RUTHFULLY YOURS

I am the Headmistress of a school called Michaela, a free school in inner-city London, trying to make a difference. We opened in 2014 and we have been straining to increase opportunity for our working-class kids ever since. The good news is that so far we have been winning the fight. The bad news is that the technology epidemic is one hell of a weapon in the enemy’s arsenal.

Visitors to our school often ask me what has been our biggest obstacle. I used to say our detractors. Protesters demanding the closure of free schools outside our gates, or letters/emails/tweets shouting abuse or even death threats are hard to handle. We also have to manage the absence of a sports hall and sports fields (we don’t have any grass at all) and tightening budgets. Finding excellent teachers is also hard. But none of that compares to the fight we have against technology.

In the last few weeks, I have had dozens of individual meetings with our Year Ten families as we prepare for 2019 when their children will take their GCSE exams. In some of the meetings, both the child and the parent will say that the child is doing too much homework, that the school should expect less of them. The parent knows the child has their smartphone next to them during homework time, giving them access to video games, Snapchat, Instagram, Netflix, WhatsApp and YouTube. Yet the parent is still convinced that their child is doing their homework properly.

I then try to explain to the parent why I think this is dangerous, as I have done at assembly to the children. Several of the big tech CEOs don’t allow their children to own smartphones and when they are older don’t allow them unsupervised access to the internet on their phones. Steve Jobs, when asked what his children thought of the iPad when it came out in 2010, said they had not tried it because he thought it was too dangerous. Both he and Bill Gates preferred their children to spend time around the dinner table talking about books and history. Imagine that: these big tech CEOs pack their houses with real books with pages to turn!

This is always eye-opening for our parents. They, like me, had no idea. In fact, I hear stories from parents who have saved for months in order to get their child a new smartphone for their birthday. Some of them then look to me in desperation, saying that the present they saved up for now monopolises and controls their child.

For parents who are still unconvinced, I suggest that these CEOs must know something we don’t know. They must have inside knowledge. They are protecting their own children from what they are selling to our children. I explain how the tech CEOs remind me of Snoop Dogg, who sells rap to other people’s children, yet doesn’t allow his own children to listen to his music.

Nearly one year after the release of Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education, NAS’s report remains front page news. Through our work on this issue, NAS has also become a go-to resource for Senators and Representatives considering policy changes to address Chinese government-funded Confucius Institutes at American college campuses.
Earlier this month, Florida Senator Marco Rubio cited NAS’s report in a letter sent to all Confucius Institutes in Florida. Senator Rubio also questioned FBI head Christopher Wray in a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on February 13, at which Wray acknowledged, for the first time, that the FBI is investigating Confucius Institutes.
NAS has briefed staff members for six U.S. Senators and Representatives; the Government Accountability Office; the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee; and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. We have recommended specific policy changes to address Confucius Institutes.
Outsourced to China has become one of several key studies—including Academic Malware by University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins and the documentary In the Name of Confucius—that have turned Confucius Institutes into a topic of national discussion. We are gratified to note that at least one Confucius Institute, at the University of West Florida, is now preparing to close.
NAS is committed to engaging with members of Congress, academic institutions, and members of the media to promote academic integrity and push back against the rise of Confucius Institutes. We encourage NAS members to learn more about the threat Confucius Institutes pose to academic freedom and institutional integrity by visiting www.nas.org/ConfuciusInstitutes.

Harvard’s Catharine MacKinnon correctly noted the Israel Defense Forces’ ethics. But when a colleague accused her of praising the Jewish state, the celebrated scholar went on the attack.

Before Kendall Myers was sentenced to life imprisonment for betraying secrets to Cuba, he was an avid proselytizer for the London Review of Books. As recounted in Toby Harnden’s 2009 Washingtonian profile, the former State Department analyst (who had spent 30 years spying for the Castro regime) would pass copies of the Review to his neighbor in the tony D.C. Westchester building along with the endorsement that the magazine was “much better on Palestine” than its American inspiration, the New York Review of Books. That publication, known for printing Tony Judt’s call for a binational Palestinian state and Peter Beinart’s jeremiads against the “American Jewish establishment,” was, Myers sniffed, “too Israeli.”

