RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/columns/dennis-prager/2023/08/29/why-young-americans-are-not-taught-about-evil-n1722794

Most of our schools teach almost nothing of importance, and nothing is more important than the study of good and evil. In the United States today, nearly all schools, from elementary through graduate, concentrate on teaching about racism, sexism, preferred pronouns, homophobia, transphobia, LGBTQIA+, climate change, diversity, equity, inclusiveness and white guilt. In other words, most of our educational institutions, including the most prestigious, do not educate.

Here are a few proofs.

It is almost certain that the great majority of American high school and college students (with the obvious exceptions of Christian students) could not name the Four Gospels (presuming they even know what they are); five of the Ten Commandments (presuming they know what those are); or the names of two Shakespeare plays. Most American students know little about the American Revolution, let alone about the French or Russian Revolutions. The same holds true for the Constitution and every other American founding document. It is doubtful that, other than Washington and Jefferson having owned slaves, American students know anything about these men or could name two other Founders.

When it comes to evil, the ignorance is enormous, often almost total. For example, according to Pew, about half of Americans ages 18-39 cannot identify Auschwitz or any other Nazi death camp. And there is every reason to assume that much fewer than half could identify the Gulag Archipelago (20 million-plus murdered); the Ukrainian forced famine (5 to 6 million murdered in a little over a year); Mao’s Great Leap Forward (about 60 million murdered); or Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (about one in every four Cambodians murdered).

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/not-a-fundamental-right-maryland-court-strikes-down-parents-request-to-opt-kids-out-of-lgbt-curriculum/

A Maryland district court denied parents’ appeal to reinstate an opt-out policy in Montgomery County Public Schools on Thursday.

The case, Tamer Mahmoud v. Monica B. McKnight, hinged on whether the district’s May decision to rescind its opt-out policy for LGBT curricula violated parents’ right to direct the religious instruction of their children.

The court concluded that, “the plaintiffs’ asserted due process right to direct their children’s upbringing by opting out of a public-school curriculum that conflicts with their religious views is not a fundamental right.”

Parents sought a preliminary injunction that would authorize opt-out options once school begins on August 28, which judge Deborah Boardman also denied:

“Because the plaintiffs have not established any of their claims is likely to succeed on the merits, the Court need not address the remaining preliminary injunction factors. Nonetheless, because a constitutional violation is not likely or imminent, it follows that the plaintiffs are not likely to suffer imminent irreparable harm, and the balance of the equities and the public interest favor denying an injunction to avoid undermining the School Board’s legitimate interests in the no-opt-out policy . . . The plaintiffs seek the same relief pending appeal as in their preliminary injunction motion: an injunction that requires the Board to provide advance notice and opt-outs from instruction involving the storybooks and family life and human sexuality. For the reasons stated in this opinion, the Court cannot conclude the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of an appeal. The plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction pending appeal is denied.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/why-d-e-i-needs-to-die/

The Reign of the Woke is starting to totter. The excesses of the tyranny of the tiny trans minority is getting significant pushback, from consumers boycotting woke corporate fellow-travelers like Bud Light and Disney, to parents challenging schools that attempt to usurp their authority over their children.

More significant in the long run, some state universities’ governors are rejecting requirements for faculty and scholars to sign loyalty pledges to the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion ideology.

The latest grove of academe to end this noxious practice is the Arizona system comprising five campuses with 142,000 students. In addition, the Foundation for Individual Freedom in Education has filed suit against California’s community college system on behalf of six professors to stop the state’s imposition of regulations that require allegiance to highly contested political ideologies, virtually cancelling both academic freedom and the First Amendment.

We should all celebrate these pushbacks, since the politicized dogma of “woke,” as well as the requirement of fealty to it, violates the very core of the university’s traditional mission and purpose: “to know the best that has been known and thought in the world,” as Matthew Arnold defined it, “irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind; and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without the intrusion of any other consideration whatsoever,” and “through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically.”

