RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/the-culture-wars-come-for-the-american-historical-association/

Today’s historians prize emotion over evidence and fiction over fact.

On June 16, I received an email from the American Historical Association (AHA), of which I am a member, trumpeting its “firm opposition” to anti–critical race theory legislation nationwide. Amid our culture of near-omnipresent virtue signaling, wherein businesses and organizations rush to embrace the woke cause du jour, I could have been forgiven for paying this instance no mind.

It turned out to be worth a closer look. The message noted that the AHA had authored a statement, joined by the American Association of University Professors, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and PEN America, bemoaning “Legislative Efforts to Restrict Education about Racism and American History.” It has since been co-signed by 130 organizations and counting, many of which represent institutions of higher education.

The statement is a tour de force in presenting both disingenuous arguments and fake narratives.

These bills, the statement reads, intend “to suppress teaching and learning about the role of racism in the history of the United States.” If that were the aim of the legislation, we all should share their outrage.

Yet state governments are not trying to expunge racism from history textbooks. Consider the bill that was recently proposed in Texas. At no point does it mandate that public schools drop the history of racism in America from their curricula. Any class on American history worth taking can and should cover the transatlantic slave trade, chattel slavery, and Jim Crow, as well as emancipation and the civil-rights movement. Slavery and racism are indelible sins of our country’s past. On that you’ll find universal agreement, within the AHA and any other educational organization.

https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-nea-adopts-motion-to-promote-critical-race-theory-in-americas-schools

The NEA, which is the largest teachers union in the country, adopted several actions in favor of critical race theory indoctrination in American schools during their Annual Meeting and Representative Assembly this weekend.

The NEA’s Business Item 39 states that the “USA’s economy/social order is built on interactions between different cultures/races” and that “To deny opportunities to teach truth about Black, Brown, and other marginalized races minimalizes the necessity for students to build efficacy.”

As such, they have decided to implement a plan that will publicize “information” on what critical race theory is and “what it is not.” They will bring in staff to education union members who “want to learn more and fight back against anti-CRT rhetoric.”

The plan will provide a “study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society, and that we oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/or The 1619 Project.”

They say that this will “convey [the NEA’s] support for the accurate and honest teaching of social studies topics, including truthful and age-appropriate accountings of unpleasant aspects of American history, such as slavery, and the oppression and discrimination of Indigenous, Black, Brown, and other peoples of color, as well as the continued impact this history has on our current society. The Association will further convey that in teaching these topics, it is reasonable and appropriate for curriculum to be informed by academic frameworks for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society, including critical race theory.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/02/a-major-education-realignment-in-the-works/

According to data released by Education Week, America’s government-run schools lost almost 1.3 million students this year. (Delaware, Illinois, and North Carolina didn’t supply enrollment statistics, so the true number is probably somewhat higher.) The downtick was due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its overwrought response, including draconian lockdowns and subsequent forced digital learning—mostly occurring in school districts with strong teachers unions.

While undoubtedly some of the “missing” kids will return when schools open their doors in August and September, to be sure many will not. And for those who don’t, increasing numbers will have more choices than ever.

As EdChoice Director of Policy Jason Bedrick notes, 14 states have enacted 18 new or expanded educational choice policies so far this year. Additionally, it’s expected that six additional states will usher in new or expanded choice programs. On a national level, Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) has introduced the Children Have Opportunities in Classrooms Everywhere Act, which would “modernize how, and to whom, we distribute our K-12 resources.” Lee explains that his bill “would allow low-income families with children in grades K-12 to apply for federal education funds that they can choose to put toward the public schools in which their children are enrolled or toward an education savings account, known as a 529 account.” (Education savings accounts [ESAs] allow parents to pull their children from a public school and receive a deposit of public funds into government-authorized savings accounts with restricted, but multiple, uses.)

Additionally, homeschooling has been booming. The Census Bureau reports that between 2012 and 2020, the number of homeschooling families remained steady at around 3.3 percent. But by May 2020, about 5.4 percent of U.S. households with school-aged children reported they were homeschooling. And by October 2020, the number jumped to 11.1 percent.

Many polls reflect the fact that the ZIP-code-mandated education system just isn’t cutting it anymore for many Americans. The American Federation for Children reports that 65 percent of voters support school choice, with 69 percent of blacks and 67 percent of Hispanics in favor, according to just-released survey results. An EdChoice poll shows that when given a fair description of school choice types, a great majority are in approval. For example, 80 percent of black and Hispanic parents support ESAs, and 76 percent of white parents are in favor.

