Category Archives: education

Dumbing Down our College Pupils

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This from College Fix:

George Washington University recently changed its requirements for history majors, removing previously key courses for the stated purpose of giving students more flexibility.

The department eliminated requirements in US, North American and European history….

More flexibility.  Now, in GWU’s infinite wisdom, it’s possible for a pupil there to get a degree with a history (small ‘h,’ now) major without so much as a survey course—a 100-level Freshman course—in US history, Western history, or any idea at all about how we got where we are today: a nation that allows children to study unvarnished history at all.  This statement from Katrin Schultriss, GWU’s Department of History Chair, comes without any sense in her of the irony of her remark:

Whatever they want to do, there’s a way to make the history department work for them.

A GWU History degree is now a participation award.

Unfortunately, GWU isn’t a standout on this; they’re just joining the mediocrity of our secondary “education” system.

…fewer than one-third of the nation’s leading universities require history majors to take a single course in US history.

No knowledge of who we are or how we came to be.

Dumbing down, indeed.

Students of Color Conference

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This one at the University of California encountered the reality of identity politics.  It collapsed into, as one of the conference-goers called it in her op-ed for the UCLA Daily Bruin, an oppression Olympics.

From the first link:

In one of the larger workshops, one of the students raised a question about why the only issues being discussed were those involving anti-blackness, prompting an African-American student to respond that black students are the most oppressed, to which a Muslim student made a comment about her people being bombed in the Middle East[.]

And

Above all, conference participants each wanted to focus on their own particular minority issue[.]

And the whole thing apparently turned a series of microaggressions, unsafe safe spaces, and canceled workshops.  UCLS student Robert Gardner:

I am very unhappy about how this conference was ran. There needs to be accountability for the trauma some of the organizers made. And I didn’t appreciate my workshop being cancelled….

Apparently grammar isn’t a safe space for young Master Gardner, either.  But he continued:

It was really hurtful to have other marginalized identities silenced because a small fringe of organizers decided that their oppressions are more important (talk about Oppression Olympics. …)

Stop oppressing me with your superior victimhood!

Teaching Opportunity Successfully Avoided

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Because safe spaces are more important than education spaces.

A Virginia school district has “temporarily” banned the classics, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, after a parent complained that her high school-aged son was traumatized by racial slurs used in the books.

Would a trigger warning have helped this snowflake masquerading as a Mom to do her job as a parent?  Probably not:

I keep hearing, “This is a classic, this is a classic[.]”  …  I understand this is a literature classic.  But at some point, I feel that children will not—or do not—truly get the classic part—the literature part, which I’m not disputing.  This is great literature.  But there are racial slurs in there and offensive wording that you can’t get past that.

No, the children can’t.  Not when their parents won’t let them learn how to do so.  And: I read Huck Finn in junior high and Mockingbird as a high school sophomore.  The slurs, aside from being part of the stories—they were, after all, tales of their times, another aspect of this teaching opportunity away from which this school, this “parent,” slunk away—they were minor incidents in the tales.

And: if these minor parts of the tales really are that important to today’s youth, to today’s infantile parents, then how better to teach these children how to deal with the slurs, the racism, the ugliness that still exists, for all the progress we’ve made since those days when I read this stuff without a hazmat suit to protect me, than to do it in a controlled environment where such words can be put in the contexts of their times and then in the context of our times?

The alternative, after all, is that these children will eventually leave their safe space homes and their safe space schools and encounter such behaviors out in the world without having had a chance to learn how to deal with them.  Then these children will learn how badly cheated they’ve been by those whom they thought they could trust because those homes and schools were not even close to safe because of “safe” space shielding.

Racism and Sexism in a Teachers Union

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San Francisco’s public schools have been offered a classroom lesson plan that calls President-elect Donald Trump a racist, sexist man who became president “by pandering to a huge racist and sexist base.”

The union that represents city teachers posted the plan on its website and distributed it via an email newsletter to its more than 6,000 members. The school district has more than 57,000 students.

This is what the United Educators of San Francisco has done.

Union President Lita Blanc said that even House Speaker Paul Ryan had called Trump’s campaign racist and sexist.

This is plainly false and another carefully manufactured union slur.  Ryan did indeed denounce certain of Trump’s remarks as racist and sexist.  But Ryan denounced those remarks; he did not denounce the entire campaign.  Blanc knows this.

It’s not just racism and sexism, it’s hypocritical racism and sexism to manufacture charges of racism and sexism out of the æther, and it’s especially so when the manufacturers do so knowing full well there is no racism or sexism present.

How Democrats View Civility

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A group of maverick history teachers at elite Beacon HS in Manhattan let their kids skip class Tuesday to join a Trump Tower protest, despite objections from colleagues, The Post has learned.

Roughly 200 kids from the Hell’s Kitchen public school were granted hooky passes at 11 a.m. and joined students from across the city to disparage The Donald, sources said.

This is reminiscent of the teachers unions in Wisconsin and of the Wisconsin and Indiana Democratic Parties during their wars on the States’ governments over worker rights not to pay money to unions to which they didn’t belong.  In those cases, the Wisconsin unions encouraged their teachers to lie about where they were as they missed work (with too many doctors complicit in the lies) to “protest” the State government’s legislation to rein in public unions and the Democrats in both States giving themselves permission to abscond from the States, shirking their duties, and halting those two governments because these minority parties didn’t get their way.

So now precious teachers are teaching precious little ones to emulate precious Democrats and these teachers’ unions.

The schools employing these teachers are receiving tons of State dollars under a broad range of programs and grants.  It’s time to review those programs and grants.