The pseudo-concepts of “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” have long been “stock notions” that our “woke” commissars “follow staunchly and mechanically.” Typical of all tyrannies, these words have been warped into propaganda advertising an illiberal political program of expanding the political power of one faction of citizens at the expense of others’ freedom–­–the cost being paid by our unalienable rights to freely think, and freely speak in the public square our opinions and beliefs.

https://rufo.substack.com/p/reshaping-the-narrative?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Last month, I published an op-ed in the New York Times arguing that DEI programs in public universities had created a “stifling orthodoxy that undermines the pursuit of truth.”

The Times has published six letters to the editor responding to my op-ed, under the headline: “University D.E.I. Programs: Do They Help or Harm Education?” Most of the letters were critical, though the editors made sure to include some supportive opinions, including this one from Wayne State University professor Jukka Savolainen:

Thank you for giving voice to Christopher Rufo, who has exposed the diversity-industrial-complex for what it is: a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Mr. Rufo is exactly right when he says that this should not be a partisan issue.

The central purpose of universities is to pursue truth. This mission requires an environment of open debate and political neutrality. Unlike Mr. Rufo, I am not a conservative. In recent presidential campaigns I have voted for Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

However, in the role of a college professor, my loyalties are with an altogether different ideology: the scientific value system. This ideology is inconsistent with identity politics of any flavor.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/college-rip-off/

It’s August. Many young people head off to college.

This year, fortunately, fewer will go.

I say “fortunately” because college is now an overpriced scam.

Overpriced, because normal incentives to be frugal and make smart judgements about who should go to college were thrown out when the federal government took over granting student loans.

Why?

Because our government basically vomits money at everyone who applies.

If private lenders gave out the loans, they’d look at whether they were likely to be paid back. They’d ask questions like: “What will you study? You really think majoring in dance will lead to a job that will pay you enough to allow you to pay us back?”

Government rarely asks these questions. Bureaucrats throw money at students. Many don’t benefit. Many shouldn’t even be going to college. Today, nearly half of the students given loans don’t graduate even after six years.

Many feel like failures.

College is good for people who want to be college professors or who major in fields like engineering and computer science that might lead to good jobs. But that’s not most people. Government loans encourage everyone to go to college, even if they’re not very interested in academics.

Government’s handouts also invite colleges to keep raising tuition. Over the past 50 years, college cost rose at four times the rate of inflation. Four times!

Years ago, I reported how colleges were suddenly wasting money on luxuries like fancy gyms and even day spas. Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that it’s gotten worse: The University of Oklahoma bought a monastery in Italy for study abroad students! The University of Kentucky built a theater where students play video games.

“Why not raise tuition?” asks the typical college president. “Uncle Sam pays the bill!”

When I went to Princeton, tuition was $2,000. Now its $60,000.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/08/28/how-do-you-spell-mississippi/

Students here long had some of the lowest reading scores in the country — but over the past decade, something changed.

The Magnolia State’s revolution in reading instruction

Columbus, Miss. — The boy’s word is “lap.”

“Let’s sound it out with our finger spelling,” says his summer-camp counselor, counting the sounds with him on three digits: “lll . . . aaa . . . p.”

The boy, who just finished first grade and speaks in a whisper, begins finding letters on Scrabble-like tiles. Consonants are on blue tiles, vowels on yellow ones. He pulls out the blue “l” and then the yellow “a.” Struggling to finish the word, he chooses a third tile, a blue “b.” Not quite right.

Remember, “balloons go up and pigs go down,” the female counselor says, noting the different shapes of a “b” and “p.”

After his one-on-one, the boy joins the other campers on the lawn outside, where teams of kids in matching baby-blue camp shirts are competing in a relay race, with one kid passing a balloon over her head, the next passing it between his legs, and so on until the balloon reaches the end of the line. The last kid excitedly stomps on the balloon, popping it, and then reads the message on the slip of paper inside — “I can see the dolphin in the ocean” — before running to the front of the line and passing the next balloon over his head.

The scene on the lawn looks like any other summer camp around the country. But while fun and games are an important part of the experience, the 20 or so kids at “Camp LIT,” a program of the Mississippi University for Women, are here in late June for a more important reason: to become better readers.

During the one-week camp — a first for the university’s department of speech-language pathology — students between the ages of six and twelve are each paired with a graduate student trained in the Orton-Gillingham method of reading. This involves one-on-one therapy to work on phonic building blocks of reading: letters and sounds, digraphs and blends. Every component of the camp, even arts and crafts, has a literacy element.

