RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/07/dress_codes_for_public_school_students_degrade_even_further.html

Public school dress codes are degrading.  This is no mean feat, given how low the standards already are.  As good example of the trend comes from the Austin Independent School District (AISD) in Texas. 

This district has a little over 81,000 students, of whom 27 percent are white.  Its current dress code was challenge in a petition supposedly crafted by a group of parents.  It reads in part:

The current district dress code does not uphold the AISD values of equity, diversity, and inclusion. It contains vague language, arbitrary restrictions, and emphasizes bans on clothing that are primarily worn by females and minorities. It also allows for individual schools to create additional restrictions, which leads to further inequality across our district.

This petition touched all the hot-button issues and basically claims that the current dress code is racist and sexist and does not uphold “diversity.”  Faced with such charges, what could a progressive school district do but capitulate?  A new dress code was formulated.  Here’s how one Austin TV station describes what’s coming. 

Under the new proposed dress code, students would be allowed to wear hats, sweatshirts with hood up, athletic gear and even pajamas.  Specifically for girls, spaghetti straps, tank tops, halter top and shorts of any length, as long as their buttocks are covered, would be permitted.  The draft says bra straps and underwear waistbands could also show under the new rules.

https://quillette.com/2019/07/15/age-of-amnesia/

We live, as the Indian essayist Saeed Akhter Mirza has put it, in “an age of amnesia.” Across the world, most notably in the West, we are discarding the knowledge and insights passed down over millennia and replacing it with politically correct bromides cooked up in the media and the academy. In some ways, this process recalls, albeit in digital form, the Middle Ages. Conscious shaping of thought—and the manipulation of the past to serve political purposes—is becoming commonplace and pervasive.

Google’s manipulation of algorithms, recently discussed in American Affairs, favors both their commercial interests and also their ideological predilections. Similarly, we see the systematic “de-platforming” of conservative and other groups who offend the mores of tech oligarchs and their media fellow travellers. Major companies are now distancing themselves from “offensive” reminders of American history, such as the Nike’s recent decision to withdraw a sneaker line featuring the Betsy Ross flag. In authoritarian societies, the situation is already far worse. State efforts to control the past in China are enhanced by America’s tech firms, who are helping to erase from history events like the Tiananmen massacre or the mass starvations produced by Maoist policies. Technology has provided those who wish to shape the past, and the future, tools of which the despots of yesterday could only dream.

Factories of  “Mass Amnesia”

Sadly, many of  the very institutions charged with understanding the past are now slipping back to Medieval antecedents. Writing in 1913, the historian J. B. Bury compared the Middle Ages to “a large field … covered by beliefs which authority claimed to impose as true, and [where] reason was warned off the ground.” Scholars at the University of Paris, described as the “theological arbiter of Europe,” were “licensed” by the bishop to, among other things, defend church dogma. In the late 1300s, the University held a conclave to reassert the reality of demons that were supposedly infecting society. 1   

Over the ensuing centuries, as capitalism and liberal thought arose, the university gradually  emerged as a beacon of liberal education, open inquiry, and tolerance. But this period of liberalization seems to be coming to an end. Like the Medieval scholars, today’s intellectuals are narrowing the field of inquiry. The “frantic energy to know more and more about less and less,” identified by Russian sociologist Pitirim Sorokin a half century ago, has made academic life increasingly irrelevant to most people.

A healthy appreciation for the past is being lost. Today, historical analysis is increasingly shaped by concerns over race, gender, and class. There are repeated campaigns, particularly in and around schools, to pull down offensive statues and murals—including of George Washington—and to rename landmarks to cleanse Western history of its historical blights.

https://nypost.com/2019/06/28/changing-gender-is-easier-than-ever-in-nyc-schools/

Changing gender is easier than ever in NYC schools

By Selim Algar

The city public schools have to deal with violence, low national ranking in language and math skills and this is the drivel that occupies the Dept. of Education…..rsk

City kids can now change their gender status on school records without any legal documentation — and play for the sports teams of their preference, the Department of Education announced Friday.

With parental permission, students can alter their genders, change their names and join sports teams regardless of what appears on their birth certificate, officials said.

“Schools are safe havens for students to develop their passions and discover their true identities, and these new guidelines celebrate and affirm all students,” said Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza in a statement.

“This Pride Month, I’m thrilled to send a clear message to our students — we celebrate you, we respect you, and we support you.”

After submitting a newly created “name and gender change request form,” all school-related documents and data — including report cards, diplomas, and enrollment numbers — will reflect the requested designations.

“With this updated policy, which allows students to change their name and gender on school records without legal documentation, we are signaling our support for all students regardless of gender identity,” City Council Speaker Corey Johnson said in a statement celebrating the changes.

Kids and their families will also be able to self-report names and genders when enrolling in a DOE school.

The regulations will permanently modify how schools calculate their demographics. Instead of tabulating gender numbers through birth certificates, administrators will now rely on self-reported information.

The rule is part of a larger set of new DOE initiatives aimed at minimizing gender-specific practices inside city classrooms.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jordan-peterson-gender-politics-has-no-place-in-the-classroom

Back in September of 2016, I released three videos, expressing my concern about Bill C-16, which was then under consideration by the federal government, following the passage of similar legislation in a number of provinces. C-16 purported to merely add “gender identity” and “gender expression” to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination. However, it was embedded in a web of policy, much of it created by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which indicated that the bill comprised the tip of a very large iceberg. I was particularly upset with the insistence that failure to use the “preferred pronouns” chosen by individuals whose gender-related identity did not fit neatly, according to their personal judgement, into the standard categories of boy and girl or man and woman would now become an offence punishable by law.

Worse is the insistence characteristic of the bill, the policies associated with it, and the tenth-rate academic dogmas driving the entire charade, that “identity” is something solely determined by the individual in question (whatever that identity might be). Even sociologists (neither the older, classical, occasionally useful type, nor the modern, appalling, and positively counterproductive type) don’t believe this. They understand that identity is a social role, which means that it is by necessity socially negotiated. And there’s a reason for this. An identity — a role — is not merely what you think you are, moment to moment, or year by year, but, as the Encyclopedia Britannica has it (specifically within its sociology section), “a comprehensive pattern of behavior that is socially recognized, providing a means of identifying and placing an individual in society,” also serving “as a strategy for coping with recurrent situations and dealing with the roles of others (e.g., parent-child roles).”

Your identity is not the clothes you wear, or the fashionable sexual preference or behaviour you adopt and flaunt, or the causes driving your activism, or your moral outrage at ideas that differ from yours: properly understood, it’s a set of complex compromises between the individual and society as to how the former and the latter might mutually support one another in a sustainable, long-term manner. It’s nothing to alter lightly, as such compromise is very difficult to attain, constituting as it does the essence of civilization itself, which took eons to establish, and understanding, as we should, that the alternative to the adoption of socially-acceptable roles is conflict — plain, simple and continual, as well as simultaneously psychological and social.

To the degree that identity is not biological (and much, but not all of it is), then it’s a drama enacted in the world of other people. An identity provides rules for social interactions that everyone understands; it provides generic but vitally necessary direction and purpose in life. If you’re a child, and you’re playing a pretend game with your friends, you negotiate your identity, so the game can be properly played. You do the same in the real world, whether you are a child, an adolescent, or an adult. To refuse to engage in the social aspect of identity negotiation — to insist that what you say you are is what everyone must accept — is simply to confuse yourself and everyone else (as no one at all understands the rules of your game, not least because they have not yet been formulated).