RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-teachers-unions-go-woke-11625697757?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Parents didn’t ask to be thrown into the trenches of America’s culture war, but progressives aren’t giving them a choice. Witness the way the national teachers unions are adopting woke values and pressing them into K-12 curriculums across the U.S.

The National Education Association, the largest teachers union, held its annual meeting last week and the measures approved by delegates deserve broader attention. One calls for the union to support and lead campaigns that “result in increasing the implementation of culturally responsive education, critical race theory, and ethnic (Native people, Asian, Black, Latin(o/a/x), Middle Eastern, North African, and Pacific Islander) Studies curriculum in pre- K-12 and higher education.”

Critical theory is a neo-Marxist ideology that is pervasive in higher education and teaches that a person is defined above all else by race, gender and sexual orientation, and that American institutions are designed to ensure white supremacy and “the patriarchy.”

The delegates also directed the NEA to lobby for “professional development around cultural responsiveness, implicit bias, anti-racism, trauma-informed practices, restorative justice practices and other racial justice trainings” for “all school employees.” The delegates called for similar training for students. Just what second-graders need: instruction on how to distrust kids with different skin colors.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/06/class-at-yale-compares-american-prisons-to-nazi-concentration-camps/

In the fall of this year, the Ivy League university of Yale will be offering a class that explicitly compares the American prison system to Nazi concentration camps, Soviet gulags, and other brutal authoritarian regimes throughout history, the New York Post reports.

The class, titled “Mass Incarceration in the Soviet Union and the United States,” falsely claims that the United States is currently operating “one of the most brutal prison societies in human history.” The course description says that the class will be “an investigation of the experience and purposes of mass incarceration in the Soviet Union and the United States in the twentieth century.”

To this end, the class will also compare the American prison system to “important comparative cases, such as Nazi Germany and Communist China.”

“Incarceration is central to the understanding, if not usually to the self-understanding, of a society,” the course description claims. “This course proposes a frontal approach to the subject, by investigating two of the major carceral systems of the twentieth century, the Soviet and the American.”

The class will be taught by History professor Timothy Snyder and Philosophy professor Jason Stanley. Stanley took to Twitter to further justify the course’s existence, claiming that “the United States is the nation with the highest incarceration rate in the world…almost 10 percent of the world’s prison population comes from the US’s traditionally oppressed minority, the 38 million black Americans.” He then went on to further claim, without any evidence, that “US prisons are famous for brutality.”

In the Soviet Union, such concentration camps – known as “gulags” – were primarily used for the imprisoning of minorities and political prisoners, often put to heavy labor or starved to death for opposing the Communist regime. In Nazi Germany, similar concentration camps were primarily used for rounding up and executing various minorities that did not support the Nazi regime, with Jews being the primary target, as well as Christians, Communists, homosexuals, and other groups.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/06/how-alumni-established-a-beachhead-for-open-discourse-on-bucknells-campus/

The small, classically pillared bank building at the center of the little town of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, could be the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan in Bedford Falls from the film “It’s a Wonderful Life.” But it’s at the center of revolutionary new trends emerging in American higher education.

The new headquarters of the Open Discourse Coalition (ODC) was established this spring by Bucknell University alumni to support innovative programming for the nearby campus, and will feature seminar rooms, space for receptions and talks, and offices for student and faculty research. The goal: Encourage viewpoint diversity and civil discussion on campus about the “great books” of the liberal arts tradition, at a university where faculty and staff increasingly seem to many students to only advocate for one set of extreme ideological views.

“We want to open up higher education to new ideas and not let it stagnate in static ideology, to prepare students adequately for a dynamic twenty-first century ahead,” explains Allison Kasic, an alumna involved in the project, which has seen initial financial support from alumni in the seven figures since its launch in November 2020. The alumni involved include a former chair of Bucknell’s Board of Trustees, Judge Susan Crawford, and Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone.

