RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/black-lives-matter-in-the-classroom

Black Lives Matter, though less prominent in the headlines of late, continues to be quite a growth story. What began in 2013 as a hashtag propagated by a few activists and academics rapidly grew into a nationwide protest movement and then into an institutional establishment, with local chapters around the U.S. and even a few abroad. With lavish funding and generally supportive media attention, the BLM network has become the progressive Left’s primary organ of antiracism activism. Now it seeks to sustain and expand upon that success. In its most ambitious venture yet, the group has moved beyond the streets and into the nation’s public schools.

No one should be surprised. As BLM statements repeatedly make clear, the movement has always linked the charges of police misconduct that brought it into existence with a comprehensive critique of the American polity. “State violence” against blacks “takes many forms,” the BLM network’s “About us” statement declares. The first plank of a widely publicized platform issued in 2016 demands “an immediate end to the criminalization and dehumanization of Black youth,” including “an end to zero-tolerance school policies and arrests of students, the removal of police from schools, and the reallocation of funds from police and punitive school discipline practices to restorative services.” BLM founder Opal Tometi heads the list of signatories of a 2018 letter urging teachers to support a “new uprising for racial justice” in the nation’s schools.

Neither Tometi nor BLM’s other two founders, however, initiated the latest campaign. In keeping with activists’ pride in their network’s decentralization—a self-conscious departure from the top-down organizational model that they ascribe to the civil rights movement—the present venture is akin to a franchising operation, with local cells of teachers’ union activists as the operators. K–12 educators sympathetic with the movement have successfully promoted the “Black Lives Matter at School” program, bringing its activist spirit and ideology into a growing number of secondary and even elementary classrooms.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/when-the-culture-war-comes-for-the-kids/596668/

To be a parent is to be compromised. You pledge allegiance to justice for all, you swear that private attachments can rhyme with the public good, but when the choice comes down to your child or an abstraction—even the well-being of children you don’t know—you’ll betray your principles to the fierce unfairness of love. Then life takes revenge on the conceit that your child’s fate lies in your hands at all. The organized pathologies of adults, including yours—sometimes known as politics—find a way to infect the world of children. Only they can save themselves.

Our son underwent his first school interview soon after turning 2. He’d been using words for about a year. An admissions officer at a private school with brand-new, beautifully and sustainably constructed art and dance studios gave him a piece of paper and crayons. While she questioned my wife and me about our work, our son drew a yellow circle over a green squiggle.

Rather coolly, the admissions officer asked him what it was. “The moon,” he said. He had picked this moment to render his very first representational drawing, and our hopes rose. But her jaw was locked in an icy and inscrutable smile.

Later, at a crowded open house for prospective families, a hedge-fund manager from a former Soviet republic told me about a good public school in the area that accepted a high percentage of children with disabilities. As insurance against private school, he was planning to grab a spot at this public school by gaming the special-needs system—which, he added, wasn’t hard to do.

Wanting to distance myself from this scheme, I waved my hand at the roomful of parents desperate to cough up $30,000 for preschool and said, “It’s all a scam.” I meant the whole business of basing admissions on interviews with 2-year-olds. The hedge-fund manager pointed out that if he reported my words to the admissions officer, he’d have one less competitor to worry about.

https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2019/09/09/teaching-that-america-is-hopelessly-racist/

Peter Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars and author of “Diversity: the Invention of a Concept.”

Many more college students have read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ anti-white screed Between the World and Me (2015) than have read, say, works by the Nobel economist Robert Fogel, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Slavery (1974) or Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (1989). I can say that with some confidence. The Open Syllabus Project finds Coates’ book assigned in 783 courses. Fogel’s Time on the Cross is assigned in 22 courses and his Without Consent or Contract in 156 courses. Moreover, Coates’ book is now the second most-assigned book in the country in college summer reading programs.

Coates treats slavery as an institution that was never truly abolished. It continues as the pervasive racism of American society. This rhetorical flourish sells a lot of books today. Fogel, the economic historian, takes on slavery as an appallingly real institution and brings intellectual heft to the task of explaining it.

That contrast is all the more important in light of The New York Times’ plunge into re-educating all Americans about our history through the lens of African American slavery. The Times launched its 1619 Project on August 18 to a great deal of fanfare. 1619 is the year that the first black African slaves landed at Jamestown. It is a noteworthy date, but not quite what the beginning of slavery in the New World or in what would become the United States. The Spanish had brought African slaves long before. And we have at least one account by an early Spanish soldier, Cabeza de Vaca, who was captured and enslaved by Native Americans in the South in the 1520s. Slavery was an indigenous American institution long before Europeans got here.