Even in California, where the private option is nonexistent, things are happening. In a recent poll, voters were asked if they’d approve a ballot initiative establishing ESAs, and a majority said they would. In fact, 54 percent of voters said they’d vote “yes” if given the chance, while only 34 percent said they’d vote “no.” Support among black and Latino voters was even higher, with 71 percent and 66 percent respectively in favor. Toward that end, the California School Choice Foundation will be sending an education freedom initiative to Sacramento for title and summary in July.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/classroom-censorship-comes-to-the-university-of-oklahoma/?utm_source=

An on-campus workshop instructed faculty in how to suppress unwelcome speech.

Late last month, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) obtained a video recording of an “Anti-Racist Rhetoric and Pedagogies” workshop that was presented to faculty in the English Department at the University of Oklahoma. Originally held in April 2021, this hour-long workshop was intended to teach instructors how to eliminate racist comments and shut down unwanted speech in the classroom without fear of administrative repercussions. The tactics and guidelines set down in the workshop are so broad that they threaten basically any speech that those who might apply them dislike.

Assistant teaching professor Kelli Alvarez led a presentation titled “Setting an Anti-Racist Tone,” in which she describes the expectations she sets for her classes each semester. In her class, students are to avoid “derogatory remarks, critiques, and hate speech” in the classroom and in their writing (18:10). She also has her students read “When Free Speech Becomes Unfree” by Ibram X. Kendi. According to Alvarez, the premise of the article is that “there’s no such thing as free speech” and that someone is paying for what we say, emotionally and physically.

In the workshop, Alvarez continued with the false claim that hate speech is not protected by the Constitution, and failed to cite any Supreme Court case that supports this argument. Instead, she encouraged instructors to tell their students, “No, you don’t have the right to say that. Stop talking right now.” She maintained that students can and should disagree with one another. But if their disagreement is “rooted in the oppression and denial of humanity and someone’s right to exist,” it is not allowed. That would be denying someone “their basic human rights” and “human dignity,” which is “not conducive or productive.”

https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/06/30/is_harvard_sacrificing_science_to_wokeness_783577.html

There is a cultural shift underway affecting all aspects of American life. Though hard to define, it usually takes the form of an emphasis on what is known variously as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), critical race theory, wokeness, anti-racism, and the like. Several scholars and writers have been raising the alarm about its anti-intellectual and illiberal aspects. Heather Mac Donald has shown how it has permeated the university. Is there reason to be suspicious?

One might suspect that the new ideology only affects intrinsically political areas of study, such as Government and History. But in fact it has infected every area, even science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Below is a sampling of new policies at Harvard that reveal how this ideology is affecting STEM education.

A few clicks away from the homepage of Harvard’s prestigious medical school, one finds among their “anti-racism initiatives” the following: “We will develop new classes for master’s and PhD students to acknowledge the ways in which racism is embedded in science.” What in the world does it even mean to say that racism is “embedded” in science? It has been pursued, certainly, by flawed people—but science is the pursuit of universal truth. It cannot itself be racist. At best, such classes will simply be a waste of time. At worst, as the language above suggests, they will attempt to indoctrinate students by teaching them that they, and the medicine they practice, are inherently racist.

Not even mathematics, the most rigorous and least ideological of the STEM disciplines, is unscathed. Harvard’s math department is currently implementing suggestions from last year’s town hall concerning “diversity and anti-oppression.” It is suggested to no longer require the GRE for graduate admissions, and, shockingly, to “reform Math 55 culture and content” for the sake of “promoting equity.” Now, Math 55 is known as the hardest undergraduate math class in the country—some years more than half the class does not finish. The rationale underlying these suggestions is unmistakable: there are not enough women and minorities succeeding in the department, so let us lower the standards to make our classes and programs more diverse. Such thinking has become disturbingly common. It’s both condescending and an open admission that diversity is more important than rigorous education. Is it lamentable that some years Math 55 has no women? Perhaps. But that is preferable to encouraging students to take it who may not succeed or lowering the standards for all.  

