RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/09/caltech_joins_lesser_colleges_in_lowering_admissions_requirements.html

The dismantling of academic standards continues apace.

The California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the elite science and engineering university, is altering its admissions requirements in an effort to make access to the ultra-competitive institution more “equitable.”

Therefore, it is no longer requiring applicants to have already taken calculus, physics and chemistry in high school. 

According to the Los Angeles Times, prior to this decision, Ashley Pallie– Caltech’s executive director of undergraduate admissions– began to question whether the requirements were unfair to students from less advantaged backgrounds. Ergo, Caltech dropped its calculus, chemistry, and physics requirements, as long as applicants could supposedly prove their academic chops otherwise, such as through taking an online course.

Call me a skeptic, but this seems “problematic,” as the wokesters are wont to say, especially for an engineering school.

So the dismantling of standards continues apace. Liberal arts schools eschew previously popular classical courses like Western Civilization and Western Literature. Debate and rhetoric are now all but extinct, having given way to more progressive disciplines like women’s studies and gender race theory.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-do-not-co-parent-with-the-government-justice-descovich-education-rights-d9609fc6?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Tina Descovich found herself surrounded by “Muslim dads.” The scene was a school-board meeting late last year in Dearborn, Mich. Local parents were angry about sex-themed books at the school library, which they regarded as “pornography.”

After chatting with Ms. Descovich for a few minutes, a Dearborn dad realized she was a founder of Moms for Liberty, a nonprofit parents’ rights group that came into being on Jan. 1, 2021. He shook his head and told her she didn’t “seem like a racist at all.”

“That’s because I’m not,” she replied.

With its dogged focus on school reform, hostility to teachers unions and opposition to Covid shutdowns and mandates, the group is hated on the left and typecast as far-right—or worse—by much of the media. I speak with Ms. Descovich, a 49-year-old mother of five, at Moms for Liberty’s headquarters here, between Miami and Jacksonville. Seated with her is Tiffany Justice, 44, the group’s co-founder and a mother of four. The modest office has no external signage to identify its occupants. Both women have received such a deluge of threats—by email, voicemail and even handwritten letters—that there’s a deputy at the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office whose main job is to review each one. “Someone calling himself Satan writes to me every week,” Ms. Descovich says wryly. “He lives in Denver.”

A more influential antagonist is the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC, founded in 1971, has a storied history of fighting the Ku Klux Klan via civil lawsuits and cooperation with law enforcement. The media uncritically describe it as a civil-rights group, even though in recent decades its has shifted its focus to smearing conservative organizations as hate groups.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/09/01/democrats-and-republicans-have-been-talking-about-school-reform-for-years-while-everything-has-gotten-worse/

On education, both Republicans and Democrats are out of ideas as schools continue to crumble.

One important takeaway from the first Republican presidential primary debate was that every candidate shared lackluster views on education.

The GOP has not developed a coherent position on this crucial issue. Sure, they have a few talking points: They want to abolish the Department of Education, break up teachers unions, protect children from leftist radicals, and implement some kind of school choice. But this doesn’t come close to a comprehensive vision of an issue that affects all Americans and will largely determine the trajectory of the country’s future. 

Assuming the candidates received their wishes, how would this work out? In all likelihood, this would mean that the federal government would save billions of dollars by offering fewer grants to needy college students and underprivileged schools. Teachers in all states would lose their leverage in negotiating a fair wage and better working conditions. And a whole new industry of education scammers would crop up to con unwitting parents out of their school vouchers.

These ostensible “reforms” could be made without such negative outcomes — and I’ve argued for some of them myself — but only if the reformers did their homework and took the time to understand how these systems and processes worked. 

Unfortunately, the Democrat Party is even worse on education.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/30/parents-revolt-against-trans-missionaries/

As I noted recently, fads aren’t always harmful things. Nehru jackets, lava lamps, and mood rings may have set you back a few bucks, but that was the extent of it. Some fads, like the various eating disorders that were with us in the 1970s, were recognized as dangerous and treated as mental health problems. Today, though, becoming transsexual is treated simply as a lifestyle decision.

But as Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist, points out, “Trans is clearly identifiable as a fad, comparable to preceding fads, or ‘transmissible psychological diseases,’ like outbreaks of alleged multiple personality disorder, hysteria, self-mutilation, and anorexia. The typical victim is a young female with an underlying neurosis that seeks a socially acceptable form of expression. These forms of expression vary with the times.” Peterson goes on to say that the current trans fad will be viewed as we now view lobotomies. 

These days, 5.1% of adults younger than 30 claim to be trans or nonbinary, and this is being used as a political cudgel by many with a nefarious agenda. In reality, a staggering 99.4% of the population does not have the physical traits that cause someone to become transgender, according to UCLA’s Williams Institute, an LGBTQ advocacy group. The 0.6% of the adult population who are truly gender dysphoric – a condition that causes extreme distress – certainly deserve empathy and respect.

Unlike most fads, the trans variety is being promoted in our government schools, and many of them try to conceal the student’s condition from parents. In fact, as of now, 1,040 school districts across the country have adopted policies instructing or encouraging faculty and staff to keep students’ gender identities a secret from parents, according to Parents Defending Education. Those 1,040 districts include 18,335 schools and a whopping 10,712,558 students. It should come as no surprise that 593 of the districts are in California.

To put it bluntly, California is predominantly run by power-hungry extremist individuals who don’t give a rip about parents or the sanctity of the family unit, and it is very difficult for traditional moms and dads to exert power on the state level. Hence, the local school board is the place where parents can find allies in their quest to stave off the trans-missionaries. And in July, Chino Valley Unified School District (CVUSD) in San Bernardino County, with 32,000 K-12 students, got the ball rolling. The district banned Pride flags in the classroom and requires that staff tell parents when a child is using a name or pronouns that don’t match the sex determined at birth.

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.