RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/cancel-culture-comes-chaucer-mark-tapson/

Another week, another Dead White Male toppled off his perch in the classics canon by university administration milquetoasts pandering to the woke, anti-intellectual mob. This time the DWM in question is medieval literary giant Geoffrey Chaucer of The Canterbury Tales fame, courses on whom are being eliminated at the University of Leicester in England because the man often called the Father of English Literature doesn’t match the current “enthusiasms” of students there.

Last month, the University announced its intention to remove courses in The Canterbury Tales and replace them with courses centered on – what else? – sexuality, diversity, race, and ethnicity. “We want to offer courses that match our students’ own interests and enthusiasms, as reflected in their own choices and the feedback we have been hearing,” a university spokesperson explained to MailOnline. Students’ “interests and enthusiasms” apparently now are dominated by an obsession with the power dynamics of skin color and genitalia, and thus Chaucer is no longer relevant.

And not just Chaucer’s works, but anything written prior to the year 1500. Also potentially on the chopping block, reportedly, are courses on: Beowulf, the heroic epic considered to be the earliest work of English literature; John Milton’s magisterial Paradise Lost; the works of poet John Donne and playwright Christopher Marlowe; the chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, the 15th-century chronicle of the legend of King Arthur.

Leicester University management emailed the English department to notify them of these changes, stating, “The aim of our proposals [is] to offer a suite of undergraduate degrees that provide modules which students expect of an English degree.” Apparently a familiarity with Chaucer and other medieval authors is no longer what students expect of an English degree, but race-mongering identity politics is.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/02/10/the-decline-of-intelligence-in-the-west-n1424731

Recent studies have reported a worrisome decline in IQ scores in Western nations over the last decades, a reversal of the once-hopeful Flynn Effect (named after the late philosopher and psychologist James R. Flynn) which posited a growth in cognitive abilities for much of the 20th Century. Now the Flynn Effect seems to have reversed, leading to predictions of a general dumbing down of selective populations. Other studies report that IQ erosion is not confined to this century but that IQ has dropped by an average of 14.1 percent over the last century. As Evan Horowitz writes for NBC News, “A range of studies using a variety of well-established IQ tests and metrics have found declining scores across Scandinavia, Britain, Germany, France and Australia.”

Horowitz argues that the plummet in cognitive abilities “could not only mean 15 more seasons of the Kardashians, but also… fewer scientific breakthroughs, stagnant economies and a general dimming of our collective future.” Flynn himself, who did the original research on the eponymous effect, has stated that “The IQ gains of the 20th century have faltered.” Flynn’s more optimistic Are We Getting Smarter: Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century was published in 2012; his subsequent findings led in an opposite direction.*

The brainchild of French psychologist Alfred Binet, the IQ construct is a controversial issue with many different interpretations and applications. Charles Spearman proposed the variable notion of a g factor, or general intelligence measure, responsible for overall performance on various mental ability tests such as memory retention, spatial processing, and quantitative reasoning. The g factor has been compared to general athletic ability which allows a person to excel in different fields and activities. There has been vigorous debate over the strict equivalency between IQ scores and intelligence, but there is broad agreement on a general waning of intelligence or, from a clinical perspective, an ebbing of IQ scores. Of course, smart people can sometimes do poorly on IQ tests and obtuse people can sometimes rank high on aspectual tiers of these tests. But the consensus appears to be that the correlation approximately holds while allowing for scalene anomalies. In effect, the g factor is eroding.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/the_need_for_civics_and_us_history_teacher_certificate_programs.html

The 2020 election and the events of January 6th, 2021 have convinced many of the need for better civics and U.S. history teaching in K-12. Bolstering this feeling is how poorly students perform in multiple tests and studies when it comes to U.S. history and government. Unfortunately, teachers are inadequately prepared to educate pupils in these subjects. Rigorous, coherent, and carefully structured certificate programs can provide the training teachers need to successfully instruct the next generation of American citizens.

In a 2019 RAND study, 80% of teachers did not think they were “very well prepared” to teach a course on the United States government. The same study also showed that “between a third and just over half of both elementary (K–5) teachers and secondary (grades 6–12) teachers who taught social studies reported they had not received any training on civic education.” These numbers are troubling and indicate the need for professional development programs to address this lack of preparedness. 

Teachers are not the only ones struggling when it comes to civics and history. Students are failing to learn American history, or its founding principles, including their roots in the Constitution. The 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed that, when it comes to civics, 36% of students tested did not test at a basic attainment level. Eight years later, the 2018 assessment showed only 24% of students performed at or exceeded a proficient level. Worse, there was no significant improvement compared to 2014 or 1998. 

The situation is worse when it comes to U.S. history. The 2018 scores decreased from 2014, from a meager 18% of students performing at or above NAEP proficient down to 15%. The grim reality of student performance when it comes to history requires action.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/safe-spaces-and-neo-segregation-black-students-richard-l-cravatts/

Just before the fall semester kicked off for the class of 2020, John Ellison, Dean of Students at the University of Chicago, sent the incoming class a traditional letter welcoming them to the campus community and stressing some of the values that the university honors and promotes.

While sending a letter like this was not particularly unique, Ellison did vary his tone and message when he warned students that their experience at Chicago would, and should, involve challenging oneself to confront views different than one’s own—sometimes radically so—and that students should be prepared to have their own notions challenged, disputed, argued against, even denounced. That, Ellison suggested, is one of the key roles of a university.