A final example, this time from the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS). Buried on the 17th of the 37-page SEAS Strategic Plan for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging it is recommended that a “comprehensive training program” be created for all members of SEAS to address “bias, privilege, inclusive leadership, gender identity, etc.” including inviting speakers and in-house training. But what does this have to do with engineering? Naturally, they neglect to mention the cost of such a program or how it advances the core mission of SEAS.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/01/when-collaboration-is-capitulation/

In response to my article “Counterfeit Civics,” and in defense of Educating for American Democracy (EAD), Paul Carrese and James Stoner are not only eloquent but also persuasive on one important point: they personally uphold the good intentions of this plan to transform American education. Beyond that we enter into disagreements, both over the general intellectual tenor of EAD and what the alternatives to it might be. They also attribute to me several views that I do not hold.

But let’s start with a point of easy agreement. Carrese and Stoner urge that “Conservatives should read the Educating for American Democracy documents for themselves, not be led by repeated caricatures that give no indication of having studied and digested the entire project.” I agree. In fact, I provided links to those documents in my article for American Greatness and called for a “close” reading of the same. Anyone who recognizes the importance of this major public policy proposal really should devote the time to read it in its entirety, including the footnotes, and not just the Roadmap, but also the full report.

Better still would be to go further by digging into some of the source material and the controversies that underlie EAD. The proposal did not spring up from the deliberations of the steering committee, the six task forces, the two working groups, the advisory council, and the corresponding principal investigators without drawing deeply from the well of collective wisdom in contemporary educational theory and practice. That, of course, is part of the problem. 

EAD represents “consensus”—“a national-consensus, collaborative effort across philosophical and political differences,” as Carrese and Stoner put it. That is to say, EAD represents the views of the same educational establishment that has brought ruin to much of American K-12 education. “Consensus” in this case is not a recommendation. It is a warning.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/schooled-hate-richard-l-cravatts/

When some 200 parents crowded into a highly charged, heated Loudoun County, Virginia school board hearing on June 22nd to air their displeasure with curricula and teaching in area schools, they were expressing the same discontent that parents across the country have more increasingly begun to feel as they witness the radical ideology that informs much of public-school education today. Though one teacher did give a powerful statement on how she disagreed with the hijacking of education by a core group of teachers with a leftist, extreme ideology, the school board, and presumably a majority of the district’s teachers, were obdurate in their defense of current practices in public school education.

At hand in this case was a debate about transgender policy proposals requiring Loudoun County Public Schools employees to use students’ preferred names or pronouns. The use of artificial pronouns, randomly chosen by children or adults who arbitrarily decide to shift their gender, and the whole emphasis on transgender rights and how they impact decisions about school bathrooms, among other items, is part of the chronic indoctrination taking place in schools where woke teachers, captivated by paroxysms of tolerance, virtue signaling, and political correctness, have attempted to deflect parental opposition and tailor instruction so that students receive a highly-politicized, radical education—much of what passes for learning being little more than in-school training for activism and a new generation obsessed with race and their role as either oppressed or oppressor,

The scene at the Loudoun County meeting has been playing out with increasing frequency around the country, with parents expressing similar sentiment about their unhappiness with the content and ideology behind much of what passes today as pedagogy. Rather than being understanding of parents’ concerns, teachers and school boards are increasingly combative, pushing back against parental complaints, rejecting suggestions for more transparency with curricula and teaching materials, and expressing outright indignation at the notion that parents—the very taxpayers who pay the salaries for teachers and bloated school system bureaucracies—should push back against the practices of the Nanny State, a society in which the government, not the family, instructs on morality, culture, race, sexuality, and faith—much more than the reading, writing, and arithmetic that public school education was nominally created to teach.

More troubling is the fact that educators keep pushing the boundaries of acceptable content for curricula, widely incorporating, as one current problematic topic, critical race theory (CRT) into teaching so that black students are taught they are victims and oppressed by virtue of their blackness alone and white children taught that they are the privileged oppressors by virtue of the color of their skin.

https://townhall.com/columnists/joshhammer/2021/07/02/yes-we-should-ban-critical-race-theory-from-our-schools-n259192

As we head toward this weekend’s 245th anniversary of American independence, critical race theory has emerged as the dominant subject gripping and dividing the nation. The threshold question, itself the subject of rancorous and oftentimes disingenuous debate, is what the term “critical race theory” even refers to. When this semantic debate surfaces, proponents usually attempt two things at once.

First, they accuse their CRT-skeptical interlocutors of being bigots, white supremacists or apologists who want to deliberately muddle and whitewash America’s complex — and at times tragic — history of race relations. This first step involves CRT proponents grilling CRT critics as to why they are so “scared” to “discuss racism” or “discuss slavery,” as if that applied to anyone other than a truly infinitesimal and politically powerless fringe subset.

