RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/the_lost_american_generation.html

James Stevens Curl has recently written how he has “become increasingly concerned with creeping dumbing-down, not least in the field of education, where it became obvious to [him] many years ago that standards were dropping through the floor in the dishonest campaign by politicians and professional ‘educators’ to claim that they were getting better every year, with resulting ‘grade-inflation.'”  He “devised some very simple tests … regarding ambitions, interests, hobbies, the results of which were shocking, quite apart from that fact that the answers to [his] questioning revealed a void, a scary emptiness, untempered by any evidence of intellectual curiosity, cultural foundations, or much else besides.”

Moreover, Curl “selected a short paragraph from a published work, and asked candidates to read.”  “Many stumbled over some quite common words, but one could not read at all.  Only very few were able to get through the paragraph fluently, without making mistakes.  Simple tests in spelling, use of punctuation, and so on revealed abysmal ignorance.  It was obviously a massive lie, a confidence-trick, a disgraceful piece of jingoistic nonsense for politicians and pundits to claim for the nation a ‘world-class education,’ getting better every year.”

In fact, American education has been sliding into the abyss for 50-plus years.  The forerunner to affirmative action was open enrollment.  Begun in the late 1960s, the result was that ill prepared students were suddenly thrust into a college environment and expected to keep up with the still rigorous college expectations.  I tutored many of these students, and to this day, I still recall asking them to use a thesaurus.  They did not know what it was or how to use it.

Fast forward a half-century, and my now-college students still do not know what a thesaurus is.  But why should they?  Spelling rules, vocabulary expansion, grammar instruction, geographical knowledge have all been deliberately cast aside.  These young people may be the most credentialed students, but they are the least educated.  It has been a purposeful and highly successful left-wing maneuver to create an “educated” class of serfs who will eventually do the left’s bidding.

The following are examples of the work I receive from what I now call the “lost generation.”  Nothing has been edited.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/04/no-free-speech-doesnt-mean-porn-in-schools/

Free speech is not freedom to degrade public morals and destroy the order necessary for liberty. Some speech is beyond the pale.

PEN America, an international advocacy group for free expression, recently published an updated report about “book banning” in America. The group claims that school districts choosing not to carry particular books in their libraries “threaten[s] free expression and students’ first amendment rights.” The most common books that school districts have restricted student access to include “Gender Queer,” “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” and “Out of Darkness.” These books have been criticized as pornographic and promoting LGBT content. For example, “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” a book aimed at adolescents, contains graphic descriptions of male homosexual sex.

PEN America argues that the removal of such books from school libraries “impede[s] free expression rights” and that such efforts do not “uphold free speech rights.” For PEN America, free expression rights “must be the bedrock of public schools in an open, inclusive, and democratic society.”

Such an understanding of free speech and free expression is wrong. Any sort of “free speech absolutism” that recognizes no limits is not the ideal for those concerned about ordered liberty. Men and women who care about their communities and their nation ought not to desire a public square that is laissez faire in its approach to speech. Just as true liberty is not license but liberty to do what is good, free speech is not freedom to degrade public morals. Speech expresses morals, and some morals — some ways of life — are beyond the pale for societies that are oriented to what is good and right and true.

Speech-Denying Nature Undermines the Nation

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/hijacking-middle-east-studies-asaf-romirowsky-alexander-joffe

Few trends in academia are more depressing than the continued domination of Middle Eastern studies departments by postcolonial professors whose shtick involves recycling cliched attacks on the United States as the “Great Satan” and Israel as the “Little Satan.” The results of this trend are evident in faculty antipathy toward Israel, which is increasingly playing out in their support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

This reached a new pinnacle in March 2022 when the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) voted to formally support an academic boycott of Israeli universities. “Our members have cast a clear vote to answer the call for solidarity from Palestinian scholars and students experiencing violations of their right to education and other human rights,” MESA’s president, Eve Troutt Powell, wrote of the resolution. “MESA’s Board will work to honor the will of its members and ensure that the call for an academic boycott is upheld without undermining our commitment to the free exchange of ideas and scholarship.”

MESA, which has more than 2,800 members and more than 50 institutional members, describes itself as a “private, non-profit learned society that brings together scholars, educators and those interested in the study of the region from all over the world.” Academic Middle East studies departments are crucial in the development of American students’—and by extension the American public’s—views of the Middle East. It is also the mechanism that informs and helps shape U.S. policymakers, from the State Department to the military and intelligence communities. MESA’s vote to boycott Israeli academics and institutions puts scholars on notice that professional acceptance in the organization now demands that they discriminate against individuals on the basis of their national, ethnic, and religious origins.

Part of MESA’s decision to boycott Israel is explained in a new report from the National Association of Scholars (NAS), a conservative nonprofit organization that advocates for academic freedom, on the takeover of Middle East studies centers (MESCs). Established by the federal government in the 1950s in the interest of advancing U.S. national security, MESCs have been hijacked by Arab and Muslim states who donate generously to universities and departments, the report finds, and by activist professors who have “repurposed critical theory to galvanize activism on Middle East issues.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/dumber-and-brainwashed/

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) – known as The Nation’s Report Card – “gives us a window into the state of our K-12 education system.” The results provide educators, policymakers, elected officials, and parents across the country with information regarding how much students are learning in the U.S.