Be that as it may, the Times wants to reimagine the European version of America as founded on slavery and stained in every possible way by the continuing effects of slavery. This is a political project more than a historical one. Its unacknowledged goal is to taint all opposition to progressive political goals as rooted in the perpetuation of oppression, and perhaps to delegitimize America itself.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/school-choice-offers-more-freedom-and-better-education-at-a-lower-cost/

With most services, you get to shop around, but rarely can you do that with government-run schools.

Philadelphia mom Elaine Wells was upset to learn that there were fights every day in the school her son attended. So she walked him over to another school.

“We went to go enroll and we were told, ‘He can’t go here!’ That was my wake up call,” Wells tells me in my latest video.

She entered her sons in a charter school lottery, hoping to get them into a charter school.

“You’re on pins and needles, hoping and praying,” she said. But politicians stack the odds against kids who want to escape government-run schools. Philly rejected 75% of the applicants.

Wells’ kids did eventually manage to get into a charter called Boys’ Latin. I’m happy for them. I wish government bureaucrats would let all kids have similar chances.

Wells was so eager for her sons to attend that she arranged to have one repeat the sixth grade.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/09/bucknell-university-to-host-antifa-leader-who-promotes-political-violence/

On the American college campus, the constant advance of extremist ideas goes on. Sometimes, those ideas are put into direct action in the form of violence, such as when radicals attack speakers and physically prevent audiences from gathering to hear them. But the more insidious aspect of the advance takes the form of invitations to propagandists in the garb of scholars who defend and encourage violence while attempting to mask their deeply totalitarian motivations in a superficial and mendacious veneer of moral self-righteousness and academic respectability.

At the campus where I teach, this week we are seeing an example of this insidious creep toward the left’s open embrace of violence against those who advocate for conservative ideas. The Humanities Center at Bucknell University has invited Mark Bray to speak on September 10, 2019, the day before the 18th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.  It is the inaugural event in a year-long series the Humanities Center has put together on the theme “Confronting Fascism.”

Bray is an advocate for and participant in Antifa, an amorphous group of communists and anarchists who engage in thuggish street violence, attacking property and individuals they label “fascists” or “white supremacists,” designations they use sufficiently liberally as to include just about anyone they feel like vilifying and attacking. In his book, “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” Bray carefully adheres to this crude and toxic system of definition, calling all those who support the current president of the United States “everyday fascists” and wrapping up with a concluding chapter with the astounding title “Whiteness is indefensible.”

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/sep/6/coddling-campuses-and-crippled-culture/

Summer is over. School has started. Students from coast to coast have returned to their college campuses, and the nation waits with bated breath as to what will happen next. 

Will the self-absorbed snowflake insanity persist? Will you continue to hear cries of “you offended me” and “trigger warnings” in the halls of the academy? Will the demands for “safe spaces” continue to trump the study of science? Will the fixation on “micro-aggressions” continue to be more important than teaching morality? Will victimization continue to trump virtue?  

In the days ahead, what will the news from the ivory tower be? If the old axiom that the best predictor of future behavior is always past behavior is true, here is just a shortlist of what you can expect in the coming weeks and months.

Students at Emory University will renew their cry for counseling because someone used chalk to write the name of an unpopular politician on a campus sidewalk. 

Young intellectuals at Yale will continue to demand the termination of professors because of their “hurtful” views on such critical issues as Halloween costumes.

Southern Illinois University will double down on its brilliant plan to host campus “naps” in its library so students can snuggle up together in sleeping bags as they seek to solve our nation’s ills. 

In the coming academic year, millennials from campuses across the land will persist in their juvenile fits of rage. 

At American University, the University of Wyoming and the University of California-San Diego, burgeoning scholars will, once again, receive coloring books to help them cope with their stress and anxiety.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274878/video-students-justice-palestine-targets-dr-jason-frontpagemagcom

This new edition of The Glazov Gang features Dr. Jason D. Hill, a professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago, and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is the author of several books, including We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People. Follow him on Twitter: @JasonDhill6.

Dr. Hill shares how he has been targeted by ‘Students for Justice in Palestine’ at Depaul, unveiling how he is paying the high price for his thought crimes about Israel.

Don’t miss it!