Among innovative projects underway sponsored by ODC:

A non-credit leadership seminar in the fall by a Bucknell professor emeritus and former Goldman Sachs general partner and naval officer, whose courses earned rave reviews from generations of alumni, with grants for students who successfully complete it.
Support for paradigm-shifting student research, faculty curricular development, and faculty work that comes under attack by colleagues for ideas at odds with conventional campus political wisdom.
Speaker programming featuring dialogues and thoughtful viewpoints on issues often excluded from campus.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/07/07/the-lefts-critical-race-theory-is-ruining-public-education-in-the-u-s/

A radical teachers’ union has a message for parents: We control your children, not you. And it means to prove it by shoving Marxist Critical Race Theory (CRT) down your kids’ throats, part of the union’s ongoing effort to “fundamentally change” America. If you want the best for your children’s education, you’ll say “hell, no!” to this pernicious, anti-American ideology.

Unfortunately, many centrist and conservative parents have looked the other way as our nation’s once-superior public schools have been taken over by leftist unions and their “educator” allies, using race-based Marxist CRT as their tool. It’s a pity.

Just last weekend, the 3-million-strong National Education Association, the largest labor union in America, stated its outright opposition to parents’ groups and state legislatures seeking to end CRT’s baleful influence on a whole generation of school kids.

Doubling down, the NEA announced not just its support for CRT, but also said it would encourage teachers to hold a “national day of action” each year on martyr George Floyd’s birthday to “teach lessons about structural racism and oppression.”

No parents needed. In fact, teachers are actively opposing parents who don’t like what they’re doing. The NEA last week, for instance, also voted to “research” (that is, spy on and politically attack) groups that oppose CRT in our nation’s schools.

“NEA will research the organizations attacking educators doing anti-racist work and/or use the research already done and put together a list of resources and recommendations for state affiliates, locals, and individual educators,” the union threatened.

Meanwhile, “More than 5,000 educators have signed a petition vowing to break anti-critical race theory laws being considered in multiple state legislatures – as the controversial curriculum faces a reckoning in districts across the country,” the New York Post reports.

And why is this so important to the left? It thinks it owns your children. Don’t you remember? “It takes a village.” So it has a right to push hateful CRT and the wholly specious 1619 Project on gullible students.

http://getinsight.pro/schools/intro_video.htm

My way of coping with this situation was to create an online curriculum to teach my children to question the propaganda that they learn in school and to expose them to information that is being left out by schools.  This online curriculum is free for everyone.  The lessons have condensed video clips by some of the best experts on the different topics and added explanatory texts.  I unexpectedly have learned a lot by doing this.  The lessons are full of history that I didn’t know.  Although the original intent was to counter propaganda a side benefit is that my children are learning a lot of science and history and most importantly they are learning to think critically about what they are being taught in school.

I asked my son what he thought would motivate children to learn the online lessons.   He suggested that I make a quiz for them to take on each page.  Once they take the quiz the computer will display a certificate that shows that they took the quiz and how they scored which they can show their parents.  Then their parents can reward them for it.  Of course he wants rewards every time he takes a lesson and I give one to him.  Usually it’s a dollar or a treat.  It’s cheaper than private school and a lot of private schools indoctrinate as much as the public schools do anyway. 

Regarding quizzes. There are two kinds of questions those with circles in front of the answers and those with squares in front of the answers.  The ones with circles have only one answer.  The ones with squares can have more than one answer but might only have one answer.  Lets say a question has 2 right answers and your child checks the correct boxes but also checks two boxes that are the wrong answer.  In that case your child will get a score of zero on the question even though 2 of the answers were correct.

The Lesson List of the web site lists all the pages on the site so children can make sure they didn’t miss a lesson.  If children learned a lesson the color of the link to that lesson in the Lesson List changes.  This only works if the child took the lesson on the same computer with the same browser.  Children can print the Lesson List and check off what quizzes they took to help them keep track.  If a child wants to look up a topic they learned in school, they can do a search on the Lesson List page for a keyword by typing CTRL F and entering the keyword.

The site is arranged by topic.  These topics were chosen to counter what my children are being taught in school.  For example my daughter was taught that voter ID wasn’t fair.  That falls under the topic of discrimination.  So there will be the topic Discrimination on the home page of the web site.  Clicking on it will take your child to a web page on some aspect of discrimination.  That page will in turn have a link on the bottom to another page about another aspect of discrimination which in turn leads to another until your child gets to the voter ID.  The fastest way to get to it is from the Lesson List page.  There is a link to that at the bottom of most pages.

