to vital therapies are being deprived.

So, it is not surprising that mental health problems account for a growing proportion of children’s visits to hospital emergency rooms. In November, the CDC reported that from March 2020, when the pandemic was declared, to October 2020, the figure was up 31 percent for those 12 to 17 years old and 24 percent for children ages 5 to 11, compared with the same period in 2019. And when severe mental health problems exist, suicides escalate.

The National Institutes of Health reports (pre-lockdown) about 70 children in the U.S., ages 5-14 kill themselves every year. While we don’t have national data yet for 2020, that reported number is likely to skyrocket. In Nevada’s Clark County alone, there were 18 youth suicides in the last nine months of 2020.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/systemic-racism-and-the-biden-administration/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=second

The first two weeks of the Biden administration have been dominated by promotion of “racial equity” and eradication of “systemic racism.”

Setting aside the fact that structural/institutional/systemic racism is largely a canard, and the administration’s invocation thereof is primarily a tool to expand progressives’ power, there’s one inarguable case of systemic racism that the administration could address, but likely won’t: the blatant and staggering discrimination against Asian Americans in college and grad-school admissions.

The Trump Justice Department filed a brief supporting the appeal to the Supreme Court by Asian-American students who maintain that Harvard discriminates against Asian Americans in admissions. Evidence adduced in the case shows, e.g., that the combined SAT scores of Asian Americans admitted to Harvard between 2010 and 2015 were 218 points higher than those of similarly situated black admittees. Similar disparities, including those involving GPAs, occur in colleges throughout the country.

It’s widely expected that the Biden administration will switch the government’s position on the case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. If it does, that will tell you all you need to know about the administration’s concerns about systemic racism.

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/01/georgetown-professor-islamic-slavery-is-freedom

“Slavery cannot be intrinsically evil in Islamic law,” Georgetown University professor Jonathan Brown stated during a July 20, 2020 webinar. This disturbing assessment came during a 2019-2020 series of presentations on his 2019 book, Slavery & Islam, whose theses have hardly improved upon this Muslim convert’s past scandalous comments on slavery.

On February 7, 2017, Brown had caused furor while presenting a paper on slavery and Islam at the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). Thereby he noted the traditional Islamic doctrine expressed in Quran 33:21 that Islam’s prophet Muhammad is an “excellent pattern” of behavior. Therefore this example sanctified the slavery practiced by him and his companions, including sex slavery, a doctrine that had justified slavery throughout Islamic history.

Once public, such views completely negated Brown’s disclaimer at the presentation’s beginning. “I always make some hyperbolic statement that really makes sense in the context,” he noted, such that he would face accusations of “calling for slavery.” Given such concern over criticism, he expelled this author from the presentation before it started.

Brown’s elaboration of his views during his subsequent book tour has been hardly more reassuring, for slavery is “simply a fact of life in the Quran” and perhaps even “part of the DNA of Islam.” “Every area of Islamic law is permeated by slavery,” something that “sharia, without exception until the 20th-century, validated.” Muslim scholars have even speculated about a “time when the laws of slavery will actually be needed again,” such as in a post-apocalyptic Mad Max-like world, he has noted.

https://nypost.com/2021/01/30/dad-says-nyc-doe-public-schools-are-brainwashing-kids/

Henry Jones* is a married 49-year-old father of a daughter, 12, and son, 8, who are enrolled in two different public schools in Manhattan’s District 2. Worried about the identity politics agenda that’s increasingly dominating his children’s education, Henry, who is white, reached out to The Post. Here, he reveals his fears that his kids’ curriculum has gone too far: 

In 2017, our 5-year-old son came home from kindergarten and said he was studying a famous teenage transgender girl in school. I’d never heard of her, but he said her name was Jazz Jennings (formerly a boy who transitioned a few years ago and has so far had three gender reassignment surgeries.) 

I knew his school was liberal, so in the beginning I didn’t worry too much. But I did tell the principal I thought it was inappropriate. He disagreed. He told me, “We would never teach something inappropriate.” 

Not long after that, our son came home and told me the teacher said it was wrong to give little girls pink toys and little boys blue toys. That same year, teachers urged my son and his classmates to march around the school chanting, “Pink and blue is for everyone!” in a gay-rights walk. 

In 2018, my son and daughter were in the same elementary school, and their principal started involving parents as if they were part of the problem, too. We were told to read Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” and Ibram X. Kendi’s book, “How to Be an Antiracist.” I read both books, and had issues with them both. Alexander argues that the war on drugs is racist. This is crazy talk because drugs were and still are devastating the black community. Kendi says that unless you’re actively pushing for “equity” all the time, you’re racist. So, for example, the city wants to abolish testing for its more competitive schools because there aren’t enough black kids passing the test. But this lowers the bar for everyone. In my opinion, this so-called anti-racism is hurting black people. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/28/biden-teachers-unions-and-the-630-billion-shakedown/

For all their devastating, long-term side effects, the various failed remedies to COVID-19 have been clarifying.

The “expert” class, in case it was still unclear to anyone, is overrun not with critical thinkers devoted to scientific inquiry but hyperpartisan hacks with a hive mind no better than that of a typical seventh-grade cheer squad. The scientific method is dead; in its place is a multitiered campaign to bully, silence, and cancel anyone who dares to challenge their unchallengeable expertise.

Political leaders on both sides of the aisle are as clueless as they are callous. Little daylight exists between Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican Governor Mike DeWine.

The majority of Americans, sadly, quickly submit to the whims of the expert class to the point of self-destruction. Millions of Americans are doubling up on face coverings because Master Fauci said to do so and they are prepared to harass others into compliance as well.

But the biggest takeaway is this: The Democratic Party will never again get away with claiming that their number one priority is “the children.” 

Joe Biden and the Democrats just lost their most overused political prop—exploited to advance every policy from climate to health care—as tens of millions of American children, locked out of their classrooms for almost a year, act as human pawns in the unions’ biggest, most brazen shakedown yet.

The hustle has been underway since March 2020; unbeknownst both to students and parents, America’s youth of all ages walked out of classrooms and off college campuses not to return for months on end. 

Back then, as today, no scientific justification existed to shut down schools. The decision was based on the now-discredited Imperial College model created by now-discredited British scientist Neil Ferguson. Armed with no reliable data, Ferguson nonetheless warned that unless schools were closed in the United States, millions would die of the disease.

Teachers’ unions and their stooges in Congress wasted no time exploiting the crisis—and the gravy train quickly delivered. Over the past 10 months, colleges and K-12 schools have received at least $114 billion in federal COVID “relief” funding; the CARES Act allocated roughly $34 billion for shuttered schools and the bipartisan package passed in December gave away another $80 billion—despite no disruption in the flow of federal, state, and real estate tax revenues that fund the nation’s public school systems.

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.