RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/an_english_teacher_proudly_hates_the_english_language.html

English is a glorious language that has developed over a thousand years, borrowing from every other tongue as it goes, and developing strict rules to maintain maximum coherence. It is spoken around the world and is, therefore, the language of money and power. But to a White, middle-aged leftist English teacher, the English language she’s responsible for teaching to all students, regardless of race, color, creed, etc., is nothing more than an ugly White supremacist means of controlling people

More than any language in the world, English is a portmanteau language—that is, it has cheerfully borrowed from every language with which English speakers have come into contact, creating a language of unusual richness and beauty. Over the millennia, it has absorbed myriad tongues into its Germanic core: Latin, Greek, the Romance languages, French, Hindu, Welsh, Gaelic, Dutch, Hebrew, Yiddish, Arabic, Swahili, and more. In this, it differs greatly from other languages. The French, for example, are proud that their language has calcified.

Over the same time, it has developed grammar rules that are intended to ensure the utmost clarity when communicating. Take, for example, one of my favorites, which is the rule against dangling or misplaced modifiers. There is a huge difference between “The girl in the red bathing suit watched a seagull flying by,” and “The girl watched a seagull flying by in a red bathing suit.”

I also like the rules saying that the wise writer avoids passive voice. Which sentence do you prefer? “The dog played with the child’s ball” or “The ball of the child was played with by the dog.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/video_watch_a_trans_demiboy_nonbinary_explain_her_pronoun_lesson_for_5th_graders.html

You know a video is alarming when you receive texts and emails from several people, all pointing to it as the perfect example of what leftists are doing to America’s school children. In this case, a self-identified “trans demi-boy non-binary” speaks matter-of-factly about how she uses classroom time when she has complete control over the children to teach them about imaginary “gender identities” and pronouns. Parents need to get outraged, and there’s at least one group that exists to help parents channel that outrage into successful political action.

At Saturn Street Elementary School, which is part of the Los Angeles Unified School District, one of the fifth-grade teachers is a woman named Skye Tooley. Her home page at the school’s website has a small picture of a young, green-haired person wearing a t-shirt saying “trans resistance.” That’s the first hint to parents that their child is going to be indoctrinated, rather than educated. Tooley also signs her introductory statement as “Mx. Tooley” (which I always read as meaning “mixed up”) and adds “Pronouns: they/them.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/12/sacrificing_academic_excellence_on_the_altar_of_equity.html

One of the four dissenting judges in the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger case, which resulted in the allowance of race quotas in student admissions, was Justice Clarence Thomas, a descendant of slaves and himself a beneficiary of affirmative action. Outraged by the patronizing attitude of teachers and classmates, and driven by the values of hard work, merit, and pride instilled in him by his grandfather, he had come to believe, over the course of his inspiring life, that quotas are demeaning.

“The Constitution abhors classifications based on race,” he wrote in his dissenting opinion, “not only because these classifications can harm favored races, or are based in illegitimate motives, but also because every time the government places citizens on racial registers and makes race relevant to the provisions of burdens or benefits, it demeans us all.”

Against such eminent good sense, a deranged ‘woke’ agenda of diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE) is sweeping the country. This obsession with victimhood, with its unending demand for compensatory benefits, erodes self-respect and self-reliance, and perpetuates a culture of expecting and making do with government handouts and hand-me-downs. It is the antithesis of the pursuit of excellence.

DIE policies are also threatening to destroy America — traditionally a powerhouse of innovation — by destroying top public schools that nurture the talent, merit, and persistence of the gifted and inspire creativity and imagination. The race-blind admission requirements of these schools — standardized entrance exams, high GPAs, and a record of rigorous coursework — are under attack from the false narrative that they are designed to exclude racial minorities and that merit per se is racist.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/institutions-of-lower-learning/

As if you needed any further evidence that even our most prestigious institutions of higher learning have degenerated into woke indoctrination mills aimed at deconstructing the moral, intellectual, and cultural underpinnings of our civilization, a new course catalog for Princeton University reveals that the Ivy League school will begin offering its students courses on BDSM and fetishism next year.

As colleges and universities all over the Western world hasten to “decolonize” their curricula in order to erase the magnificent legacy of no-longer-relevant Dead White Males™ such as Will Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, they offer, as alternatives, courses like Princeton’s “Black + Queer in Leather: Black Leather/BDSM Material Culture” and “Anthropology of Religion: Fetishism and Decolonization,” both of which students (or their parents) paying $57,000 in tuition can look forward to in 2023.

