It is both foolish and wicked to teach the average man who is not well off that some wrong or injustice has been done him, and that he should hope for redress elsewhere than in his own industry, honesty and intelligence.
—Theodore Roosevelt
I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely—that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.
—Kurt Vonnegut
AG Garland has testified it was the NSBA’s letter suggesting that parents protesting at school board meetings should be investigate as domestic terrorists that provided the basis for his memorandum directing the FBI and US Attorneys to investigate and prosecute parents for protesting against school boards and teachers who insist on indoctrinating children with critical race theory. Now, that the NSBA has apologized for their letter (see below), it would make sense for the Attorney General to withdraw his memorandum. Given that he has also testified that he sees no ethical problem with ordering such an investigation even though his son-in-law is founder of a business selling critical race theory teach materials, I doubt that he will do the right thing.
It’s clear that most of the over-credentialed but under-educated members of many school boards who are allowing (or promoting) the introduction of critical race theory and such ahistorical nonsense as the The 1619 Project really don’t understand Marx or the 20th-century history. If they did, they would not be pursing such foolishness. However, there are some on school boards who do understand what they’re trying to foist on the nation’s children. The first bunch may be persuaded to correct their errors. The second lot needs to be removed from any positions of authority.
Parent’s protests have been surprisingly peaceful thus far, but using the FBI in a attempt to stifle dissent will likely not be helpful. Indeed, an understanding of 18th-century history teaches that heavy-handed government doesn’t sit well with Americans. Imagine the surprise on some school superintendent’s face when he finds that a group of citizens dressed as Indians have thrown the district’s CRT instructional materials into a local body of water.
The protests shouldn’t have to go that far, and I doubt they will if school boards act responsibly. If …
Attorney General Merrick Garland has directed the FBI to investigate parents who are opposing the teaching of Critical Race Theory in their children’s schools. It is reported that Garland’s son-in-law is the co-founder of a company which sells CRT instructional materials to school districts.
… I remember when the reason there was an FBI special agent at our school meeting was because his daughter attended the school.
Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
No one yet has learned to drive a locomotive sitting in his study.
—Leon Trotsky
From time to time, I’ve published posts expressing my opinion that the first two years of the Xiden administration would be a disaster for the Democrats because they would engage in political excesses that would alarm the majority of Americans. The have razor-thin margins in Congress and an incompetent President, and they face a more closely balanced federal judiciary. A significant number of Democrat politicians see a real possibility of a Republican wave election in 2022, so they are in a rush to pass as much of their wish list as they can. This is leading to overreach by the Left at all levels of government. I’ve been expecting significant pushback from the Right.
What I didn’t specifically see was that the big pushback would be on what should be a local issue—school curricula—or that the pushback would also come from some people nominally on the Left.
Politico has a post up titled ‘People are scared’: Democrats lose ground on school equity plans. It opens with these words—
Elina Kaplan is the kind of suburban mom who made Joe Biden president.
An immigrant who came to the United States from the Soviet Union, she is a registered Democrat from San Mateo County, Calif. And she’s alarmed over her state’s new model ethnic studies curriculum, which cites critical race theory as a “key theoretical framework and pedagogy.”
Well, it shouldn’t be surprising that someone who escaped from the Marxist dystopia of the USSR would be troubled by a neomarxist form of racism being taught in her local schools.
“What I hear over and over again is that people who are against CRT in schools are just against talking about racism,” Kaplan said. “We believe strongly in teaching [against] racism, in confronting racism.”
Politico quotes Democrat operative Amanda Litman’s concerns for the effectiveness of this issue.
“The Republican Party historically has used this kind of panic effectively,” Litman said. “And they have managed to unite a few different components of anxiety — racial anxiety, anxiety about schools that came up through the pandemic and who’s managing schools, and this idea of cancel culture — in one.”
“It’s irrelevant what the facts are — it’s the way it makes people feel,” Litman concluded.
Of course, facts are irrelevant to CRT proponents. Marxism is about power. Facts which get in the way of ceasing and holding power must be dismissed as false narratives.
I grew up in the South during the ’50s and ’60s. I’ve watched America change. We aren’t perfect, but this county is one of the least racist on the planet.
American parents don’t want schools to tell their children that they are either oppressors or losers. We want our children and grandchildren taught the practical and intellectual skills that will equip them for productive and fulfilling lives as citizens.
Reaching into the schools to corrupt even math instruction with racist nonsense was a bridge too far. I doubt the Left will be able to save CRT. Too many people have been aroused for the pushback to end.
So how will this play out through the 2022 elections?
The avalanche has already begun. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
—Kosh
One who knows little may explain that little with more ease and efficacy than one who has his head stuffed full of the prescribed bunch of official wisdom.
—Joseph Dietzgen
I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.
—Samuel Johnson
Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
—Joseph Stalin
There’s an excellent review of woke math over at Legal Insurrection. Go read it; it does a better job of summarizing the danger to our society.
However, I have a suggestion about how to shutdown woke math education in the schools. Simply calculate the pay of any teacher or education bureaucrat using or promoting woke math on the basis of 2 + 2 = 3.
How strange it seems that education, in practice, so often means suppression: that instead of leading the mind outward to the light of day it crowds things in upon it that darken and weary it.
