RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/discrimination-at-brown-university/

In May, Brown University offered an online teacher-training course in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) that ironically created a lot of stress among the population that was not allowed to take the course: whites and Asians. The course was only offered to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) students, and even to students who did not attend Brown. One anonymous student filed a complaint against the university on May 13 with the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR). According to the complaint, the professors of the class are only those who identify as BIPOC (supporting professors may be white).

The student wrote, “Brown is offering a RACE-BASED teacher training program that is ONLY open to certain demographics (black, latino, indigenous).” The anonymous student also pointed out the reality of the situation: “This is a return to educational segregation based on skin color.” The student claims in their complaint that only BIPOC students receive financial aid in the MBSR program, which the student rightly decries as “discriminatory.” The student has decided to unenroll from the MBSR program because of the school’s decision to engage in patent segregation:

As a student of the program, I find myself being unable to continue my training with this institution as I refuse to support educational segregation based solely on skin color as it violates my core principles, values, and the Buddhist teachings that which this program is based on.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/real-reasons-government-schools-are-evil-jason-d-hill/

Among many conservatives and opponents of public-funded education in general, there is the idea that government schools are bad because they are conveyor belts of indoctrination; that the state, by means of forcibly exercising a coercive monopoly in the field of education, conscripts the minds of children and stamps them with the insignia of state propaganda. In effect, the brains of children are cognitively nationalized. This is indeed true, but it is not just the case with government schools. The same propaganda and doctrinal philosophies which are simply idea pathogens also infect private education as well and, more importantly, private institutions that also receive government aid. Our private schools today are as WOKE and as progressive in the regressive sense as any left-wing public school that teaches hatred of and disdain for America, individualism, capitalism, self-reliance, and the religious traditions of others.

I would suggest that mind-conscription is incidental, and that it is made possible by a deeper philosophic issue that few grapple with in a consistent manner. The state can only have a coercive monopoly on education and, a fortiori, enforce doctrinal ideas on children if a basic idea is left unchallenged in our society. The idea is that we are responsible for the procreative choices that other people make. This idea codified into a principle results in the fiscal enslavement of people into supporting the reproductive choices others made for themselves which they then penalize others for as a natural right.

Public education is tax-funded education, which means that parents are made to understand that they are not responsible for educating their own children. Society as a whole shall assume the responsibility of paying for the education of your children. Why not pay for their cribs, diapers and birthday cakes? Why specifically should we support the reproductive choices others have made in the educational realm?

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/john-mcwhorter-rejecting-the-tokenism?utm_source=email#details

John McWhorter is back again for the latest installment in our ongoing, nearly decade-and-a-half-long conversation. Let’s get into it.

John starts out telling us about his current whereabouts: a Dirty Dancing-style bungalow in the Catskills. We move on to a developing story out of Princeton, New Jersey, where a group of parents has written an open letter protesting the school district’s “dumbing down” of the math curriculum in the name of DEI.

John and I are on the same page on this one: How much longer are we going to pretend that this is doing any good for the students? The way that the Princeton school district went about implementing these curriculum standards was, at best, deceptive. 

Don’t parents have the right to know how decisions that affect their kids are being made? Of course, DEI is a business, one that has created thousands of jobs for administrators and consultants who spend their days rooting out racism. And as John points out, if someone’s job depends on finding instances of racism, they’re going to “find racism,” whether it’s really there or not.

This incentive structure makes John despair. He also suggests that my theory of social capital may provide the conceptual underpinnings for some present-day arguments in favor of affirmative action. But I point out that, while social capital may partially explain disparities in outcome, it doesn’t excuse disparities in outcome.

After all, we can see that, some historically disadvantaged groups regularly over-perform when high academic performance is incentivized within their community. But incentives for middling academic performance tend to produce middling academic performance, and I fear that we’re incentivizing middling academic performance in our young black students.

Is there a way out of this mess? Is John right to despair? I close on a note of hope from my Brown University and Heterodox Academy colleague John Tomasi.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/06/expanding-a-feminist-professors-education/

Twitter has many things to answer for, from users’ freedom to engage in anonymous abuse to the censoring of off-narrative opinions and personalities by what must be an enormous squad of woke censors at the social media giant’s head office. But every now and again — not often, but it does happen — something worthwhile figures in the threads.