Some of the words on the lesson pages are highlighted in yellow.  If your child places the cursor over those words the page will show the definition of the word.

This website is continually being improved and extended.

One of the challenges of a site like this is that children come in all ages.  Some of the material may be too difficult or advanced for some children.  I’ve tried to make it as easy as possible but some of the videos were made by adults for adults.  Sometimes I have put definitions of difficult words before the video to help the child understand what is being said.  My children often surprise me with how well they understand what they are reading but they are 9 and 12. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/stopping-k-12-indoctrination-is-right/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

A July 5 New York Times Op-Ed by Kmele Foster, David French, Jason Stanley, and Thomas Chatterton Williams argues that it is “un-American” for state laws to keep indoctrination in the tenets of critical race theory (CRT) out of the K–12 curriculum. While conceding that such laws may be permissible in the “narrow context of public primary and secondary education,” they argue that said laws are “antithetical to educating students in the culture of American free expression.” While the authors raise some legitimate concerns about specific provisions in bills that have passed to date, their conclusions do not follow. Many of the specific problems they point to can and should be fixed. The overall effort to prevent CRT indoctrination, however, is both necessary and justified. It is CRT that is un-American, not efforts to prevent the imposition of this pernicious orthodoxy on schoolchildren.

Let us begin with specific legislative language, then move to broader principles. I focus here on Texas House Bill 3979, inspired in significant part — but by no means entirely — by my model legislation published with the National Association of Scholars. That Texas bill has some technical flaws, which were well on their way to being fixed as the legislative session wound down. The flaws of which the op-ed complains can and should be addressed when House Bill 3979 is taken up soon in a special legislative session.

Texas House Bill 3979 initially passed the House. After it reached the Senate, a key fix was made. The original House version held that the various illiberal concepts listed (e.g., collective guilt by race or sex) should not be made “part of a course.” This phrasing could potentially prevent even discussion of the various concepts, which would indeed run afoul of our culture of free expression, despite being legally permissible. In contrast, my model legislation merely says that teachers should not teach the various illiberal concepts in such a way as to inculcate them. Anything can be discussed. The core concepts of critical race theory, however, should not be presented as worthy of assent and belief. In other words, students should not be indoctrinated with CRT.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/05/a-university-capitulates-to-the-woke-mob/

May and June were lovely months. The cherry trees in Riverside Park put on their annual extravaganza. The eastern redbuds came a beat later with their mysterious clusters of lavender flowers bursting straight out of their bark. And free-range New Yorkers met the sunlight, maskless as the day they were born. This glorious freedom was bound to fade, but not before we had one more gift: the revelation that the trustees of the University of North Carolina had summoned the courage to say “no” to the proposal that Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the New York Times‘ now-infamous “1619 Project,” be appointed with tenure to UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism. 

I expressed my delight in this development several weeks after it was reported. And while the American higher education establishment was seething with resentment over the decision, it looked like those UNC trustees had the gravel to stick with their unpopular choice.

Now we know better. Last week, in a 9-4 vote, the UNC trustees approved a grant of tenure to the award-winning journalist. No explanation was offered, but the decision followed an intense campaign of vilification of the trustees for their failure to recognize Hannah-Jones’ exceptional merits.

Kudos to the four trustees—Dave Boliek, Haywood Cochrane, Allie Ray McCullen, and John Preyer—who had the fortitude to stand against the surrender. 

The vote is a significant defeat for those of us who hope to see American colleges and universities cease their seemingly relentless slide into the politicization of their faculty, curricula, and academic standards. 

Hannah-Jones’ tenured appointment, of course, is far from the first time that a public university board has capitulated to pressure to go along with a meretricious appointment, and it won’t be the last time either. It feels a little different, however, because it was preceded by that short spring of hope. 

What should we make of the trustees’ reversal? Some of the lessons will be abundantly clear to Hannah-Jones’ supporters. Noise works. Bluster, threats, and intimidation are effective ways to advance an academic appointment that is meritless on its face. University trustees are as susceptible to social and political pressure as anyone else. The trick is to spot their particular vulnerabilities. 

The other lesson is more speculative. UNC has willingly sacrificed some of its reputation for high academic standards in order to appease its woke critics, to land a celebrity journalist, and to stave off the threat of a boycott by some other black academics. 

