RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/15/scholastic-pushes-a-false-racial-narrative-to-elementary-children/

Scholastic seeks to connect emotively with our children and change the way they think about the United States and the ideals, principles, and freedoms it was founded upon.

What do George Floyd, Thanksgiving, and the Civil War all have in common? The publicly traded Scholastic Corporation has made a conscious decision to weave them into a twisted account of American History (their label) portraying our country as systemically racist, fundamentally flawed, and essentially evil. Articles written in their weekly Scholastic News Review are mandatory classroom reading and discussion for our children—6 million in total from first through sixth grade across the country, according to Scholastic.

During back-to-school week in August, these 6 million mostly elementary-age students were welcomed back with an article titled “Demanding Justice,” with the subheading: “Protests spread across the United States after a Black man is killed by police.”

The opening article paragraphs are misleading and disturbing:

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are demanding an end to the long history of racism and police brutality against Black people in the U.S. He (George Floyd) died after being pinned to the ground by a white police officer. The officer had pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for more than 8 minutes. Floyd repeatedly said he couldn’t breathe.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1776-report-11610754084?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

President Trump established the 1776 Commission with an executive order last year for the purpose of producing a counter-balance to the political left’s largely negative interpretation of American history.

The commission’s report, set for release Monday, won’t silence criticism of America, as liberal teachers groups feared. That isn’t in the power of the federal government, let alone an advisory commission. Instead, the 1776 Report makes the case for the American creed and a less radical way to teach history.

“Neither America nor any other nation has perfectly lived up to the universal truths of equality, liberty, justice and government by consent,” the report states. “But no nation before America ever dared state those truths as the formal basis for its politics, and none has strived harder, or done more, to achieve them.”

The Declaration of Independence’s claim that “all men are created equal” was a revolution in itself, a turning point in world history. To reduce America to its violations of that principle, as do many contemporary writers, is to miss the distinguishing part of the story that roused freedom lovers and terrified tyrants everywhere—and still does. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we celebrate Monday, could make America better by insisting it be truer to its own founding principles.

Those steeped in recent academic accounts of the U.S. may wonder how the 1776 Report can say core U.S. principles are “true” and still call itself history. That’s because it reads the Declaration not as archaeology or dissimulation, but as a live claim that demands adjudication.

Can anyone be surprised to hear that undergraduate history enrollments lately have hit new lows, facing worse drop-offs than any other department?

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/06/sophists-choice/

The latest anti-school choice rant comes to us courtesy of Diane Ravitch, “a historian of education,” who is the Arthur C. Clarke of her field. When she writes, the reader is treated to science fiction dosed with a substantive amount of snake oil for good measure. In the current New York Review of Books, Ravitch’s “The Dark History of School Choice” is laden with cherry-picked half-truths and a level of fearmongering guaranteed to put a satisfied smirk on the face of every teacher union leader.

Reviewing several books on the subject, she does correctly cite a few circumstances where the push for the privatization of schools was used to promote racial segregation, but her 3,700-word tirade is very light on facts and is instead primarily an excuse to bash Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Christianity, and free-market policies in education.

As director of policy at EdChoice Jason Bedrick notes, there have been seven studies examining the effect of private school choice on racial integration. Six found positive effects and one showed no significant statistical difference. Another important piece of data conveniently absent from Ravitch’s screed is that a recent American Federation for Children poll conducted by Beck Research—a Democratic polling firm—finds that nationally, school choice is very popular with Latinos—82 percent support it, while 68 percent of African Americans are in favor. It is important to note that this poll was taken in January 2020, before the teacher unions strong-armed school districts into ditching in-person learning.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/incubating-hatred-how-radical-professors-help-richard-l-cravatts/

While the pandemic greatly disrupted campus activities in 2020, the student governments of at least three universities managed to focus their efforts to pass BDS resolutions, bills that asked their respective universities to divest from holdings of companies doing business with Israel.

At the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, that school’s resolution “called on the university to divest from Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Company, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar Inc. and Elbit Systems Ltd. for what the resolution alleges is partaking in human-rights violations in the Palestinian territories. . . .” Additionally, in a twist that forced Jewish students to choose between supporting the Black Lives Matter movement and condemning Israel, the resolution included concessions for the minority community and a nod to BLM, and “also called for the university to divest from its own police department . . . and for the university to divest from companies involved in the prison system, U.S. immigration enforcement and fossil fuels.”

