RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/elementary-schools-go-woke

Many American parents may assume that culture-war battles over critical race theory and “wokeness” are fought on legitimate terrain, involving such matters as how high school students can best grapple with our nation’s complex past. Perhaps they think that the suddenly ubiquitous topics of gender identity and preferred pronouns rankle only those parents who are old-fashioned in their thinking. If only. America’s youngest students are being bombarded with classroom activism and indoctrination that is inappropriate not only developmentally but for public school systems in general.

The contemporary obsession with identity has made its way into elementary school policy, curricula, and standards approved by state boards. While we continue to see poor reading and math scores, schools spend money and time confusing and shaming other people’s children. Many educators and elected leaders have good intentions; they believe deeply that they are part of a necessary and long-overdue movement to teach racial literacy, social justice, equity, and antiracism. But as virtuous as these terms may sound on their face, they mean something else in far too many classrooms. American schools are teaching young children race essentialism: reducing them to identity groups, putting them in boxes labeled “oppressor” and “oppressed,” and often inflicting emotional and psychological harm.

If this sounds extreme, that’s because it is. It is not happening everywhere—but it is happening enough to have juiced a multibillion-dollar, nationwide industry. Sometimes the source is a rogue teacher whom the principal and superintendent admit they are trying to rein in; but increasingly, it is simply public officials implementing approved policies.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/04/29/founder-of-nyts-discredited-1619-project-honored-with-prestigious-unc-job-n1443684

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the founder of The New York Times‘s discredited “1619 Project,” will join the faculty at the University of North Carolina (UNC), where she earned her master’s degree.

“This is the story of a leader returning to a place that transformed her life and career trajectory,” Susan King, dean of UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism, said in a statement on Hannah-Jones’ new gig. “Giving back is part of Nikole’s DNA, and now one of the most respected investigative journalists in America will be working with our students on projects that will move their careers forward and ignite critically important conversations.”

Hannah-Jones will join UNC Hussman as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism. Knight Chair professorships, endowed by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, bring top professionals to classrooms to teach and mentor students.

“The Knight Chairs are highly-respected news leaders who bring insights about journalism and support elevating it in the academy. Their work contributes to keeping communities informed and democracy robust,” Karen Rundlet, journalism director at the Knight Foundation, said in the statement. “Nikole Hannah-Jones is an outstanding addition to this group of leaders.”

Yet Nikole Hannah-Jones’s brainchild has an ugly track record. “The 1619 Project” tried to flip American history on its head by arguing that America’s “true founding” came with the arrival of the first slaves in Virginia, not with the Declaration of Independence. Scholars immediately raised objections and the Times has issued a series of stealth corrections tacitly admitting that its project was based on a lie.

The 1619 Project twists American history along the lines of Marxist critical race theory, reframing many aspects of American life as rooted in race-based slavery and oppression, including capitalism, the consumption of sugar, and America’s rejection of 100 percent government-funded health care. The project goes right to the heart of America, featuring graphics crossing out “July 4, 1776” and replacing the founding date with “August 20, 1619.”

Until September 2020, the 1619 Project website had announced that the project “aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” In September, the Times stealth-edited the website to remove the claim about 1619 being America’s “true founding” and the project’s founder, Nikole Hannah-Jones, told CNN that the project “does not argue that 1776 was not the founding of the country.” Psyche!

Historians have criticized the project for twisting the truth. For instance, there were black slaves, and black freedmen, in America for about a century before 1619. Whoops!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-backlash-against-bad-history-11619822062?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Education in America is still mainly a state and local enterprise, and thank heaven for that. Look no further than the Biden Administration’s plan to use federal grants to urge states and local schools to teach bad American history like the New York Times “1619 Project” in classrooms.

Thirty-nine GOP Senators led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wrote Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on Thursday expressing “grave concern” with his “effort to reorient the bipartisan American History and Civics Education programs” from “their intended purposes toward a politicized and divisive agenda.”

