RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/classical-v-unclassical-curricula/

Chad Aldeman, a Virginia-based researcher who focuses on education-related issues, recently detailed the educational experience of his daughter, who completed sixth grade in June. He writes that her teachers didn’t use textbooks, assign homework, or expect kids to study at home for tests, didn’t teach kids to sound out words, and didn’t drill times tables. He also mentions that there were no spelling tests, students didn’t practice handwriting of any kind, cursive or otherwise, and didn’t learn the 50 states and their capitals, let alone world geography.

Aldeman is very concerned by this shift, arguing that her educational experience has “reduced instructional time devoted to science and social studies and emphasized isolated skills such as critical thinking or reading comprehension over teaching students a coherent body of knowledge and facts.”

The scenario spelled out by Aldeman is hardly an isolated case, as traditional pedagogical fads have replaced tried and true methods. Additionally, political causes in education are frequently front and center to the detriment of traditional learning. In a 2022 statement, the National Council of Teachers of English declared: “The time has come to decenter book reading and essay-writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” Instead, teachers are urged to focus on “media literacy” and short texts that students feel are “relevant.”

In many places, the curriculum has taken a Marxist turn. In New York City, students now receive lessons critical of capitalism, that black Americans should receive reparations, that student loans are equivalent to “debt peonage,” and the feasibility of abolishing the police.

In Evanston, IL, the district is loaded with Critical Race Theory bilge. Schools there are committed to equity and to “identifying practices, policies, and institutional barriers, including institutional racism and privilege, which perpetuate opportunity and achievement gaps.”

One of the many new trends in education is the teaching of ethnic studies, which means different things in different locales. In the state of Washington, where ethnic studies is a graduation requirement, its main goal is to “dismantle white supremacy.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/what_happens_to_all_the_unnecessary_dei_workers.html

Recall the adage to be careful of what you wish for… you might just get it. This sage advice is currently being demonstrated in the decline of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) crusade. Scarcely a week passes without major corporations and universities ending their DEI programs but unfortunately, these cutbacks hardly mean the end of DEI; it may even get worse. The reality is that the thousands of newly unemployed functionaries plus countless would-be DEI commissars are not about to disappear.

Particularly worrying that DEI functionaries are disproportionately middle-class African Americans, and unlike politically voiceless Kentucky coal miners now unemployed due to the push for green energy, they will not quietly go out to pasture on government doles.

Now for the “you may get what you wish for” bad news: the federal government is likely to pick up the slack, and the armies of now unemployed DEI functionaries and future racial preference experts will undoubtedly find a home in the vast federal bureaucracy. In a sense, this recalls the Great Depression, when the federal government served as the employer of last resort. Now, however, rather than build the next Hoover dam, these new hires will push Washington to ensure that that the federal workforce “looks like America” while prioritizing diversity, equity and inclusion.

The federal government has already gone on a DEI hiring spree. On the first day of his administration (January 20th, 2021), Biden issued an Executive Order, to “…Advance Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/universities-should-be-political-but-not-politicized

Wesleyan University’s campus was abuzz last week after student protesters, demanding divestment from the “U.S.–Israeli Empire,” occupied an administrative building and refused to leave until the police arrived and threatened arrest. This was a new development for Wesleyan, whose president Michael Roth had boasted about not calling the police during the past year’s protests. His leniency didn’t earn him many friends among the demonstrators: in an Instagram video posted by the student group Beyond Empire, students shout “shame on you” at Roth as he walks away—under the floating text, “f— michael roth.”

It’s hard to feel sorry for Roth, though. As my colleague at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) Steve McGuire was quick to point out, he published a New York Times op-ed at the beginning of September titled “I’m a College President, and I Hope My Campus Is Even More Political This Year.”

Clickbait headline aside, much of what Roth says in the op-ed would be unobjectionable were it not for the deplorable occurrences on American campuses over the past year. He decries the vision of a college education as merely a means to make a better living, arguing instead that colleges should lean into their “civic mission” of preparing students to be better citizens, capable of respectful and productive disagreement. In pursuit of this mission, he says, professors should use the classroom not to indoctrinate students but rather to challenge them to think deeply about how we ought to live in a community.

If a campus being “political” means that its professors are educating students with an eye toward responsible citizenship, then many of us at ACTA and elsewhere would also like to see campuses be more political. Students are woefully ignorant of American history and government. Colleges would do well to mandate basic civics lessons to teach students how to think critically about America’s past and to form well-reasoned arguments about shaping America’s future.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/02/classical-v-unclassical-curricula/

Chad Aldeman, a Virginia-based researcher who focuses on education-related issues, recently detailed the educational experience of his daughter, who completed sixth grade in June. He writes that her teachers didn’t use textbooks, assign homework, or expect kids to study at home for tests, didn’t teach kids to sound out words, and didn’t drill times tables. He also mentions that there were no spelling tests, students didn’t practice handwriting of any kind, cursive or otherwise, and didn’t learn the 50 states and their capitals, let alone world geography.

Aldeman is very concerned by this shift, arguing that her educational experience has “reduced instructional time devoted to science and social studies and emphasized isolated skills such as critical thinking or reading comprehension over teaching students a coherent body of knowledge and facts.”

