RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mediocrity-is-now-mandatory-11612724198?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Has an era of American mediocrity begun? In January the College Board announced it would eliminate the essay portion of the SAT, as well as all of the separate SAT subject tests. Their stated purpose was “reducing and simplifying demands on students.” Such a burden.

One high school near me just dropped freshman advanced-standing (honors) English “to combat the effects of academic ‘tracking” because it “ultimately separates students of different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds.” It turns out that middle schools from lower-income areas aren’t adequately preparing their students for high school. So rather than fix that problem, they dumbed down high school.

Then again, when the University of California system did away with racial preferences in 1996, it moved to holistic admissions. What does holistic mean? Anything you want. The Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities defines it as “assessing an applicant’s unique experiences alongside traditional measures of academic readiness.” Grades are only a suggestion—and SAT scores are biased, supposedly. And here you thought smart students got into good colleges. Yes, mediocrity has crept into our self-proclaimed elite colleges. Job recruiters understand this.

Virtually all universities and now many companies have D&I departments, for diversity and inclusion. Sounds worthy. But as far as I can tell, the No. 1 job of a D&I department is to hire more people into the D&I department. No one ever mentions excellence.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/san-franciscos-race-games-11612571242?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

First, George Washington and Abe Lincoln get the boot as school names. Now academic achievement will soon be history. The progressive beat goes on in San Francisco, where the school board next week is expected to consider a resolution abolishing merit exams and high grade point averages for admission to Lowell High School.

Named for 19th-century poet and abolitionist James Russell Lowell, the school is a nationally known beacon of excellence. Lowell is also among the 44 schools whose names the school board recently voted to change because Lowell’s references to African-Americans are regarded as insufficiently enlightened by today’s standards.

One school board commissioner, Alison Collins, has called merit-based admissions “racist.” The real problem progressives have with Lowell is that too many Asian-Americans are passing the entrance exam. But it’s perverse to penalize Asian-Americans because other children do less well on tests.

https://spectator.us/topic/chasing-chaucer-beowulf-curriculum/

 In British and American universities, fewer and fewer students are studying English, history and other humanities. That’s a job killer for the faculty. It’s time for quick answers — and the English faculty at Leicester University has come up with a beauty. The problem with their curriculum, they have decided, is that it is just not left-wing and anti-Western enough. They must figure students want to study English mostly to learn more about imperialism, capitalism and social theory, not to read and interpret great novels and poetry or to read modern works against the background of a great tradition.

So, out with the old, in with the new. In this case, ‘the new’ reflects the tendentious political preoccupations of the faculty and their most agitated students. At Yale, which has had one of the greatest English departments in the world for decades, the students demanded removal of Shakespeare’s portrait. It’s gone. No problem. Yale’s art history department killed off its iconic course on architectural history because they deemed it too Western. Oh, the horror. No matter that it was the department’s most popular course by far. Leicester’s English faculty decided to drop its traditional requirement for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the medieval epic ‘Beowulf’. All gone, sent to the rice paddies to learn from the glorious peasants.

What’s wrong here? And what’s right? There’s nothing wrong with including some social theory in the humanities. But this theoretical work should meet two criteria. It should be first-rate, not inferior, ideological claptrap, as so much of it is. Second, it should supplement essential works in the curriculum, not supplant them. The goal is to build upon students’ prior knowledge of foundational works in their field. That means English students should read Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser and Marlowe before they read social critiques of Elizabethan England. They should read Dickens and his contemporaries before they read Marx and Mill. Why? Because the overriding goal for English students should be to enrich their study of literary texts. These primary and secondary categories would reverse for students of sociology. They might be asked to read imaginative literature to enrich their understanding of social structure.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/san-francisco-votes-rename-schools-named-founding-sara-dogan/

In the latest excess of radical left cancel culture, the San Francisco School Board has voted to rename 44 public schools after a biased and historically inaccurate report judged their namesakes to be unworthy of the honor.

Famous Americans whose names are to be stricken from the schools include Founding Fathers George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, as well as less obvious targets such as California Senator Dianne Feinstein, a radical Democrat. Feinstein’s crime? While mayor of San Francisco in 1984, she replaced a Confederate Flag which stood as part of a larger display outside City Hall, after it was vandalized and removed by activists. The display featured 18 flags and was intended to showcase the stages of America’s history. 