Below is one such exchange, prompted by Professor Danna Young, who is paid to teach her brand of ‘journalism’ at the University of Delaware. By way of background, the professor describes her specialty thus: “Dannagal G. Young (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, 2007) is a Professor of Communication and Political Science … studies the content, audience, and effects of nontraditional political information.” Earlier this week, she posted this tweet:

My teen told me something that’s been haunting me for weeks.

He said “I think almost every white middle school boy is in the alt-right pipeline -at some point-until something/someone pulls them out.”  
                                                        — Dr. Danna Young (@dannagal) June 18, 2022

The response was quick, with the Twitter mob initially endorsing the professor’s appraisal of boys as problems — largely, one gathers, because it is their great misfortune (and a curse on everyone else)  that they are not girls. Wading into this stream of woke drek came 18-year-old  Daniel Schmidt, a freshman at the University of Chicago. His series of tweets, copied from the originals lest Twitter’s censors take down the thread for the crime of making too much sense, are reproduced below. Each horizontal line indicates a fresh tweet in the series.

https://www.city-journal.org/grade-inflation-equity-and-educational-integrity

People these days worry about the rising prices of gasoline and milk, but there’s another destructive inflation that has gone unchecked for years: grade inflation. Just like monetary inflation, which makes your bank account look great until you’re rudely awakened by the reality that you can’t buy as much as you used to, grade inflation makes your transcript look great, until you discover that you haven’t learned as much as you thought. And though grade inflation is not new, its recent intersection with “equity” bodes ill for the integrity of our schools.

It’s hard to deny the reality of grade inflation at America’s colleges. As Times Higher Education reported in 2016, “A is by far the most common grade on both four-year and two-year college campuses (more than 42 per cent of grades). At four-year schools, awarding of As has been going up five to six percentage points per decade and As are now three times more common than they were in 1960.” Three years later, Forbes reported that “in the early 1960s, 15 percent of all college grades nationwide were A’s. Today, that number has tripled—45 percent of all grades are A’s. The most common grade awarded in college nationwide is an A.” As a sign of how deeply entrenched grade inflation has become, note that two prestigious institutions—Princeton University and Wellesley College—that put the brakes on grade inflation in 2004 have since been forced to rescind their efforts (Princeton in 2014, and Wellesley in 2019). No other universities had followed their lead, and they did not want to continue bearing the brunt of student complaints.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/community-family/education-flows-for-parents-ebbs-from-the-left

Democrats are fighting on behalf of their teacher union paymasters to prevent parents from choosing the right education for their children. The party of the Left, of course, seeks to limit freedom across a wide policy spectrum, but the salience of education as a political issue is being sharply underscored with midterm congressional elections drawing near. Fortunately, it is a debate the Left is losing.

An overwhelming majority of parents , 82%, say they’ll consider switching allegiance on Election Day to vote for candidates of a party that shares their views on education. This includes 79% of Republicans, 81% of Democrats, and 88% of independents. Whatever lessons they think should be taught, parents agree that the decision is theirs to make. They don’t want to be dictated to or have their children taken as ideological hostages.

This shows once again that people who are willing to brush aside many issues as “just politics” that they can safely ignore do not take the same laissez-fair attitude on the question of their children’s learning. Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) demonstrated the political potency of this distinction when he knocked off Terry McAuliffe to win last year’s election in Virginia.

But President Joe Biden refuses to learn the lesson. Just three months ago, long after the implications of the Virginia parental rebellion should have sunk in, his administration issued a new rule that could force some public charter schools to close by denying them federal funds if they contract operations to for-profit educators.

The practice is widespread, and Robert Eitel, president of the Defense of Freedom Institute, said at the time, “This is confirmation that the Democratic Party has shifted hard to the Left on education … it would have a chilling effect on new charter schools and make it difficult for existing ones to continue.”

https://www.commonsense.news/p/they-questioned-gender-affirming?utm_source=email.

On May 25, Paul and Rebeka Sinclair pulled their minivan over to the side of the road, just north of Lake Tahoe, and logged onto a Zoom with Katherine Dinh, the head of the Marin Country Day School.

