Professors Professing Progressive Perfidy

Marxist Professor Calls For Violent Overthrow of US Government

Feminist Professor Praises 'Happy Abortions' in New Book

Prof: punishing protesters promotes 'white supremacy'

Study: Whites Must Not Be Civil To Non-Whites (really!)

White Civility is Racist, Promoting White Supremacy and Whiteness
Evil, Evil, Evil)

Civility and White Institutional Presence: An Exploration of White Students' Understanding of Race-Talk at a Traditionally White Institution

ABSTRACT

In this study, the authors draw upon critical whiteness studies to explore how White students' understanding of race-talk within higher education (re)produces whiteness. Through an analysis of interview data, they generated 3 categories describing whiteness-informed civility (WIC): (a) WIC functions to create a good White identity, (b) WIC functions to erase racial identity, and (c) WIC functions to assert control of space. These thematic concepts show how WIC is characterized by logics of race-evasion, avoidance of race-talk, and exclusion of people of color. The authors conclude by offering ways for instructors to interrogate WIC through classroom practices informed by critical communication pedagogy.

…"Civility within higher education is a racialized, rather than universal, norm."

The authors (both white) have defined 3 categories of "civility" describing whiteness-informed civility (WIC):

(a) WIC functions to create a good White identity: I.e., treat with courtesy. This is bad because it promotes “Good Whiteness” and thus White Supremacy.

(b) WIC functions to erase racial identity: “I don’t see race; I see a person”. This is race-talk evasion, and that is Whiteness and White Supremacy.

(c) WIC functions to assert control of space. Segregation.

Civility is therefore a racist tactic used by whites to suppress/oppress non-whites. Apparently what is desired by these two white authors is blunt race-talk, which is not civil.

It is interesting that in all Leftist attacks on Whites and Whiteness, the criticisms leave no alternative for the white person to use. For example, if courtesy is not allowed, and ignoring race is not allowed, then the resulting “race-talk” when encountering a non-white must be non-courteous, and race-oriented.

Think about that the next time you encounter a POC (person of color). You must be rude and address that person’s race and zis/zer place in the hierarchy of man, based on skin tone (the only marker of race for the Left). Now that would certainly be an event to observe from a safe distance.

Now this: …"Civility within higher education is a racialized, rather than universal, norm."

As a white potentially encountering a non-white, I imagine that this is quite valid; at least within current cultural social connections race is hard to ignore. And perhaps civility is always “racialized” in that context. It certainly will be under the direction of these authors.

But whose fault is the perpetual class war between races? Class war is not a white value; class war is a Leftist value, and has been since the days of Democrat-dominated Slavery. And this entire “study” is following the skeletal Leftist narrative which demands that there be conflict engendered by whites against non-whites, and never peaceful community with non-whites. This study, by virtue of prejudicing the inputs, intends to show that there is no way around it; racism is a first principle of Whiteness, a Leftist condemnation of the souls of whites everywhere.

The rational error here is obvious: The original premise goes against the larger observation, which is that it is not – NOT – necessary to have “race-talk” with every “not my race” person, every time one meets one. In fact, this would be a disaster of the first order, especially given the conditions which the authors place on such race-talk contacts.

Further, the three “types of civility” are fully bogus. Types (a) and (b) are pegged as actual, genuine civility between the white and the non-white, which is condemned out-of-hand as promoting the white as a “good” white, which immediately connects imaginarily to White Supremacy.

So being a civil, “good” person is damned as a racist act of suppression/oppression by the white, against the beleaguered non-white.

As is all too common with Leftist projections, the unreasonable presuppositions are in place in order for the Left to place class condemnation on the selected Oppressor Class. In this instance, the whites have no recourse. Any and everything they do within the boundaries of this set of presuppositions is declared officially racist. Further, the consequential, if unmentioned, choice – rude race-talk – with all People of Color, in every encounter, is also racist.

Finally, it is apparent that rude race-talk is, in fact, what many campus radicals want: except they want to be the rude party, screaming "shut up and listen" while they spit expletives and hate in the faces of their victims. When one does listen, what one hears is eliminationist Marxist rhetoric in full hate mode, which cannot be hate speech because only whites can do that.

If the POC actually obtain their desire to eliminate or at least completely nullify the White race and Whiteness in general, what will remain is visible in the blue cities - Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore - where Leftism has ruled for decades. And of course in the No Go Zones of France, Germany, Sweden, Britain. Under Leftism, no options are pretty.