Myers has thankfully not been heard from, on politics or the relative merits of book reviews, since his sentencing nearly a decade ago. (“I see no sense of remorse,” the federal judge told Myers and his wife, who assisted his espionage, at the couple’s sentencing. “You were proud of what you did.”) But I was reminded of Myers’s recommendation when reading the letters section of the current London Review. There, the feminist American legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon can be found angrily responding to a review of her most recent book, Butterfly Politics. The reviewer, Lorna Finlayson of the University of Essex, had taken exception to MacKinnon’s 2008 acceptance of an honorary doctorate from Hebrew University in defiance of the academic Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) movement against Israel. (Moreover, “one of the people honored alongside her was Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French philosopher and critic of ‘Islamic extremism.’”) Adding insult to injury, MacKinnon returned to the Zionist entity in 2014, where she “delivered a speech at the Kiryat Ono Academic College in which she praised the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) as ‘the only army in the world that does not rape the women of its occupied people.’” Citing the Israeli historian Benny Morris’ work on the 1948 War of Independence and a 27-year-old Amnesty International report, Finlayson disputes that this is in fact the case.

Finlayson also takes issue with what she calls MacKinnon’s “broadly pro-American narrative when it comes to global politics.” MacKinnon, a critic of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and hardly a liberal interventionist, is guilty of this charge because she draws a parallel between terrorism and misogynist violence, seeing both rooted in a “masculine ideology.” This is revealing of a “pro-American narrative,” Finlayson argues, because, while women have done nothing to deserve the violence of a patriarchal society, the same can hardly be said of the terrorism directed at America and other Western imperialist states, responsible for the “destruction of entire Middle Eastern societies and their ways of life.”

In most academic circles, especially the ones inhabited by Catharine MacKinnon and Laura Finlayson, the accusation that one is acting as a useful idiot for George W. Bush is a scarlet letter, as depraved as liking child pornography or torturing animals. But the allegation that she is a handmaiden of American imperialism is not what prompted MacKinnon to write a letter to the editor. No, it was the fear that readers of the London Review of Books might mistake her for having even the slightest sympathy for the Jewish State which stirred the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at Michigan Law and James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School to action.

As you file your taxes, try not to think too hard about the revelation that your hard-earned money is helping someone achieve their dream of becoming a clown. Because, apparently becoming a clown requires going to college, and going to college requires taxpayers footing the bill. Next time you’re at the circus, demand a “thank you” from a clown.

CNS News provides more information about the bad news regarding the gross misuse of our taxes: “The federal government is funding a clown school located in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco-based congressional district that has classes and workshops on ‘Precision Idiocy’ and how to act like a ‘Buffoon,'” CNS wrote. “The school, which is called the ‘Clown Conservatory’ and is part of the nonprofit Circus Center, received a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts that runs from June 2017 through May 2018.” Clown Conservatory claims to be “the United States’ only professional training program for clowns and physical comedians.”

The Clown Conservatory is split into two sessions over 24 weeks. Tuition is $6,000. While much cheaper than many colleges, I’m not sure if the return on investment is quite the same.

Although, I may not be treating the Clown Conservatory fairly. As my editor pointed out, I may just be jealous. It’s true that I have taken mime classes and had to pay for them out of my pocket; I received no federal financial aid to help pay for my mime classes. So, in the issue of full disclosure, I may simply be bitter that I’m now having to pay for other people’s mime classes via my tax dollars. CONTINUE AT SITE

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. – Reality television personality Rick Harrison of the History Channel’s “Pawn Stars” lamented that too many high school and college students in America believe “capitalism is bad” and that the federal government can afford to “pay for everything.”

“Kids come out of high school today, they think corporations are bad. They think capitalism is bad. The No. 1 thing in the world that has brought people out of poverty is capitalism,” Harrison said at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside D.C. on Friday.

“We have a generation of young people who think the government can just pay for everything and they have no understanding of how government works and … who we are, why we are and why this country has become such a great country,” he added. “You have kids in college who really think this is a bad country – trust me, I’ve been to India, this is a great country.”

Harrison, co-owner of the World Famous Gold & Silver Pawn Shop in Las Vegas, told the audience that he would not have been able to overcome his battle with childhood epilepsy and succeed in any other country.

“I had to drop out of high school because I was so sick and I became very, very wealthy because I tried really hard. I failed a lot of times, but eventually I got it. There’s no other country in the world, I believe, I could have done that in. So this is a great country,” he said. “When they are argue that this country is terrible, ask them: What country do you think is so great then? Because you’re never going to be able to find a country like this. I don’t know how else to put it.”