“Black Queer BDSM material culture resists contextualization in relationship to biographical narratives because of the underground elements of the community,” reads the jargon-bloated course description. What will students be doing in the course? Why, they will “consider the fragility of archival engagement with these communities by surveying existing BDSM archives in research libraries, community groups, and individuals and their personal ephemera,” of course.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-decline-of-higher-education

In the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, academic-freedom disputes routinely took a particular shape. In a small town, somewhere in the heartland, there would be a college campus on which a young academic loudly voiced his opinions on controversial matters—mostly political, but sometimes also on sexual morality, or even on legalizing drugs. This would offend the sensitivities of some local townspeople.

Someone like the local mayor would lean on the college president (probably a personal friend), the president would then lean on the department chair, and the young professor was soon gone. The American Association of University Professors would then intervene, and the individual would be reinstated, because the AAUP would in effect threaten blacklisting. Reports of cases like this were reasonably common.

The AAUP would always insist that college campuses must be the one place with unfettered freedom to discuss and analyze issues of all kinds, no matter who might be offended. The analytical function of academia must never be shut down by a shallow local moralism. This was then the consensus of academic life.

If we fast forward to the present, one feature of what’s happening on the campuses looks similar: that crucial analytical function is still getting stifled whenever it offends an equally shallow local moralism. But there’s a startling difference: the actors have changed places. It’s now the professors who do what the small-minded small-town worthies used to do, shutting down analysis whenever it offends them, which is often.

In fact, they do it on a vastly larger scale. Those old AAUP cases were aberrations affecting a tiny minority of campuses, and the infractions were soon corrected. But today, the suppression of debate and analysis happens almost everywhere, and the perpetrators—both professors and administrators—represent a controlling majority of the campuses.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/12/the_futile_quest_to_protect_racial_diversity.html

In June of 2023 the Supreme Court will render its decision regarding the legality of racial preferences in higher education. Considering recent rulings, the Court is likely to ban outright or at least severely limit these preferences. Will the Court thus end racial preferences? Unlikely — the passion for “diversity” (i.e., admitting less-qualified minorities) — seems hard-wired in today’s elite universities and, more telling, American higher education has long prepared for this dreaded day. Their strategy is straightforward:  since legal proof of discrimination depends on statistical evidence across racial groups, just eliminate tests like the SAT that expose biases.

The latest installment of messenger shooting is a pronouncement from the American Bar Association permitting law schools to drop the LSAT in the admissions process beginning in fall 2025. No doubt, other subterfuges, for example, eliminating class rankings, are being contemplated. University administrators thus resemble criminals scrubbing the crime scene for any evidence of their wrongdoing. How can you sue universities for racial discrimination if everything is murky and ill-defined? For schools prizing diversity über alles, mission accomplished, or it would seem.

Will hiding statistical evidence of preferences ensure that blacks and Asians finally be on equal footing when it comes to pursuing careers in law or medicine?  The answer is “no,” and, if anything, banning these indicators will only acerbate racial bias. Abolishing quantitative criteria will restore the earlier era when schools freely indulged prejudices. Recall that one of the purposes of SAT-like tests was to overcome the racial/ethnic unfairness that came with subjective admission standards.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-devastating-education-schemes/

Little did I know that when I was teaching in the 1990s and “multicultural education” became all the rage, that it was just the beginning of an onslaught of radical endeavors that shows no sign of abating. As 2022 winds down, let’s take a glimpse at a small sampling of the schemes that have been inflicted on America’s children over the past few years.

Critical math

 As a former teacher, I loved teaching math because there was clearly a right and wrong answer. Feelings, opinions and political dogma didn’t matter. Now however, with the ascendance of racialism, if you insist on right and wrong answers, you just might be considered a racist. Really.

In fact, in 2021, the proposed California math framework recommended eight different times that teachers use “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction ” as a resource. This radical drivel insists that addressing student errors, focusing on getting the right answer, and requiring students to show their work is a form of white supremacy. Objectivity, you see, is now racist.

Another iteration of the framework stressed “student-led instruction.” But it’s been shown repeatedly that direct instruction led by a qualified teacher is more effective in teaching the subject.

However, due to citizen outrage during the “public comments” period, the state walked back some of its wackier ideas, notably dropping the over-the-top “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction.” The battle still rages, and now the state won’t be adopting a framework till some time in 2023.

But whatever is ultimately decided, 2+2 still equals 4.

https://quillette.com/2022/12/02/at-canadian-universities-race-and-gender-quotas-have-become-a-way-of-life/

On March 21st, the University of Waterloo—a Canadian public research university renowned for its STEM programs—published an unusual job posting for a professor in the Faculty of the Environment. “This opportunity is open only to individuals who self-identify as women, transgender, non-binary, or two-spirit,” read the announcement. The rationale? “Improving the representation, participation and engagement of equity-deserving groups within our community is a key objective of Waterloo’s Strategic Plan.”