—Louis Sullivan
My podcasting partner Stacy McCain has a post up about a federal lawsuit relating to free speech at the University of Virginia. A medical student’s questions about microagressions got him banned from campus.
Skepticism and disagreement are impermissible on the 21st-century university campus. Bhattacharya’s questions made him a Thought Criminal, and soon UVA faculty ordered him to undergo psychiatric evaluation.
The former student Kieran Ravi Bhattacharya has sued the university, and a federal judge has rejected the school’s motion to dismiss.
The school’s founder Thomas Jefferson was unavailable for comment.
All the arguments that have been presented for increasing the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour rely on claims that a lesser wage does not provided enough money to a worker. Such claims are based in the use of arithmetic to compute the worker’s financial status and implicitly endorse the proposition that there is such a thing as a “right answer.” However, it now received educational theory that the very idea of a “right answer” is a racist concept. Thus, in order to advance minorities and suppress white supremacy, it is vital that we not only defeat the Fight for Fifteen but also must also repeal the existing minimum wage laws that have been used as tools of oppression for decades.
Theodor Geisel’s birthday to be precise. Geisel’s pen name was Dr. Seuss.
It seems that Dr. Seuss’ caricatures of “people of color” are too raaaaacist for an outfit called Learning for Justice, and they’re demanding that schools avoid reading Dr. Seuss because his books allegedly have “racial undertones.” BTW, Learning for Justice is the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Since before the turn of the century, 2 March has been Read Across America Day in honor of Dr. Seuss’s birthday. The reading recognition day was founded by the National Education Association, but schools in some of the usual-suspect jurisdictions are removing any connection between Dr. Suess and Read Across America Day this year.
Neither the red fish nor the blue fish was available for comment.
The House has passed a legislative nightmare called the “Equality Act.” If it passes the Senate and becomes law, it would amend federal statutes to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, and it explicitly will destroy religious freedom protections related to sexual and gender identity. The bill explicitly states: “The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (42 U.S.C. 2000bb et seq.) shall not provide a claim concerning, or a defense to a claim under, a covered title, or provide a basis for challenging the application or enforcement of a covered title.”
Stephen Kruiser has suggested that the Equality Act is proof that the Democrats are clinically insane. OTOH, The Party may need the words “equal” and “equality” to have different meanings. Sometimes two plus two equals four. But not always.
Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.
For those of you who don’t know the Sam Cooke song Wonderful World (the first line of that song is “Don’t know much about history …”), this is a line from the second stanza. I think it makes a good headline for a post about teachers who don’t understand math.
Fox reports that the Oregon Department of Educations is seeking to undo white supremacy in mathematics education. The minicourse being offered to teachers
includes a list of ways “white supremacy culture” allegedly “infiltrates math classrooms.” Those include “the focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer,” students being “required to ‘show their work,'” and other alleged manifestations.
“The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so,” the document for the “Equitable Math” toolkit reads. “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”
I wonder how many of the education bureaucrats who are promoting the course would object to the calculations on their paychecks being done on the basis of 2 + 2 = 3.
We can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present.
—Adlai Stevenson
[L]iberty without learning is always in peril, and learning without liberty is always in vain.
—John F. Kennedy
Looking around my generation of cousins in our family, there are quite a few of us with educational and/or career accomplishments that entitle us to various honorifics. Several have doctorates in various disciplines: PhD, MD, DDS, EdD, and DPhil (that’s Oxford’s equivalent to PhD). All of them use the honorific “Dr” professionally from time to time, but only the physician and dentist use it socially.
Similarly, neither of the retired colonels among us use “Col” socially.
Although many of us are still working, the youngest is old enough to be drawing Social Security. We’re comfortable with who we are and our accomplishments, so simply being Mr or Mrs is enough.
UPDATE—For the record: In terms of university degrees, I’m the least educated person in my generation of the family.
I graduated with my Bachelor of Engineering degree from Vanderbilt in 1970 after paying tuition in full each semester. Fairness dictates that if student loans are to be forgiven, then those of us who paid up front should receive tuition rebates with interest. At the current legal interest rate in Tennessee (Vanderbilt is in Nashville) I would be due a bit more that $90,000.
I’d be willing to take the rebate in the form of a tax credit that I could spread over several years.
Chris White is a college professor who has written a post for Slate making the absurd claim that referring to well known composers by their last names is a form of white supremacy.
Musicians, academics, and teachers have a lot of work ahead to confront the racist and sexist history of classical music. Fullnaming composers, especially those who have been elevated to mononymic status by this complicated history, will challenge us to at the very least afford the same respect to all of the individuals whose music we talk and write about.
Uh, no. If I say that I’m listening to a piece by Mozart and don’t use a first name, it’s a reasonable assumption that I’m referring to Wolfgang Amadeus and not his father Leopold who was also an accomplished composer. If I refer simply to Bach, I probably mean Johann Sebastian and not Carl Philip Emmanuel, Johann Christian, or any of the senior Bach’s other musically talented children. This has nothing to do with race; it’s about stature and importance as musicians.
Similarly, if I refer to President Johnson, it’s a safe bet I don’t mean Andrew Johnson unless the context deals with his administration or Reconstruction.
BTW, Joplin and Ellington were unavailable for comment.