In Mitch Albom’s magical book titled The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto, “narrated by the voice of Music itself,” there is a singular line that describes what is sorely lacking in our world today. Many people speak of the cultural changes – perhaps even the cultural rot – demoralizing far too many Americans. Instead, we need, as Albom asserts, an understanding that “the secret is not to make your music louder but to make the world quieter.” Given the cacophony of brutal words spewed online via Twitter or by so many in show business and politics, we need a return to quiet introspection. It is imperative that we approach subjects with reason and logic rather than capitulate to the empty barrels that make the most noise.

In the world of education, it is long overdue to expect – in fact, demand – not perfection, but surely excellence. The soft bigotry of low expectations is producing a crop of young people who are functionally illiterate, historically ignorant, and frighteningly incoherent. For starters, the teaching of phonics must begin in kindergarten. I have college students who cannot sound out words or names because they were never taught how to use phonics. Moreover, students do not know what an anthology is because books are now replaced with readings on the internet. They have no clue about biblical or mythological allusions. There is a constant level of superficiality despite the plethora of information available to them. Few have learned the skills of separating the wheat from the chaff.

The so-called adults in the room are abdicating their responsibilities to mold and lead young people to make in-depth and thoughtful decisions. Instead, the focus is on who can scream the loudest and who can virtually blackmail higher authority. Facts are forsaken while censoring ideas is accepted, even applauded. This is not a good silence.

We need to return to ideas and language that evoke the sublime, not the gutter talk that pollutes so much conversation these days. We need to instill a return to the days of the “magic words” such as “please” and “thank you.” I cringe every time a person says “no problem” when I say “thank you.” It implies that being polite is a hardship in the first place.

Dizzy Gillespie once said, “It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.” In fact, “[s]ilence enhances music” just as pauses offer think time. But there are few rests in life anymore. It is a constant din.

Who knew that removing the federal government from debates over school bathroom policies would be considered an assault on LGBT rights? That’s the argument activists made last week when the Department of Education (DOE) announced that it would begin enforcing Title IX the way the federal government always had, up until the second term of the Obama administration. That’s when the Obama DOE announced that the word “sex” now meant “gender identity” — and ordered schools to open up their bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, and dorms accordingly.

It’s understandable that many ordinary Americans recoiled at this transgender mandate. Most Americans — including those who identify as transgender — aren’t activists and want to find ways to peacefully coexist. Most can understand why a man who identifies as a woman doesn’t want to be forced into the men’s room but also understand why women don’t want a man in the ladies’ room. These concerns are even more heightened when dealing with students.

New transgender policies raise five distinct areas of concern — privacy, safety, equality, liberty, and ideology — and the Trump administration is right to reject the radical Obama policies in favor of letting local officials work to find reasonable compromises.

“What made the event so memorable was how uneventful it was. This is what counts as a triumph on an American campus today. ”

Waiting to enter the university building that would house Thursday evening’s debate, I encountered a security guard, ruddy and robust. From a private firm, he looked unsure of his role on a college campus. “Expecting trouble?” I asked. He was noncommittal but gave off a whiff of apprehension. “Things could get out of hand,” he said. “A white supremacist’s coming to speak.”

The lecturer to whom he referred so damningly—and inaccurately—was Charles Murray, a libertarian social scientist who’s had more controversy thrust upon him than almost any other American public intellectual. Critics say that the disputation that shrouds Mr. Murray is entirely deserved, and many regard him in precisely the terms the unknowing guard had used.

This is largely on account of a book Mr. Murray co-wrote in 1994, “The Bell Curve.” Sections of it have been brandished as proving Mr. Murray believes that differences in IQ among individuals are attributable to race. Ergo, he’s a toxic racist. Mr. Murray’s lecture at Middlebury College last year was disrupted violently, sending his faculty escort to the hospital. This evening, Stanford took no chances.

Two hundred yards away, at a picturesque spot called History Corner, was a group of student protesters who didn’t want Mr. Murray on campus. “Hey hey, ho ho, Charles Murray’s got to go,” they chanted. Their gusto was impressive, though their lack of originality left me feeling shortchanged. Was that the best they could do with their world-class education? The drabness of their prosody was lifted somewhat by a spirited young rapper, although her punch line, “F— Steve Bannon, f— the Western canon,” seemed misdirected.

Mr. Murray had been invited by Stanford as part of a new university initiative “to help promote discussion of a diversity of perspectives” on campus. He was to debate Francis Fukuyama, perhaps America’s best-known political scientist, on the subject of “Inequality and Populism.” In the weeks preceding the event, argument had raged among students, and some faculty, about the merits of inviting Mr. Murray. Objections to his presence came at a furious pace and fell into two categories.