RUTHFULLY YOURS

Samworth Church Academy, a high school in Nottinghamshire in the U.K., has banned its students from raising their hands to answer questions because it is unfair to students who do not raise their hands.

In a letter explaining the policy, Samworth principal Barry Found called hand-raising an “age-old practice.”

“We find that the same hands are going up and as such the teaching does not challenge and support the learning of all,” he said, according to an article in the Daily Mail.

Samworth teachers have been instructed to forbid hand-raising in their classrooms and instead call on students at random to answer questions — which is completely and totally ridiculous.

Now, I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with calling on students at random in itself. When I was in school, most of my teachers used a combination of both hand-raising and random call-outs, depending on the situation. If they — being the professionals that they were — noticed that the same students were raising their hands over and over again, they would usually say something along the lines of “Does anyone else have the answer? You’ve been quiet back there, how about you?” and that seemed to work pretty well. Honestly, I really can’t see any benefits to banning hand-raising completely — but I certainly can see some problems.

First of all, as Jane Crich of the U.K.’s National Union of Teachers told the Daily Mail, an administrator’s making a blanket rule prevents the teachers from being able to decide how to best teach their own groups of students.

“Any professional teacher should be trusted to teach a particular topic in a particular style according to the class they have,” Crich said.

A key component in the ongoing effort by American public education to make kids dumber is the removal of entire chunks of relevance from various curricula to craft a narrative more conducive to, and comfortable for, the liberal version of things. It is most often done in the history books, where the more integral stories are excised and replaced with a focus on fringe events or people.

Literature is another convenient target. Book banning is generally considered the kind of thing that totalitarian societies run by tyrannical fascists do, but every fascist has to get his or her start somewhere:

Two classic American novels have been temporarily pulled from book shelves in Accomack County Public Schools.

Superintendent Warren Holland confirmed to 10 On Your Side that a parent filed a complaint about “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

Earlier this month, a parent voiced concerns to the school board about racial slurs in both of the novels.

“Right now, we are a nation divided as it is,” the mother is heard saying in an audio recording of the meeting on Nov. 15. She tells the board that her biracial son, a high school student, struggled getting through a page that was riddled with a racial slur.

“So what are we teaching our children? We’re validating that these words are acceptable, and they are not acceptable by any means,” the parent said.

Victoria Coombs, a mother of two, told 10 On Your Side she agrees that books with offensive racial slurs should not be read in schools.

“It’s not right to put that in a book, let alone read that to a child,” she said.

But other Accomack County residents told 10 On Your Side that banning a classic for offensive language can be a slippery slope.

“I don’t want to see it happen because if you start with one racial word in a book and have to go on and on and on and pretty soon you’ll be burning books left and right,” R. Kellam said.

Although I don’t have a college degree, I did attend college for a couple years. An associate’s degree in machine tool technology was requisite for an experimental position at my workplace. Halfway through my schooling, the experiment fizzled, and with that, my academic career. Although I was working at the factory seven days a week and teaching the Bible twice a week at one of the bigger churches in town, I maintained a 4.0 GPA. For contrast, I graduated high school with a 1.75 GPA.

But I was striving for a position, not a piece of paper. When the position evaporated, so did my academic stint.

AT carried an article on Wednesday, November 30, 2016, titled, “The Decline and Fall of Higher Education,” by Michael Thau, Ph.D., a professor of philosophy for 13 years, in which he lamented both what college students are not learning and what they are learning: poor work ethic, low goals, and prioritizing partying over performance.

Anyone can throw rocks at what academia is producing. It bears weight when the hurler is an academic. It’s an excellent read.

I love reading American Thinker. I strongly suspect that I get more education here than I did while in college – or at least the information is more valuable.

I’d like to compare the GDP of academia to the GDP of the blue-collar arena. The orchestrators in academia are the faculty. They set the standards. In the sweaty-stinky world, the standards are set by the parents, foremen (managers), and commanders (military).

My manager at the factory is an excellent example of doing it right. He falls into that rare category of managers who, even though they invest 60-plus hours a week doing their job, spend their off-time coaching their kids’ softball/football/soccer/etc. team. Sports coaches understand congenitally that success requires excellence.