The scores on the latest test taken in early 2022 – after the nation’s Covid panic subsided – were released last week, and looking in that “window” revealed some scary things. In a nutshell, the scores showed that just 33% of the nation’s fourth graders are proficient in reading and 36% are proficient in math. The eighth graders did even worse: 31% are proficient in reading, while a painful 26% showed proficiency in math. According to the report’s authors, “the national average score declines in mathematics for fourth- and eighth-graders were the largest ever recorded in that subject.”

The brightest spot in a sea of ugly took place in Catholic schools, most of which shut down very briefly, if at all, in 2020 and 2021. Scores in these schools were 17 points higher than the national public school average. In eighth-grade reading, the average score for Catholic school students was 20 points higher than the national public-school average, or about two grade levels ahead.

While it is clear that the test score plunge was affected by the pandemic-related shutdowns, there are some blurry areas. For example, not every school in a given state closed when Covid hysteria gripped the nation, so state-by-state comparisons don’t necessarily yield conclusive data on the effect of online learning.

There is a cohort that is trying to dismiss the shutdowns as a cause for the terrible scores out of hand, however. Typical is Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson who writes “all the bitter back-and-forth between red and blue states about how quickly to reopen schools during the covid-19 pandemic was nothing but political theater, as far as test scores are concerned. Student performance suffered across the board, and it could take years to make up the ground we’ve lost.”

https://quillette.com/2022/11/02/bloated-college-administration-is-making-education-unaffordable/

With the first semester of the new academic year upon us, many students and parents are asking: How did college tuition skyrocket to the point where many middle-class families must mortgage (or re-mortgage) their homes, or prematurely raid their retirement funds, to send even a single child to a typical four-year college, whether public or private?

Most college professors are fairly well paid, to be sure. And buildings and grounds can be costly to maintain. But none of this fully explains why tuition and fees have been increasing well beyond the rate of inflation. At Harvard University, the 2022–2023 cost of attendance for non-commuting students (which includes tuition, room, board, and fees) is estimated at $76,763. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the corresponding figure is $79,850. At Boston University: $82,760. Even at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, a public institution, it’s $34,834 for in-state students and $55,296 for out-of-state students.  

Image produced by chartr.

As someone who’s been involved in legal matters pertaining to higher education since the beginning of my career 55 years ago, I’ve had a chance to observe this phenomenon, and have naturally wondered at the cause. The short answer that I’ve come up with can be summarized in two words: administrative bloat. At Yale University, for instance, there are now as many administrative staff as undergraduates. Even among university academics, there seems to be far more resources dedicated to busywork. Every dean, it seems, has a deputy dean; with deputy deans sometimes having several assistant deputy deans. Many of these positions come with secretaries and other forms of administrative support.  

http://www.danielgreenfield.org/2022/11/the-taxpayer-funded-child-abuse-system.html?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_

The National Education Association was caught spending 9% of its budget on member assistance and 50% on various political programs. Teachers’ unions have become enormously powerful by turning their membership and their resources into assets for the Democrats.

Democrats have generously returned the favor by negotiating favorable contracts and allowing teachers’ unions to dismantle the educational system, including shutting down schools for an extended period during the pandemic, eliminating standards in favor of promotion and turning a blind eye to sex abuse. While the shutdown of schools traumatized a generation, leading to increased suicide rates, loss of learning skills, social decline and even higher crime rates, school sex abuse is an ongoing crisis that targets a narrower population of abused students.

That doesn’t mean that the damage is any less.

A recent report reveals that nearly one school employee has been arrested a day on child-sex related charges.

In just the last week, a Utah elementary school teacher was arrested for inappropriate behavior with two female students, a middle school teacher in Pennsylvania was caught sexually abusing a 13-year-old, an Oregon high school basketball coach was arrested for sexually absuing a 17-year-old, a California elementary school employee was arrested on 19 counts of abusing minors going back a decade, and a Washington middle school employee was charged with 137 counts of taking videos in female bathrooms: an incredible school crime log for one week.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/racial-discrimination-forever-supreme-court-students-for-fair-admissions-v-harvard-university-of-north-carolina-college-admissions-11667254607?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Supreme Court Justices exhibited supreme patience Monday in hearing nearly four hours of argument in a pair of major cases involving race and college admissions. But the argument was worth the time, because it exposed some unhappy truths about those who believe in the necessity of discriminating by rac

The Justices are considering challenges to the admission practices of Harvard and the University of North Carolina, in particular that they discriminate illegally against Asian-Americans in favor of other races. (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, and SFFA v. UNC.)

This means revisiting Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), which said schools could use race as one factor in admissions in the name of achieving diversity. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor also famously wrote in Grutter that the use of race to achieve diversity probably wouldn’t be needed in 25 years.

That was 19 years ago, and on Monday several Justices pressed the question about when racial preferences would end. Seth Waxman, Harvard’s advocate, admitted that the school is trying hard to get to a race-neutral future but sees no end in sight for preferences.