Second, while publicly seizing the moral high ground, CRT proponents simultaneously work behind the scenes to advance what it is that they actually believe. Consider this forthright (and harrowing) admission from “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction,” a 2001 book from Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic: “Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

CARTOONS | Pat Cross

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CRT proponents, in line with the “anti-racism” movement and vogue notions of “equity,” candidly advocate for discrimination — as long as it is anti-white, anti-Asian, anti-Christian or anti-Jewish. As leading CRT “anti-racist” intellectual Ibram X. Kendi wrote in 2019’s “How to Be an Antiracist”: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

In practice, as courageous investigative journalists such as the Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo have laid bare for all to see, CRT takes the form of crass racial indoctrination that ascribes collective and historical guilt to white Americans, urging white parents of schoolchildren to seek “white abolition” and accusing schools of wantonly “spirit murdering” black children. The two-step CRT apologia described is thus willfully dishonest. It is a bad-faith argument, pure and simple. In formal logic, we would recognize it as a prototypical motte-and-bailey fallacy.

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

What motivates a child to succeed?  That is the central question that should be asked on matters of education.

Since at least the inception of the Department of Education in 1980, the emphasis on education is always placed on socializing the components that go into the quality of instruction.  Whether it’s the instructor, the classroom size, demographic makeup, funds allocated, resources available, etc., government tends to focus on those things that are tangible and within its purview.  But when all funds have been exhausted and we find that our education system fails to keep pace with the rest of the world, our only solution is to look for ways to throw more money at the problem.

It comes as no surprise that the lagging trajectory in the educational performance of American students follows a misallocation of motivators.  Motivation most often comes from outside the walls of the school, and that is one area that is not historically within the scope of government responsibility.  Of late, the government has been overrun with activists who have attempted to fold the greater culture into academia, and as a result, we’ve begun to impart activist ideology that not only doesn’t motivate students, but disincentivizes excellence and de-motivates them.

Adopting ideology like Critical Race Theory that tells children they are inherently inferior because of their race or sex is child abuse, and the abusers should be called out for what they are doing.  On one end of the spectrum, you’re tearing down children for inherent traits that they get no say in and creating self-imposed ceilings in the name of equality.  On the other end of the spectrum, you’re tearing down children by telling them their peers are the reason that life will throw adversity at them and creating those same self-imposed ceilings.

Trade race for sex, and we can see the effects of decades of throwing boys under the bus in the name of sex equality.  They’re lagging in near every facet of society behind their female counterparts.  Activists are aware of this and the successful playbook that they have utilized to tear down the patriarchy is being deployed in the name of tearing down white supremacy.  These are boogeymen of their own creation.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/07/12/political-discrimination-as-civil-rights-struggle/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Viewpoint neutrality should be legally mandated

When a sample of nearly 1,500 female Ivy League students was asked whether they would date a Trump supporter, only 6 percent said yes (after excluding the small minority of the sample who support him). So finds a survey of 20,000 university students that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) conducted in 2020. While people are free to discriminate however they wish in dating, this attitude bleeds into problematic spheres such as hiring and social toleration.

This reveals the predilection among many young elite Americans for progressive authoritarianism, a belief system that justifies infringing rights to equal treatment or free speech in the name of the emotional “safety” of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexuality groups. In this left-modernist worldview, conservatives’ resistance to racial, gender, and sexual progressivism mark them as moral deviants. As Millennials take power, this generational earthquake is set to shake the foundations of the cultural elite to its core, leading to pervasive discrimination against, and censorship of, conservative views.

Apart from the military and police, which have little cultural influence, the only important elite institution that conservatives have a chance of controlling is elected government. As J. D. Vance, Michael Lind, and Richard Hanania suggest, conservatives will have to overcome their squeamishness about government to have any chance of holding back the woke domination of American institutions. To counteract the rising threat that progressive authoritarianism poses to freedom of expression and conscience, conservative policy-makers will need to lose their 1980s libertarian blinders and embrace government-led, civil-liberties-focused intervention in the elite institutions of society. If conservatives persist with utopian fantasies about creating a new ecosystem of universities, schools, corporate cultures, and technological platforms while believing that cuts to university budgets will win the culture war, they will only hasten the rise of progressive authoritarianism.