“You will find that we expect members of our community to be engaged in rigorous debate, discussion and even disagreement,” he wrote, and “[a]t times this may challenge you and even cause discomfort.” When Ellison referred to the “discomfort” allegedly felt by many students when they confront ideas with which they do not agree, he was recognizing the unfortunate trend being witnessed on university campuses where students not only disagree with opposing views, they want to be sheltered from even having to confront them. More than that, when professors, fellow students, and guest speakers articulate ideology or viewpoints contrary to these fragile students’ own, intellectually frail students frequently move to suppress or punish that opposing speech.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mediocrity-is-now-mandatory-11612724198?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Has an era of American mediocrity begun? In January the College Board announced it would eliminate the essay portion of the SAT, as well as all of the separate SAT subject tests. Their stated purpose was “reducing and simplifying demands on students.” Such a burden.

One high school near me just dropped freshman advanced-standing (honors) English “to combat the effects of academic ‘tracking” because it “ultimately separates students of different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds.” It turns out that middle schools from lower-income areas aren’t adequately preparing their students for high school. So rather than fix that problem, they dumbed down high school.

Then again, when the University of California system did away with racial preferences in 1996, it moved to holistic admissions. What does holistic mean? Anything you want. The Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities defines it as “assessing an applicant’s unique experiences alongside traditional measures of academic readiness.” Grades are only a suggestion—and SAT scores are biased, supposedly. And here you thought smart students got into good colleges. Yes, mediocrity has crept into our self-proclaimed elite colleges. Job recruiters understand this.

Virtually all universities and now many companies have D&I departments, for diversity and inclusion. Sounds worthy. But as far as I can tell, the No. 1 job of a D&I department is to hire more people into the D&I department. No one ever mentions excellence.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/san-franciscos-race-games-11612571242?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

First, George Washington and Abe Lincoln get the boot as school names. Now academic achievement will soon be history. The progressive beat goes on in San Francisco, where the school board next week is expected to consider a resolution abolishing merit exams and high grade point averages for admission to Lowell High School.

Named for 19th-century poet and abolitionist James Russell Lowell, the school is a nationally known beacon of excellence. Lowell is also among the 44 schools whose names the school board recently voted to change because Lowell’s references to African-Americans are regarded as insufficiently enlightened by today’s standards.

One school board commissioner, Alison Collins, has called merit-based admissions “racist.” The real problem progressives have with Lowell is that too many Asian-Americans are passing the entrance exam. But it’s perverse to penalize Asian-Americans because other children do less well on tests.

https://spectator.us/topic/chasing-chaucer-beowulf-curriculum/

 In British and American universities, fewer and fewer students are studying English, history and other humanities. That’s a job killer for the faculty. It’s time for quick answers — and the English faculty at Leicester University has come up with a beauty. The problem with their curriculum, they have decided, is that it is just not left-wing and anti-Western enough. They must figure students want to study English mostly to learn more about imperialism, capitalism and social theory, not to read and interpret great novels and poetry or to read modern works against the background of a great tradition.

So, out with the old, in with the new. In this case, ‘the new’ reflects the tendentious political preoccupations of the faculty and their most agitated students. At Yale, which has had one of the greatest English departments in the world for decades, the students demanded removal of Shakespeare’s portrait. It’s gone. No problem. Yale’s art history department killed off its iconic course on architectural history because they deemed it too Western. Oh, the horror. No matter that it was the department’s most popular course by far. Leicester’s English faculty decided to drop its traditional requirement for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the medieval epic ‘Beowulf’. All gone, sent to the rice paddies to learn from the glorious peasants.

What’s wrong here? And what’s right? There’s nothing wrong with including some social theory in the humanities. But this theoretical work should meet two criteria. It should be first-rate, not inferior, ideological claptrap, as so much of it is. Second, it should supplement essential works in the curriculum, not supplant them. The goal is to build upon students’ prior knowledge of foundational works in their field. That means English students should read Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser and Marlowe before they read social critiques of Elizabethan England. They should read Dickens and his contemporaries before they read Marx and Mill. Why? Because the overriding goal for English students should be to enrich their study of literary texts. These primary and secondary categories would reverse for students of sociology. They might be asked to read imaginative literature to enrich their understanding of social structure.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/san-francisco-votes-rename-schools-named-founding-sara-dogan/

In the latest excess of radical left cancel culture, the San Francisco School Board has voted to rename 44 public schools after a biased and historically inaccurate report judged their namesakes to be unworthy of the honor.

Famous Americans whose names are to be stricken from the schools include Founding Fathers George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, as well as less obvious targets such as California Senator Dianne Feinstein, a radical Democrat. Feinstein’s crime? While mayor of San Francisco in 1984, she replaced a Confederate Flag which stood as part of a larger display outside City Hall, after it was vandalized and removed by activists. The display featured 18 flags and was intended to showcase the stages of America’s history. 

So flagrantly politicized were the renaming decisions, that they sparked the furor of Democratic activist group, Families for San Francisco, which denounced the school board’s decision-making process in a lengthy report. 

Families for San Francisco condemned the School Names Advisory Committee which selected the 44 schools to be renamed, noting that “The Committee was not guided or informed by professional historians or any other parties with the historical expertise required for the Committee to do its work” and  “As a result…The Guiding Principles used by the Committee was a ‘Just One Thing’ test, where a historical figure was to be removed from a school name on the basis of just a single incident from a list of criteria.”