This includes the destructive 1619 Project, which seeks to replace 1776 with the year slaves first arrived in North America as the country’s true founding. Prominent historians, including many on the political left, have criticized the 1619 Project’s many mistakes, not least its claim that preserving slavery was the driving force behind the American revolution.

The Cardona effort is bound to roil the culture wars and is the opposite of President Biden’s pledge to unify the country. Mr. Cardona should take the McConnell letter as good advice to cashier his history project. The backlash he’s courting will do no one any good.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/education/2021/05/big-chalk-and-the-shrinking-of-young-minds/

The headline on the front page of today’s Australian (May 1,  paywalled) doesn’t mince words, ‘A nation of cretins: class revamp fail’, the report beneath it detailing what the pedagogic poobahs of the post-modern education Establishment wish to do to the national curriculum and, mercifully, that state and federal education ministers aren’t keen on the proposed emphasis on what might be termed the Three As — Aborigines, Alarmism, Activism.

The Australian quotes University of Queensland emeritus professor Kenneth Wiltshire as calling for the abolition of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, whose proposed ‘reforms’ were released this week for public comment. According to Wiltshire, “We will create a nation of cretins awash in a world where they have no understanding of the history of civilisation, human thought, human philosophy, values or principles.”

Misery, they say, loves company, but there is scant comfort in knowing that Australia’s schools are not alone in promoting the fashionable and politically correct memes of the day at the expense of genuine learning. In New York, the rot became too much for one father, Andrew Gutmann, to tolerate. Reproduced below, his open letter to the board of Manhattan’s Brearley School, where tuition runs to around $50,000 a year. Switch the proper nouns and he might well be writing of Australia’s educational malaise and the long-marchers of Big Chalk who are perpetrating it. — rf

https://www.wsj.com/articles/radical-parents-despotic-children-1448325901

“Liberal Parents, Radical Children,” was the title of a 1975 book by Midge Decter, which tried to make sense of how a generation of munificent parents raised that self-obsessed, politically spastic generation known as the Baby Boomers. The book was a case study in the tragedy of good intentions.

“We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling,” Miss Decter told the Boomers. “While you were the most indulged generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned to your own meager devices.”

Meager devices came to mind last week while reading the “Statement of Solidarity” from Nancy Cantor, chancellor of the Newark, N.J., campus of Rutgers University. Solidarity with whom, or what? Well, Paris, but that was just for starters. Ms. Cantor also made a point of mentioning lives lost to terrorist attacks this year in Beirut and Kenya, and children “lost at sea seeking freedom,” and “lives lost that so mattered in Ferguson and Baltimore and on,” and “students facing racial harassment on campuses from Missouri to Ithaca and on.”

And this: “We see also around us the scarring consequences of decade after decade, group after group, strangers to each other, enemies even within the same land, separated by an architecture of segregation, an economy of inequality, a politics of polarization, a dogma of intolerance.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/words-may-not-be-spoken-about-black-law-students-richard-l-cravatts/

” The diversocrats on American campuses may recoil at the notion that their efforts to achieve racial equity have unintended, even harmful, consequences, but suppressing the speech of and punishing those who reveal some of the defects of affirmative action is a serious violation of academic freedom, not to mention the willful blindness of progressives who seem to care more about appearing virtuous than they do about contributing to actual constructive social change.”

As one more bit of evidence that universities have become “islands of repression on a sea of freedom,” Georgetown University’s Law Center is currently experiencing paroxysms of anti-racist fervor after two adjunct professors teaching a joint negotiations class, Sandra Sellers and David Batson, were unknowingly recorded bemoaning the low academic performance of their black law students.

 “I hate to say this,” Sellers is recorded as saying to Batson in the 43-second video clip made in February that both professors thought was a private conversation, “I ended up having this, you know, angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are blacks. Happens almost every semester. And it’s like, ‘Oh, come on!’ You know? I get some really good ones but there’s usually some that are just plain at the bottom. It drives me crazy. Of course, there are the good ones . . . but come on . . . .”