So flagrantly politicized were the renaming decisions, that they sparked the furor of Democratic activist group, Families for San Francisco, which denounced the school board’s decision-making process in a lengthy report. 

Families for San Francisco condemned the School Names Advisory Committee which selected the 44 schools to be renamed, noting that “The Committee was not guided or informed by professional historians or any other parties with the historical expertise required for the Committee to do its work” and  “As a result…The Guiding Principles used by the Committee was a ‘Just One Thing’ test, where a historical figure was to be removed from a school name on the basis of just a single incident from a list of criteria.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/high-tech-lynching-depaul-joseph-klein/

The Left’s thought police at DePaul University in Chicago have come after Dr. Jason D. Hill, a tenured professor of philosophy and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The leftwing fascists treat every expression of views they don’t like on a controversial issue as evidence of bigotry against one or another so-called “oppressed” minority. The censors demand conformity or punishment for dissenting views.

In Dr. Hill’s case, one of his former students, Grace Gallant, charged that he is “violently transphobic.” Gallant claimed the professor “said that we would be discussing ‘if a biological man could ever be a woman.’” Gallant complained that this alleged remark Dr. Hill is accused of making was “not just offensive and hurtful, but it’s so archaic, useless and immature to have these kinds of conversations in class.”

DePaul’s student-run school newspaper, The DePaulia, ran a feature article hyping Gallant’s accusation, which Professor Hill has categorically denied. “The accusations made by [a student] against me… are inaccurate. I do not have a transphobic bone in my body,” Professor Hill said.

Dr. Hill’s accuser would like to see Professor Hill cancelled. “I’m shocked that [Hill] still has a platform at DePaul,” Gallant said, as quoted by the school newspaper. “It’s one thing to be open to all views, which I do value. But when the view is challenging the validity of student’s identities, there is a line crossed.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/campus-hate-speech-and-its-use-tool-against-richard-l-cravatts/

“Everyone is in favor of free speech,” Winston Churchill once wryly observed. “Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.”

Churchill’s prescience is obvious on college campuses today, especially concerning how students, on the one hand, support the general principle of free speech but, when pressed further to reveal their attitudes, admit that certain classes of expression should be suppressed and proscribed—sometimes even punished. On campuses where identity politics has manifested itself in a protected language of victimization and members of historically marginalized” groups seek (and most often receive) protection from criticism and judgment, who may say what about whom is carefully controlled.

Part of that process has involved categorizing speech and deciding what speech is acceptable, which views are not to be challenged, what parameters there are to major issues affecting race, sexuality, religion, and ethnicity, issues with which students grapple on a regular basis. In their zeal to purge from campus any dissenting views which question the prevailing orthodoxies, students quickly learn how to use the status as a member of a victim group to insulate themselves from critique and opprobrium.

In that process, a new tactic has emerged, namely, the designation of certain expression of being what is called “hate speech,” a contrived category of speech that has the effect of making some views beyond the moral pale, outside of acceptable standards for dialogue, thoughts that, by their very nature, are to be prohibited and labeled as not deserving of First Amendment protection.

https://www.realclearpublicaffairs.com/articles/2021/02/03/civics_and_history_education_is_at_a_crossroads_658767.html

In the current academic climate, teaching social justice has become more important than content. This is especially true in the fields of history and civic education. For example, teacher training at the University of Illinois is centered around social justice, as more than one student teacher has related to me during informal interviews. Where once the emphasis was on such topics as Bloom’s taxonomy and classroom management, social justice topics seem to have taken precedence.

If alarm bells are not going off in your head right now, they should be.

Those of us who teach history or civics, whether at the high school or collegiate levels, are at the forefront of this battle. (Yes, it is not incorrect to call this a battle.) History is oftentimes in conflict as those who want to forward a political agenda are often pitted against those who seek to teach honest historical inquiry so that students, through prudent study, can arrive at their own conclusions.

History is not wrong. Those who teach it with a bias in order to forward a set of political ideals are.

Historiography, the way history is researched and told, has tentacles of different stripes based largely on time period. The Ancient Greeks and Romans told their histories in an effort to influence morality and what they considered to be the qualities of good men. Eventually, days and dates were included so as to preserve the great deeds of kings and queens for posterity’s sake, with critical histories being published only after the death of a monarch.