The university faces a potential cost in doing this—the cost of reputational damage. That cost, of course, is unknowable at this point. Will the Hussman School fail to attract some good students who are turned off by the prospect of studying under a teacher who has conspicuously played fast and loose with the facts? Or will her celebrity and the controversy itself yield a bonanza of starstruck students? Plainly, UNC faces no reputational cost within the progressive American professoriate which rallied to her cause. But what happens among alumni, parents, and taxpayers in North Carolina? 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/universities-dont-celebrate-diversity-they-crush-it/

What the ideologically monolithic campus approach to ‘diversity’ forgets.

American universities have made it a part of their mission to embrace so-called diversity. Through a combination of outreach groups, equity officers (so official!), affirmative-action policies, and more, schools across the country have implemented measures to be as “accepting” as possible. To an extent, colleges are right to take steps to prevent the formation of a homogenous student body. Part of a university’s job is to prepare undergraduates for the rest of their lives. If all the students at Columbia were wealthy white kids from the Upper East Side, they wouldn’t be living in an environment that represents the world around them. But as they are so prone to do, the bureaucrats residing in the ivory tower have overcorrected.

As has been described in countless works, intellectual diversity at universities has greatly suffered. The pervasive cloud of wokism has seeped into almost every branch of academia. Law professors cut portions of curricula, such as the study of laws pertaining to rape, Jim Crow, and abuse, to avoid offending their students. Public medical schools punish discussion of “microaggression theory.” Worst of all, untold numbers of faculty have faced repercussions for expressing the slightest disagreement with the woke, hyper-inclusive ideology that progressives peddle.

But it is not only intellectual diversity that suffers in today’s college climate. Even the diversity that admissions officers favor, diversity of background, is weakened by wokeness.

The unhinged drive toward inclusion has resulted in some terribly exclusive practices. According to a report published by the National Association of Scholars, covering 173 private and public universities from all 50 states, over 70 percent of the schools surveyed offered separate, racially designated graduation ceremonies and residential areas. Elite institutions such as Harvard and Columbia have hopped on the bandwagon. But how will the broader student body reap the benefits of a diverse campus if the students opt into self-segregated programs?

One particularly innovative school, Chapman University, a midsize California university, has decided to host not one, not two, but seven individual graduation ceremonies based on students’ various ways of self-identifying. As one can imagine, there are problems with this. For one, it creates an almost comical scenario for Chapman students who fit under multiple categories. Maybe a gay, disabled, and Afro-Latino student should get five graduations! But, more seriously, the profusion of separate ceremonies detracts from the primary purpose of commencement. It is supposed to be a time when students in STEM, humanities, and business programs abandon their differences for the sake of celebrating their accomplishments together. Students toss their caps as one because they have finished as one. It seems wrong to have them throw their caps in separate groupuscules.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/an_antiwhite_video_at_a_pricey_private_school_set_off_a_firestorm.html

If there’s a silver lining to the COVID madness that swept America, savaged the economy, and allowed Democrats to put Joe Biden in the White House, it’s that a combination of distance learning and leftist hubris meant that the cultural Marxism in America’s classrooms hit home – and nowhere with greater impact than in New York, when upper-middle-class, White leftists discovered that the schools to which they’re paying huge sums annually are dedicated to teaching anti-White racism. The latest example was pricey Spence School, a staple for New York society girls. While the story broke three weeks ago, it’s heated up all over again because furious mothers have rejected the school head’s mealy-mouthed non-apology.

The story first exploded when Gabriela Baron, a first-generation American of Cuban descent, wrote a scorching letter to Spence School explaining why she was pulling her daughter out of the school. As the New York Post explained when the story first came to light,

Hispanic tech exec Gabriela Baron fired off a scorched-earth letter to the prestigious Upper East Side institution last week seething that the video — shown to her eighth-grade daughter and classmates on graduation day — “openly derides, humiliates and ridicules white women.

“They sat there in their graduation dresses while the white mothers of the white students – many of whom volunteer, donate, call, email and do whatever the school asks of them – were tarred and feathered in a video their teacher showed them. While their white female teachers were mocked,” Baron raged in the missive, a copy of which was obtained by The Post.