A worthy goal, one might suppose. But you’d be excused for being unsettled by the way the university was pursuing it. Perhaps you’re surprised by the unusual specificity of the listed groups (including “two-spirit,” a term that recently has become popularized in Canadian academic and government circles to signify Indigenous people whose identity “predate[s] colonial impositions, expectations, and assumptions of sex, gender, and sexual orientation”). Or perhaps you simply thought such explicitly discriminatory hiring was illegal.

And so it is—in the United States. But in Canada, where such practices are protected under the nation’s constitution, they’ve increasingly become mandated by governments, human rights commissions, and major funding bodies. Academic institutions such as the University of Waterloo not only tend to enthusiastically comply with these affirmative-action mandates, but also top up the officially prescribed requirements with their own initiatives.

At Canadian universities (virtually all of which are public, state-funded bodies), the most prestigious positions are Canada Research Chairs (CRCs)—funded federally under a “national strategy to attract and retain leading and promising minds.” In order to benefit from this program, universities must “set and meet equity targets in recognition of the persistent systemic barriers faced by researchers who are women, gender minorities, racialized individuals, persons with disabilities and Indigenous Peoples.” The task of meeting such quotas has given rise to a burgeoning administrative bureaucracy, charged with documenting the personal characteristics of faculty members in excruciating detail.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/george-harbison/2022/11/27/the-babylon-bee-publishes-a-hysterical-spoof-of-a-college-english-course-description-oh-wait-n1648938

The Babylon Bee is far and away the leading source of conservative satirical content on the internet.  Its writers brilliantly skewer the entire spectrum of woke and PC nonsense on a daily basis.  Its pieces are shared widely in social media by clear thinkers seeking comedic relief in the face of the avalanche of increasingly crazy and dangerous ideas, positions, and rhetoric emanating by the American left.

If the Babylon Bee’s most creative satirists conjured up a parody of a woke college course description, it would probably read something like this:

Reading and Writing Gender and Sexuality ENGL 214 CREDITS: 0.5

How do you read gender? How do you read sexuality? How and in what ways have gender and sexuality been written and rewritten? This course serves as an introduction to queer and transfeminist theories and practices in gender and sexuality studies. Conceptualized through its intersections with race, ethnicity, coloniality, class, and ability, the sex/gender system of oppression has long served as a taxonomizing apparatus. And yet, the literary, in league with anticolonial, civil rights, and LGBTQ social movements, not only sheds sharp light on how gender and sexuality are regulated and troubled, but also animates the liberatory potential of imagining embodied relations otherwise. At once world-building and world-shattering, representations of gender and sexuality can leverage critiques against normativity in the same gesture as they bow to reproducing it. Taking our transnational cue from subjugated knowledges and intersectional epistemologies, we’ll constellate the diverging genealogies and methodologies that have shaped the politics and aesthetics as well as the ethics and affects of gender and sexuality. Against the traffic of binary opposition, we’ll index the possibilities of intimacy and performativity that determine desiring subjects and their objects. As a class collective, our aim will be to read and reread as well as write and rewrite texts that interrogate and complicate how gender and sexuality, as contested sites of pleasure and pain, are embodied and experienced. The geographic and generic focus of this course may vary; for more information, students should contact the instructor. This counts toward the methods requirement for the major and an elective for the women’s and gender studies major. Open only to first-year and sophomore students. Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/school-choice-tremors/

The election on November 8th was good for the school choice movement. As Corey DeAngelis, senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, explains, 76% of candidates supported by his organization won their election. Govs. Kim Reynolds (IA), Chris Sununu (NH), Kevin Stitt (OK), Bill Lee (TN) and Greg Abbott (TX) were victorious after making school choice a centerpiece of their campaigns.

In Florida, where there are four different private options for families, Gov. Ron DeSantis annihilated Charlie Crist, who drew a distinct line in the sand when he chose the president of Miami’s teachers union as his running mate. DeSantis not only won by almost 20 percentage points, he outperformed Crist by 13 points with Latino voters, according to exit polls. This should not come as a surprise, as 38% of students using the state’s largest private-school choice program are Hispanic.

While the above governors are all Republicans, some victorious Democrats had become education freedom advocates. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro was elected governor after campaigning hard for school choice. Also, Illinois J.D. Pritzker found religion and supported his state’s tax credit scholarship program during his campaign.

But the choicers weren’t the only ones claiming success on November 8th. After the election, the National Education Association crowed, “Educators, Parents, Students Won Big in Historic Midterm Elections.”

NEA President Becky Pringle triumphantly asserted, “Parents and voters explicitly rejected extreme politicians who engaged in the politics of division, politicizing our classrooms, banning books, dragging their culture wars into our public schools, and pushing failed privatization schemes.”