“These are typical kids,” says Ashley Alexander, the clinical director of the department. “It’s just reading that is a struggle for them.”

It is this intense focus on what is known as the “science of reading” that has brought so much positive attention to the Magnolia State in recent years.

For decades, Mississippi has trailed the national pack in a variety of critical measures; the state has one of the highest rates of poverty in the nation, its infrastructure is lacking, and its health-care system is consistently ranked among the nation’s worst.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-weapons-of-math-destruction-learning-k-12-education-curriculum-students-teachers-instructions-policy-d6f18070?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

The California State Board of Education issued on July 12 a new framework for teaching math based on what it calls “updated principles of focus, coherence, and rigor.” The word “updated” is certainly accurate. Not so much “principles,” “focus,” “coherence” or “rigor.” California’s new approach to math is as unfair as it is unserious.

The framework is voluntary, but it will heavily influence school districts and teachers around the Golden State. Developed over the past four years, it runs nearly 1,000 pages. Among the titles of its 14 chapters are “Teaching for Equity and Engagement,” “Structuring School Experiences for Equity and Engagement” and “Supporting Educators in Offering Equitable and Engaging Mathematics Instruction.” The guidelines demand that math teachers be “committed to social justice work” to “equip students with a toolkit and mindset to identify and combat inequities with mathematics”—not with the ability to do math. Far more important is teaching students that “mathematics plays a role in the power structures and privileges that exist within our society.”

California’s education bureaucrats are seeking to reinvent math as a grievance study. “Big ideas are central to the learning of mathematics,” the framework insists, but the only big idea the document promotes is that unequal outcomes in math performance are proof of a racist society.

To achieve equal outcomes, the framework favors the elimination of “tracking,” by which it means the practice of identifying students with the potential to do well. This supposedly damages the mental health of low-achieving students. The problem is that some students simply are better at math than others. To close the gap, the authors of the new framework have decided essentially to eliminate calculus—and to hold talented students back.

The framework recommends that Algebra I not be taught in middle school, which would force the course to be taught in high school. But if the students all take algebra as freshmen, there won’t be time to fit calculus into a four-year high-school program. And that’s the point: The gap between the best and worst math students will become less visible.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/student_debating_once_a_bastion_of_logic_has_been_invaded_from_the_left.html

During my 48 years teaching at Towson University, all my classes involved informal or formal debating: the quintessential activity of academic classes outside and sometimes including the sciences and arts. Sadly, like everything else in academia, debating has succumbed to leftist ideology.

I love debate for its focus on credibility and evidence. It should be teaching the up-and-coming generation of thinkers. However, as James Fishback has noted, judges’ political preferences have come to dominate high school debate.

Under its major sponsor, the National Speech & Debate Association’s website, judges post “paradigms.” The purpose of paradigm alerts is to let debaters know in full disclosure judges’ stylistic biases, say, if they are put off by overly rapid speaking or if they approve of debaters’ apprising their audiences of the relative importance of specific arguments.

But in the last few years, Fishback explains, “Judges with paradigms tainted by politics and ideology are becoming common…[at] national tournaments, judges are making their stances clear: students who argue ‘capitalism can reduce poverty’ or ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ will lose—no questions asked.” In general, Fishback argues, high school debate has been degraded “from a competition that rewards evidence and reasoning to one that punishes students for what they say….” One of several examples Fishback provides is a debate judge under whose list of “Things That Will Cause You to Automatically Lose” is ‘Referring to immigrants as ‘illegal.’ ”

I can attest that the same is true in collegiate debate, the last place in education I would have expected political bias to interfere with education.

Several colleagues, including one who has both designed debate camps and programs and served as a tournament judge and another who is a major administrator in the National Communication Administration, tell me that, among debate coaches and judges, coaches and judges throw around their biases as a sign of virtue. This is a disheartening and dispiriting sign that we’re seeing the end of the unbiased marketplace of ideas and academic freedom. Worse, this is happening in an activity that, by definition, should be resistant to politically approved outcomes.