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/the_stepford_students.html

In 1972 Ira Levin wrote The Stepford Wives, a satirical novel about young wives in a fictional Connecticut suburb who are so submissive that they resemble robots and zombies. Even independent women who move to the town turn into mindless adherents of a cult-like docility.

Never mind the book or movie. The term “Stepford wife” entered common use to describe a wife who conforms blindly to a stereotype.

Which brings me to the “Stepford” students of American academia.

Midge Decter wrote a book in 1975 Liberal Parents-Radical Children detailing the generational gap brought about by the turmoil of the anti-war movement. Standard liberals still harbored patriotism, a belief in merit, a fear of quotas, and a general optimism about American culture and destiny and the law. Many of their children became destructive and violent and criminal dissidents who defied all authority and law. Today, many are the professors and journalists who promote the Marxist ideology that permeates the media and academia.

Millennial liberal parents spawn “progressive” Stepford children who cannot be described as real radicals or revolutionaries. In fact, while they support the more violent expressions of perceived group grievances, they mostly sulk in safe spaces after the agonies of seeing a red hat or a picture of Vice President Pence, or being called by a proper gender pronoun.

Like a programmed choir, the Stepfords detest capitalism; see moral equivalence between victims and perpetrators of terror; are alarmed by spurious climate change data; are convinced that racism and oppression are systemic in America; believe that open borders and sanctuary for illegal immigrants are the only moral choices; and all those who challenge or debate these issues are deplorable. Only group identity matters.

When a more conservative professor challenges their assumptions or invites another conservative to the campus, the Stepfords revolt, and, obtunded by their hypocrisy deny the basic freedoms of speech and assembly to anyone outside Stepford groupthink. continue reading…..

https://www.city-journal.org/new-york-substantially-equivalent-provision

Last April, in a downtown Albany courthouse, three sets of lawyers for private kindergarten through grade 12 schools found themselves defending, before a state trial-court judge, private and religious schools’ right to operate. One might think that Americans’ right to educate their children in private schools was settled long ago—in 1925, when the Supreme Court, in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, struck down an Oregon statute that required parents to enroll their children in public schools. But the lawyers in Albany, representing Jewish, Catholic, and nonsectarian independent schools, were challenging sweeping new Education Department edicts that would effectively force private schools to perform as de facto public schools. The Education Department is redefining an 1894 state law requiring that private schools offer “substantially equivalent” instruction to students as that provided in public schools—henceforth imposing on private schools the curriculum, scheduling, lesson plans, hiring standards, and reporting requirements that public schools must follow.

Even more alarmingly, the department’s new mandate would require local school district boards of education to oversee and inspect most private and parochial schools within their respective district boundaries, using undefined “objective criteria” to determine compliance with the redefined substantially equivalent standard. Lack of compliance could mean closure. Public school districts, then, would become the arbiters of whether their competitors—private and religious schools—can remain open, a blatant conflict of interest.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/school-integration-draws-scrutiny-from-left/

Long considered a signature achievement of the civil-rights movement, the integration of schools is coming under scrutiny in odd places.

EXCERPT:

More than fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, the Left has yet to make up its mind on the question of integration. Voices ranging from New York mayor Bill de Blasio to The Atlantic writer Jemele Hill have proposed radical changes to the way we approach the integration of our educational institutions, long considered to be a signature achievement of the civil-rights movement.

Bill de Blasio is weighing a proposal to halt most admissions to the city’s various “gifted and talented” programs, from specialized high schools such as Stuyvesant to special educational opportunities in ordinary public schools. A disproportionate number of Asian and white students are enrolled in gifted programs — the two groups accounted for 75 percent of enrollees last year — which, some say, creates a regime of de facto segregation in public schools. Maintaining strict racial quotas in public education is of such importance to the de Blasio administration that the mayor is earnestly considering removing race-blind programs that, at their best, are avenues to upward mobility for some of the poorest students in the state.

This is in stark contrast to Jemele Hill, who — though focusing on collegiate rather than elementary or secondary education — encourages black student-athletes to voluntarily segregate themselves at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Her latest piece in The Atlantic, “It’s Time for Black Athletes to Leave White Colleges,” decries “the flight of black athletes to majority-white colleges,” a process that she insists “has been devastating to HBCUs.”

Hill relates how, in some cases, “black students feel safer, both physically and emotionally, on an HBCU campus,” and insists that, as currently constructed, “Black athletes have attracted money and attention to the predominantly white universities that showcase them.” What if a movement began to, in effect, embrace de facto re-segregation?”