Once the offending video clip was posted on social media, the Georgetown Law campus erupted with howls of indignation, rage, and calls for the termination of both Sellers and Batson.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/top-ten-most-racist-colleges-and-universities-2-toptenracistuniversitiesorg/

#2: Smith College

Smith College proudly portrays itself as a progressive haven. Slogans featured on the university website urge students to “be prepared to push boundaries” and tout “an education as distinctive as you are.”  But Smith’s commitment to “anti-racism” failed a crucial test. When an African-American student falsely accused several white working-class staff members of racial discrimination, the college blindly accepted her racially-tinged narrative, even in the face of much evidence proving the opposite.

The triggering incident occurred during the summer of 2018. A black student, Oumou Kanoute, reported that she had been harassed by white employees of Smith College while she was merely eating her lunch in a campus dormitory lounge.

“I am blown away at the fact that I cannot even sit down and eat lunch peacefully,” she wrote in a social media post that went viral. “Today someone felt the need to call the police on me while I was sitting down reading, and eating in a common room at Smith College. This person didn’t try to bring their concerns forward to me, but instead decided to call the police. I did nothing wrong, I wasn’t making any noise or bothering anyone. All I did was be black.”

Kanoute went on to generalize her experience into a larger narrative about being black at an elite college: “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman of color.”

The problem with her narrative? It’s not remotely true.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/racism-suit-filed-against-elite-new-york-private-school/

The Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City is facing yet another scandal, this time involving allegations of discrimination against black students, according to a new report.

Kim Emile, the parent of one former and one current student, has filed a lawsuit against the elite private school in the Bronx claiming that her children were met with racial hostility and bias there for more than a decade, according to the New York Post.

Fieldston “proved itself not to be the bastion of educational, racial, and social justice it has long proclaimed itself to be,” claims the suit filed in Manhattan federal court.

The lawsuit alleges that the school’s administrators, including head of school Jessica Bagby, did not take appropriate action against students who participated in racist behavior. School leadership also failed to provide black students with the same academic opportunities as white students, the claim alleges.

The suit details an alleged incident in which a group of white male students participating in a challenge that prohibited masturbation for one month encouraged each other in a group chat to view pictures of black and brown female students whose photos were posted to the chat as a way to sexually ‘turn off’ the young men participating in the challenge,” according to the suit.

“This objectification and denigration of Black and Brown young women and their bodies at Fieldston are clearly rooted in racism, sexism, and classism, and serve to continue their oppression dating to the slave era, when Black and Brown women were considered subhuman,” the suit states.

Emile, who is also an alumna of the school, says two white students called her son a racial slur during an October 2020 Snapchat conversation. Those students were allegedly given leniency while Bagby retaliated against Emile’s son with an investigation into his behavior, according to the suit.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/top-ten-most-racist-colleges-and-universities-3-toptenracistuniversitiesorg/

#3: University of Southern California

The website of the University of Southern California proudly lists a multitude of “Student Equity and Inclusion Programs” which are designed to create “a sense of belonging” for the diverse array of students at USC.  But when a Communications Professor at the university attempted to educate his students about Chinese linguistic patterns, explaining the meaning of a Chinese word that—to the uneducated ear of American students sounded similar to the N-word—he was reported as a racist and suspended from teaching the class.

Greg Patton is a professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business and an “expert in communication, interpersonal and leadership effectiveness.” During the fall 2020 semester, Patton taught an online class during which he spoke about the use of “filler words” in the speech of various languages.

“If you have a lot of ‘ums and errs,’ this is culturally specific, so based on your native language,” the professor explained. “Like in China, the common word is ‘that, that, that.’ So in China it might be ‘nèi ge, nèi ge, nèi ge.’”

To a native Chinese speaker, the word sounds nothing like the American racial slur. Patton himself has worked in China although is not a fluent speaker of Chinese. Despite the crystal-clear context of Patton’s example, and his status as an expert in communications, a number of African-American students were so offended by his example that they sent a letter to the Marshall School of Business Dean Geoffrey Garrett accusing Patton of racial insensitivity and stating that he was unfit to teach the class.