A successful BDS resolution vote at Columbia University similarly demanded that the school “divest its stocks, funds, and endowment from companies that profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s acts toward Palestinians that, according to Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), fall under the United Nations International Convention of the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid.” 

And, most recently, in November at San Francisco State University (SFSU), a perennial hotbed of anti-Israel agitation, a resolution promoted by the radical group General Union of Palestine Students was passed and called on the University to divest from a list of some 100 companies “that benefit from Israeli Occupation, racism, and colonialism” in Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria. “[T]hese investments harm San Francisco State’s Palestinian, Arab, Muslim students,” the resolution read, “many of whom have families who currently live under Israeli occupation, or are descendants of Palestinians who have been killed or forcibly relocated as a result of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.” 

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2020/12/30/at_princeton_a_racial_reckoning_and_a_free_speech_battle_110526.html

In 2015, Princeton University became the second higher-education institution to sign the University of Chicago Statement supporting campus free speech. Yet, five years later, Princeton professor Keith E. Whittington wrote that the university stood “on the front lines” of the battle over speech. Those battle lines were drawn this summer by students and faculty demanding the adoption of “anti-racist” policies, which some on campus say run counter to free speech and open inquiry.

“The faculty were willing to write a commitment to academic freedom into the university’s governing documents in 2015 – but now, in 2020, they are being asked to carve out a substantial exception to that principle,” Whittington wrote for RealClearPolitics in August.

Princeton ranked just 29th in the 2020 College Free Speech Rankings, an ambitious survey of nearly 20,000 students at 55 schools conducted by RealClearEducation, research firm College Pulse, and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). When Princeton’s conservative students ranked the school, it dropped to 42nd. It ranked 47th on ideological diversity and earned a “red” designation from FIRE, indicating a restrictive speech code.

The survey showed that many Princeton students censor themselves in classrooms and social settings. Seventy-six percent said that they would be somewhat or very uncomfortable expressing unpopular views on social media. Fifty-two percent indicated that they would be somewhat or very uncomfortable disagreeing with a professor.

A Racial Reckoning
The two most difficult subjects to discuss at Princeton were Israel/Palestine issues and transgender issues. Affirmative action and race weren’t far behind.

Rebekah Adams, a senior and president of the Princeton Open Campus Coalition (POCC), a student group committed to defending free speech and civil dialogue, told RealClearEducation that many students fear speaking freely will bring academic repercussions such as lower grades and “social ostracization.”

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/12/the-silent-crisis-the-threat-of-mass-illiteracy/

“There are alarming implications for what could happen to our freedoms if we witness the emergence of a political and legal class who can function with virtually no scrutiny from a population that is too illiterate and therefore too disengaged to understand the language of power.”

Despite enormous efforts, despite a battery of programs and remedial regimes and the emergence of an entire sub-industry of school consultants and marketeers, the capacity to read and write across the English-speaking world shows evidence of steep decline. This should be a cause for community concern. Poor literacy is strongly associated with anti-social behaviour. Very literate people seldom enter the prison system, which suggests that widespread literacy is part of a good inoculation against criminality.

In most Western societies, the prison population has the highest concentration of illiteracy. In an interview with the Shannon Trust, a charity that promotes reading in United Kingdom jails, the journalist Stephen Moss was told that 50 per cent of British prisoners are functionally illiterate. The Literacy Project Foundation in the United States estimates 85 per cent of juvenile offenders have trouble reading, while other research estimates the illiteracy rate in American jails to be at least 75 per cent.

In 2015, the ABC reported that only 40 per cent of Victoria’s prison population had sufficient literacy to cope independently in the workforce. Or, put around the other way, 60 per cent of Victoria’s prisoners cannot read and write well enough to cope in most workplaces.

Lower literacy is related to poorer life choices, worse health, shorter lifespans and poverty. On a grander measure of human value, illiteracy denies people the ability to participate fully in their society. For at least a hundred years, basic literacy has been the necessary qualification for virtually all useful employment and for meaningful community involvement.

Literacy—sufficient to understand and produce complex texts—is even more important for our future. Fluent literacy is essential for citizens in any intellectual democracy that wishes to flourish. Since the beginning of popular democracy, the system has been safeguarded by vigilant citizens. The strength and stability of a democracy rest on the ability of its citizens to debate, understand and engage with complex ideas. Such engagement requires literacy above a basic standard. If much of modern political discourse seems to be emotional, visceral and simplistic, it may well reflect the inability of many in the electorate to handle complex ideas.