The scenario spelled out by Aldeman is hardly an isolated case, as traditional pedagogical fads have replaced tried and true methods. Additionally, political causes in education are frequently front and center to the detriment of traditional learning. In a 2022 statement, the National Council of Teachers of English declared: “The time has come to decenter book reading and essay-writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” Instead, teachers are urged to focus on “media literacy” and short texts that students feel are “relevant.”

In many places, the curriculum has taken a Marxist turn. In New York City, students now receive lessons critical of capitalism, that black Americans should receive reparations, that student loans are equivalent to “debt peonage,” and the feasibility of abolishing the police.

In Evanston, IL, the district is loaded with Critical Race Theory bilge. Schools there are committed to equity and to “identifying practices, policies, and institutional barriers, including institutional racism and privilege, which perpetuate opportunity and achievement gaps.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/on-race-and-admissions-elite-universities-cannot-be-trusted

When the Supreme Court banned the use of race in college admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, elite universities variously condemned and pledged to subvert the verdict. Now that multiple top schools have announced the racial composition of their 2028 classes, we’re learning what that looks like in practice.

Ending race-based affirmative action was expected to change elite universities’ demographics substantially. Indeed, in SFFA, many of these schools signed an amicus brief arguing that it was imperative that they be allowed to continue discriminating, because race-neutral methods would keep them from admitting classes with—in their view—enough black and Hispanic students.

Yet, in their first admitted undergraduate classes following the Supreme Court’s ruling, several top universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Penn, and Duke, have seen little to none of the expected shift in the racial composition. On average, the cumulative black and Hispanic shares of these schools’ incoming classes has declined by just 0.6 percentage points (from 26.8 percent to 26.2 percent), while the Asian share has fallen 2.4 percentage points (from 32 percent to 29.6 percent). Though schools record their demographic data differently—some exclude international students from their calculations, for example—the general pattern indicated by these results is troubling.

We know that elite universities previously discriminated against white and Asian applicants to benefit black and Hispanic students. So, universities like Yale that signed the amicus brief and have seen little change in their demographics after SFFA are either breaking the law now, or they were misleading the Supreme Court when they declared race-neutral methods insufficient to achieve their diversity goals. Which is it? The answer is probably both.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/meet-russell-rickford-who-found-oct-7-exhilarating/

The New York Post reported Thursday that “the Cornell University professor who last year called Hamas’ depraved Oct. 7 attack ‘exhilarating’ sparked more outrage Wednesday after taking part in an anti-Israel march on campus where protesters chanted, ‘Long live the intifada.’” More on Russell Rickford’s reappearance in the anti-Israel protesters’ ranks can be found here: “Cornell professor who cheered Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack sparks more outrage after marching in anti-Israel protest,” by Carl Campanile and David Propper, New York Post, September 19, 2024:

Associate history professor Russell Rickford walked with dozens of demonstrators as they spewed slogans against Israel, with one Jewish student calling the controversial instructor’s presence at the protest “insane” and another accusing him of “emboldening hate.”

Rickford was the only faculty member accompanying anti-Israel and pro-Hamas demonstrators on September 18. The participants were calling for support of an Intifada, a violent “uprising” of Palestinians against the Jews of Israel, akin to the Second Intifada.

Photos and videos obtained by The Post show Rickford clapping along with the chants as he walked with a keffiyeh around his shoulders and wearing an Ivy cap on his head — similar to the hat he wore last year when he made his shocking statements.

Intifada is the Arabic word that in English means “uprising” or “shaking off.”

In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, intifada has been used to describe violent Palestinian protests against the Jewish state, according to the American Jewish Committee. The White House has previously condemned the phrase.

Protesters eventually crashed a career fair that was held on campus where school officials said they pushed past school police officers — though it does not appear Rickford was part of that disruption from footage posted online.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/education-for-freedom-not-dei/

Two Supreme Court decisions in 2023 struck down the use of race-based admission to colleges and universities, and proscribed various proxies for race like admission essays. But just a year out, the Wall Street Journal reports, “The group Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA),” who represented the Asian-American applicants before the court, “suspects this [violation of the rules] about Yale, Princeton and Duke universities, and on Tuesday it asked the schools for information on how they chose the current freshmen who will graduate in the class of 2028.”

Having spent more than 50 years of my life in universities, I’ve had a front-row seat for observing how universities over the years have juked their admission criteria to make sure they admitted enough “protected classes,” which means anybody except white males. In my university, for example, even after California in 1996 passed Proposition 209, which forbade the explicit use of race, the admissions and hiring process still comprised numerous opportunities for evaluators to discern the applicant’s race.

The former “Affirmative Action Officer,” for example, required the hiring committee to document each member’s sex and race, as well as the applicants’. After Prop 209, the university didn’t observe the law, but merely changed the title to the “EEOC Officer,” who still gathered the same data that were inappropriate if the process was truly merit-based, while reminding everybody that the federal agency Big Brother was watching.

So those experiences made me skeptical when “Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the 6-3 majority that students must be admitted ‘based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race’ and that ‘what cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly.’”

But the really damaging idea connected to affirmative action came from an earlier Supreme Court decision and still remains today. Despite the blatant violation of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act, these race-based policies were given the Supreme Court’s imprimatur in its 1978 Bakke decision. The court didn’t, as it should have, proscribe preferences based on race, but just numerical quotas, which were easily circumvented to reach the same end––choosing by race rather than merit.