“Today was the last day of school for your children, Charlotte and Carter,” Dinh informed the couple. The Sinclairs—she’s 37; he’s 51—had been driving home from a vacation to celebrate their anniversary. Dinh appeared to be reading a script. Two MCDS board members joined her on the call but stayed quiet. “Please do not contact any other school employees, particularly Charlotte and Carter’s teachers, as your reaching out to them will cause them further stress,” Dinh continued. “The two of you are not to be on campus again.”

It was the closing act of a year-long drama between the Sinclairs and MCDS, which charges $40,000 per student per year and had been teaching first and second graders about “deconstructing the gender binary”—the idea that there’s no such thing as girls or boys, just a spectrum of relative girlness and boyness. 

The Sinclairs weren’t the only parents who had protested the new gender-identity curriculum—most families in their daughter’s class were upset and had been talking about it among themselves. But the Sinclairs had been unwilling to stay quiet. As a result, administrators had suggested that they were homophobic and accused them of tarnishing MCDS’s reputation. (An MCDS attorney had accused the Sinclairs of “defamation” for accusing MCDS of “predatory ‘grooming’ of children.” The Sinclairs never made that accusation.) Friends had stopped replying to their texts. Teachers said they felt unsafe around them. When word got out about why Charlotte, 8, and Carter, 5, had been kicked out, the Sinclairs had to decide whether they could stay in the Bay Area. 

“I had no problem being a pariah in Marin,” Beka said. “We were worried about raising our kids long term in an area that was embracing these destructive ideologies.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/06/manufacturing_social_justice_warriors_on_an_industrial_scale.html

For over a half century, American institutions of higher education have been guilty of promoting oikophobia — hatred of one’s own people and, more generally, Western civilization. Instruction initially only occurred in traditional academic disciplines like English and Sociology where youngsters learned about America’s racism, sexism, and multiple other sins. Within a few years, America-bashing had its very own departments, notably Women’s Studies, Black Studies, and other “grievances studies” departments.  

Remarkably, despite the plain-to-see pernicious impact of this “education,” it continues to thrive and expand. America-hating academics resemble drug addicts unable to achieve highs from the original dose and thus must move on to ever-larger amounts. At some point, alas, this addictive pursuit may prove fatal, and the same may be true in education as our schools continue to demonize America.

The latest installment of this national suicide on-the-installment urge is the burgeoning field of “social justice” as a separate academic major. This is not just sneaking in some criticism of Americas in a traditional history course; nor some freshman orientation lecture to exorcize white privilege. Far worse. This is ROTC for the woke.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-assault-on-childrens-psyches

Patricia (a pseudonym) is the mother of a teenage girl who in recent years has come to identify as transgender. She lives in California, considers herself progressive, votes Democrat, and leads a group for parents of children with rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD)—that is, youth who suddenly experience distress with their bodies and believe that undergoing medical “transition” will make them whole again. When I spoke to her recently, she recounted how her daughter’s at-first-lesbian and then trans identity emerged in response to feelings of shame about being white.

I have since spoken to more than a dozen ROGD parents and parent-group leaders who tell a similar story. Their schools compulsively tell their children how awful it is to be white, how white people enjoy unearned “privilege,” how they benefit from “systems” put in place by and for white people for the sole purpose of oppressing “people of color.” Plagued by guilt, the children—almost all of them girls—rush to the sanctuary of “LGBTQ+” identity. Once there, they are catapulted into hero status. According to Patricia, some teachers at her daughter’s school are more forgiving toward “queer” and “trans” kids who hand in their homework late.

The students, especially the girls, absorb this messaging. They are acutely sensitive to how identity affects their social status and academic fortunes. They want the warmth that comes with queer/trans identity, but above all they don’t want to be thought of as vicious oppressors. Lacking maturity and self-confidence, they fail to put “anti-racist” indoctrination in its proper context. They do not appreciate its ahistorical, anti-intellectual, and anti-humanist foundations, nor are they aware of the incentives leading teachers and administrators to foist it on them. Being white is not something these teenagers can escape, but they can mitigate its social costs by declaring themselves part of an oppressed group.