RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/using_antiracism_to_avoid_teaching_students_proper_english.html

It’s almost as if some universities are trying to convince parents that it’s not worth spending more than a quarter of a million dollars on a degree. If you don’t learn how to write standard English and go from campus out on the job market, your will find your career opportunities limited. If not right away, then later on.

But the racial frenzy gripping higher education seems to insist that any standard that minorities have disproportionate difficulty meeting must be discarded. Even if it sabotages those students’ chances of future success.

Jeremiah Poff of The College Fix explains:

American University is hosting a seminar next month to teach faculty how to assess writing without judging its quality. In the seminar’s own words: “grading ain’t just grading.”

It’s led by Asao Inoue, a University of Washington-Tacoma professor, and the purpose is to pursue “antiracist ends” through writing assessments.

A national scholarly organization that preaches its “commitment” to academic excellence came out swinging against the seminar, telling The College Fix that Inoue’s ideas are “destroying the very idea that composition classes should teach all students to write well.”

In an email, National Association of Scholars spokesperson Chance Layton said Inoue is “substituting social justice ideologues’ bigotry for instruction in composition”:

The national dominance of social justice educators such as Prof. Inoue indoctrinates college graduates nationwide into social justice ideology and bigotry–but fails to teach them how to write a coherent sentence.

https://canadafreepress.com/article/colleges-are-breeding-grounds-for-civil-war

We have become a nation of angry people. Too many of us carry a chip on our shoulder and find racism everywhere, sexism everywhere, misogyny rampant, homophobia out of control. It is no wonder we have masked leftists lashing out with violence, a new congresswoman making profanity-laced speeches demanding President Trump’s impeachment. We now have a Democrat majority House of Representatives with scores of avowed communists in their ranks who are in no mood to cooperate with the system as founded, but to overturn it.

Heather MacDonald, political commentator, essayist, attorney, and journalist says that universities and colleges in America today are breeding grounds for hate and planting seeds for civil war. Students are being trained by cultural Marxists in faculty and administration and it’s been going on for decades.

Students taught to hate Western civilization, each other

In the 80s, students were told the only thing they needed to know about a book was the author’s race and gender to decide whether it was of value to read. Hence, much of the works of Western Civilization were discarded. It is much worse today.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/new-york-state-declares-war-on-private-education/

In recent years, certain advocacy groups have criticized private Jewish schools, generally known as yeshivoth, claiming that the schools provide a substandard education. At issue is the interpretation of a New York state law passed in the late 19th century that requires private schools to provide an education “substantially equivalent” to that offered in the public schools. Through the decades, the various private school networks, whether religious or non-sectarian, have managed to meet this vague requirement to the satisfaction of local authorities and the New York State Education Department (NYSED).

Until now. Under substantial pressure from an organization called Young Advocates for Fair Education (YAFFED), which has actually filed suit against NYSED to try to force the matter, NYSED recently issued detailed guidelines concerning its interpretation of “substantially equivalent.” The guidelines contain a precise syllabus that must be followed, and also dictate how many hours per week are to be devoted to each of the secular subjects by grade level.

The result threw the world of private education in New York into a tizzy. Most glaringly, the guidance from NYSED required 35 hours a week of secular studies in grades 5 through 8 — a requirement which would have left virtually no time for sacred studies, the raison d’être of religious schools.

Under intense public pressure via petitions, telephone calls, and emails, NYSED revised the guidelines. It eliminated the time requirements in grades 5 and 6, and cut the amount of time required for secular education in grades 7 and 8 roughly by half.CONTINUE AT SITE

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/01/dumb-and-increasingly-dumber/
“Unfortunately, we are living in a time when a growing number of children and students are being dumbed down and turned out into the world by teachers, lecturers and professors whose minds have been corrupted by disconnected thinking over a long period. The process is akin to communist re-education. ”

If you train the brain to ignore consequences then it seems to me, admittedly as a non-neurologist, that you will perforce become increasingly stupid as the lessons of repeated failure are ignored. And thus, the progressive Left must be treated as a race apart when IQ testing is conducted.

