RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2023/06/27/the-idiocracy-is-upon-us-gen-z-cant-read-or-write-cursive-n1706622

According to Pew Research, Gen Z consists of everyone born between 1997 and 2012. How “they” arrived at that time period is a mystery, and frankly, I don’t much care how or why they picked that date range to define a generation of snowflakes.

After learning this, I hate them even more: Generation Z never learned to write in cursive.

That’s a tragedy, since there is no more achingly beautiful form of the English language than a love letter written in what we used to call “longhand.” There is something so magnificently personal and private about writing how you feel about that special someone using whirls and loops in ink from an old-fashioned fountain pen.

Even more catastrophic is that Gen Z never learned to read cursive. And therein lies a tale of lost civilized behavior that may never be recovered.

Deseret News:

With the development and prominence of technology, cursive has become increasingly obsolete, but what impact will this have for the future?

According to The Atlantic, this means, “In the future, cursive will have to be taught to scholars the way Elizabethan secretary hand or paleography is today.” This directly impacts archival work. Many written documents from the 19th century and other early time periods are written in cursive. While it was once taken for granted that American students would know how to read cursive, now that cannot be the case.

Archival work largely depends on a reader’s ability to read hard-to-read texts in shorthand and/or cursive. Will this mean that universities will start having to offer college courses in history programs on how to read cursive? Only time will tell.

The villain in this tale of the evil destruction of a treasured way to communicate is Common Core.

https://www.thefp.com/p/personal-tweets-lose-high-school-debates

One month ago, James Fishback, a former debate champion, wrote a piece for us exposing how high school debate has been hijacked by political and ideological judges. The article went viral. Politicians on both sides of the aisle tweeted their shock at Fishback’s findings. Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna and Republican Sen. Ted Cruz invited him to meet with them to discuss the problem.

Most importantly, more than a hundred coaches, debate parents, and debaters (both current and former) reached out to Fishback to share their own experiences, confirming that in high school debate, debate is no longer allowed. That number included people from inside the National Speech & Debate Association, the key institution Fishback investigated, who told him he didn’t know the half of it.

So we asked Fishback to dig deeper. Here’s what he found. — BW

Once upon a time, the National Speech & Debate Association, or NSDA, was the country’s premier debating organization, touching the lives of two million high school students across its nearly hundred-year history. Its famous alumni include Oprah Winfrey, and Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The NSDA, formerly known as the National Forensics League, currently has 140,000 young debaters on its roster—but now, rather than teaching them to debate, it is teaching them to self-censor and conform their arguments to a new politically correct standard.

The NSDA has allowed hundreds of judges with explicit left-wing bias to infiltrate the organization. These judges proudly display their ideological leanings in statements—or “paradigms”—on a public database maintained by the NSDA called Tabroom, where they declare that debaters who argue in favor of capitalism, or Israel, or the police, will lose the rounds they’re judging.

This has fundamentally changed the culture of high school debate—or so scores of students are telling me. One of them is former high school debater Matthew Adelstein, a rising sophomore studying philosophy at the University of Michigan, who was a member of the NSDA in high school.

Adelstein told me that, in April 2022, he competed at the prestigious Tournament of Champions in Lexington, Kentucky, where he debated in favor of the federal government increasing its protection of water resources.

In his final round of the two-day tournament, Matthew was shocked to hear the opposing team levy a personal attack against him as their central argument. The opposing team argued: “This debate is more than just about the debate—it’s about protecting the individuals in the community from people who proliferate hatred and make this community unsafe.”

https://www.thefp.com/p/what-happens-after-the-end-of-affirmative

When he was growing up outside San Francisco in the seventies and eighties, David Malcolm Carson almost never thought about race or affirmative action.

Carson’s mother is Jewish; his father, black. His friends were a racial and ethnic smorgasbord.

In high school he started to cast about for an identity, and became more aware of his blackness.

“I began to understand that in societal terms I would be considered ‘black,’ that America had had a ‘one-drop rule’ for centuries,” Carson told me.

He read Alex Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm X, and matriculated at the historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C. He stopped going by David, and started going by Malcolm: “Part of it was that it referenced Malcolm X and all that he represented, part of it was just wanting to declare some independence.” He got into “old-school hip-hop, Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul.” He wrote his senior thesis on the FBI’s counterintelligence program targeting the Black Panthers.

After college, Carson applied to Stanford Law School and got in. At the end of his second year, he transferred to the University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall, because he wanted to do a joint degree in city planning. Berkeley said yes.

“It’s likely that I benefited from affirmative action in applying to Stanford and Berkeley,” Carson said, but he noted that he had straight As at Howard and that, when he took the LSAT, he was in the top 1 percent. At a time of growing skepticism around race-based admissions—President Bill Clinton called to “mend, not end” the policy—Carson demonstrated in defense of it. He also joined the staff of the Black Law Journal.

But in 1995, policy at the University of California—the biggest public university system in the country—changed when the Board of Regents barred race-based admissions on its nine campuses.

In response, Boalt convened an Admissions Policy Task Force, and Carson was invited to take part. Berkeley, like many universities, had embraced diversity, and it wasn’t about to give that up.