I read something the other day which suggested that intelligence was falling. I couldn’t find the article, which is always annoying, so turned to the internet. Judging by the first Google page, there seems to be a degree of consensus that IQ scores are on the way down in the developed world. God knows what the IQ scores are in the struggling world. A Norwegian study was cited by CNN in June 2018, for example, with the added comment that “similar studies in Denmark, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Finland and Estonia have demonstrated a similar downward trend in IQ scores.”

This all means, of course, that younger people, on average, are dafter than older people. It used to be that intelligence was linked to genes. However, the latest fad points to environmental factors like the emergence of the moronic addiction to electronic displays and social media and to the quality of teaching. Me, I don’t discount the brain-sapping effects of screen living or being taught by green-left dolts, but it seems obvious too that the higher survival rates of dullards, who would have otherwise perished because of poor hygiene, nutrition and medical care, does little for average IQs. In sum, if it is happening, it’s probably down to a mixture of environmental factors and genes.

But is it happening? Are the tests reliable? I am no longer sure that it is possible to undertake rigorous studies of intelligence without stratification of the subjects’ political allegiances. In other words, to my point, I wouldn’t be surprised if both older and younger people on the progressive Left were not (downward) biasing the outcome of recent testing.

I conjecture that young conservatives have retained the intelligence of their parents and grandparents. Whereas, those on the progressive Left whether older or younger have regressed. They are, in fact, on this account, more accurately termed ‘regressives’. Why would this be the case, you might ask?

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2019/1/if-orwell-were-alive-today

It’s time for another trip to Williams College. Regular readers will recall some of our earlier trips to that quaint, protected menagerie tucked away in the Berkshires where, for a mere $69,950 per annum, you can—supposing you got the right grades in high school or check the right boxes—while away four years claiming to be oppressed and, if you enjoy pretending that you do not know whether you are male or female, try on a bizarre list of made-up personal pronouns announcing your indeterminacy. Wot larks!

Regular readers will also recall our words of praise for the so-called “Chicago Statement” a few years back. What made that document so unusual in the fetid atmosphere of timorous totalitarian conformity that is the rule at most academic institutions these days was its rousing defense of free speech. Everywhere from Yale to Berkeley, coddled students clamor to be protected from “offensive” ideas—that is, from ideas that challenge their taken-for-granted pieties about the world. It used to be that higher education was about expanding one’s horizons and learning new things. More and more these days, it is about donning the ideological blinders so that no idea not certified to reinforce one’s prejudices slips through to unsettle one’s complacency. Into that humid atmosphere came a major university saying, Balderdash! If you want a “safe space” into which scary ideas will not intrude, the statement said, in effect, you should not come to the University of Chicago. The essence of the statement is captured in these few lines:

In a word, the University’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.

The good news is that some fifty-three universities, including such distinguished institutions as Columbia, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, Purdue, and Michigan State, have adopted the principles enunciated by the Chicago Statement. The bad news is that the adoption is often nominal and that fifty-three out of some 5,300 is a pretty small number.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13456/intersectionality-islamism

Censored from today’s campuses is discussion of another, in various respects competing, intersectionality: That of the shared, intersecting, predicaments of today’s victims of Islamist aggression, including terrorism.

Hamas’s operatives have trained in Sudan and worked with Sudanese forces, including those that have been engaged in the Darfur genocide. This is the organization whose supporters are leading movers behind the campus intersectionality/boycott campaign and have become the moral arbiters of campus political correctness.

Of those killed at the Twin Towers on 9/11, 215 were black (136 men, 79 women). Other African Americans were murdered in subsequent Islamist-inspired terrorist attacks in California and Florida and elsewhere, and are as likely to be victims of future such terror attacks as anyone else. But work to prevent, and minimize the impact, of such assaults apparently counts for no more to Black Lives Matter, when weighed against promoting an anti-Israel agenda, than it does to SJP and other Hamas-linked groups.

The “intersectionality” promoted on campuses and beyond by Hamas/SJP and their fellow travelers seeks, in pursuit of its anti-Israel agenda, to distract attention from the Islamist onslaught, its ongoing savaging of populations in Africa, Asia and America.

The term “intersectionality” was coined by an African-American academic, Kimberlé Crenshaw, in 1989 to denote the circumstance of being the target of more than one bias. Crenshaw saw herself as the potential victim of both anti-black racism and misogyny, thereby living at the intersection of the two bigotries. In recent years, the term has gained prominence on many of the nation’s campuses to signify something else: the supposed shared, “intersecting,” predicaments of racial and ethnic groups — as well as women and sexual minorities — victimized by white male racism and its history of imperialism, colonialism, exploitation and slavery.

While one can fully acknowledge the depredations of European imperialism and its exploitation of non-European populations, one can also debate the extent of its current impact on non-European populations, women and sexual minorities. Except that one cannot debate it: In much of Western, including American, academia today, such debate is not permitted.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/student-found-to-have-violated-title-ix-by-asking-another-student-on-a-date/
Dating can be awkward enough without adding legal hazards to the mix.

A student at the University of Missouri was found to be in violation of Title IX because he asked another student out on a date and is physically larger than she is.

According to a deposition about the case, the male student was deemed to have violated civil-rights law — and was guilty of sexual harassment — because he asked a female student out on a date that she did not want. Why? Because he was bigger than her, and his “physical size” meant that “he was perceived as having power over her.”

The deposition gained some attention after it was shared by KC Johnson, a Brooklyn College professor, on Twitter. It’s not clear from the documents what kind of punishment, if any, the student faced for his violation — but the fact that an official even deemed what he did to be a violation is scary enough.

Sexual harassment and discrimination are both very serious issues, and it’s important to have policies in place to protect people from them. This, however, is quite clearly a total abuse and misuse of Title IX.

It would be one thing if this student were a teacher or other type of authority figure. Then I could certainly understand how that would be sexual harassment. But this was not the case. This was simply one student asking another student out on a date, which, believe it or not, is completely normal and appropriate human behavior. So what if he was bigger than her? Spoiler alert: Most men are bigger than most women. If it’s a violation to ask out a woman who is smaller than you, then both men and women are going to have a lot fewer options in their romantic lives.

https://quillette.com/2018/12/26/refighting
On November 21, two educators published an article that lamented the declining quality of written work produced by American adolescents. Early in the piece, Temple University professors Kathy Hirsch-Pasek and Laurence Steinberg cite a 2011 study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics that yielded this disturbing claim: “Only one in four [high school seniors] can construct an essay that is coherent and well structured, with ideas presented clearly and logically.” To bolster their case, Hirsch-Pasek and Steinberg present anecdotal evidence from other university professors privy to what this deficit looks like (literally on paper) at the next level. One, from “a high-ranking state university,” resorted to altering “her syllabus to take two full days to review the idea of a topic sentence.” Illustrating the ubiquity of this trend, another professor, this time from “a highly ranked private college, wrote in a recent Facebook post that he took time out of class to explain how to write, noting that students had no idea what they didn’t know.”

Does this sound alarmist? Well, it shouldn’t, because we’ve been hearing about the problem for years now. If you’re a parent, you might be wondering how something this counterintuitive could occur. Don’t high schoolers need to write admissions essays to earn spots at elite universities? Wouldn’t those essays need to be both clear and logical? Are admissions officers unaware of these foreboding nationwide studies?

I shall spare you my answers to those rhetorical questions, and share instead a potential cause of this apparent epidemic that’s too often overlooked. It sounds hyperbolic, but according to a 2001 essay by David Foster Wallace entitled “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage,” it’s been undeniable since the early 1980s: “In neither K-12 nor college English are systematic [Standard Written English] grammar and usage much taught anymore.” Again, this doesn’t sound plausible. How could teachers instruct students to write well without giving them any rules or basic conventions? No reasonable answer exists, but thanks to Wallace’s observations, I can assure you that our current condition was inevitable.