What Actually Happened at Evergreen College and Why

It's worse than you probably think...

Bonfire of the academies: Two professors on how leftist intolerance is killing higher education

Read it all THERE.

Read This To Your Students!

THIS is actual education.

Undoing the Dis-Education of Millennials

I teach in a law school. For several years now my students have been mostly Millennials. Contrary to stereotype, I have found that the vast majority of them want to learn. But true to stereotype, I increasingly find that most of them cannot think, don’t know very much, and are enslaved to their appetites and feelings. Their minds are held hostage in a prison fashioned by elite culture and their undergraduate professors.

They cannot learn until their minds are freed from that prison. This year in my Foundations of Law course for first-year law students, I found my students especially impervious to the ancient wisdom of foundational texts, such as Plato’s Crito and the Code of Hammurabi. Many of them were quick to dismiss unfamiliar ideas as “classist” and “racist,” and thus unable to engage with those ideas on the merits. So, a couple of weeks into the semester, I decided to lay down some ground rules. I gave them these rules just before beginning our annual unit on legal reasoning.

Here is the speech I gave them.

********************************

Before I can teach you how to reason, I must first teach you how to rid yourself of unreason. For many of you have not yet been educated. You have been dis-educated. To put it bluntly, you have been indoctrinated. Before you learn how to think you must first learn how to stop unthinking.

Reasoning requires you to understand truth claims, even truth claims that you think are false or bad or just icky. Most of you have been taught to label things with various “isms” which prevent you from understanding claims you find uncomfortable or difficult.

Reasoning requires correct judgment. Judgment involves making distinctions, discriminating. Most of you have been taught how to avoid critical, evaluative judgments by appealing to simplistic terms such as “diversity” and “equality.”

Reasoning requires you to understand the difference between true and false. And reasoning requires coherence and logic. Most of you have been taught to embrace incoherence and illogic. You have learned to associate truth with your subjective feelings, which are neither true nor false but only yours, and which are constantly changeful.

We will have to pull out all of the weeds in your mind as we come across them. Unfortunately, your mind is full of weeds, and this will be a very painful experience. But it is strictly necessary if anything useful, good, and fruitful is to be planted in your head.

There is no formula for this. Each of you has different weeds, and so we will need to take this on the case-by-case basis. But there are a few weeds that infect nearly all of your brains. So I am going to pull them out now.

First, except when describing an ideology, you are not to use a word that ends in “ism.” Communism, socialism, Nazism, and capitalism are established concepts in history and the social sciences, and those terms can often be used fruitfully to gain knowledge and promote understanding. “Classism,” “sexism,” “materialism,” “cisgenderism,” and (yes) even racism are generally not used as meaningful or productive terms, at least as you have been taught to use them. Most of the time, they do not promote understanding.

In fact, “isms” prevent you from learning. You have been taught to slap an “ism” on things that you do not understand, or that make you feel uncomfortable, or that make you uncomfortable because you do not understand them. But slapping a label on the box without first opening the box and examining its contents is a form of cheating. Worse, it prevents you from discovering the treasures hidden inside the box. For example, when we discussed the Code of Hammurabi, some of you wanted to slap labels on what you read which enabled you to convince yourself that you had nothing to learn from ancient Babylonians. But when we peeled off the labels and looked carefully inside the box, we discovered several surprising truths. In fact, we discovered that Hammurabi still has a lot to teach us today.

One of the falsehoods that has been stuffed into your brain and pounded into place is that moral knowledge progresses inevitably, such that later generations are morally and intellectually superior to earlier generations, and that the older the source the more morally suspect that source is. There is a term for that. It is called chronological snobbery. Or, to use a term that you might understand more easily, “ageism.”

Second, you have been taught to resort to two moral values above all others, diversity and equality. These are important values if properly understood. But the way most of you have been taught to understand them makes you irrational, unreasoning. For you have been taught that we must have as much diversity as possible and that equality means that everyone must be made equal. But equal simply means the same. To say that 2+2 equals 4 is to say that 2+2 is numerically the same as four. And diversity simply means difference. So when you say that we should have diversity and equality you are saying we should have difference and sameness. That is incoherent, by itself. Two things cannot be different and the same at the same time in the same way.educ

Furthermore, diversity and equality are not the most important values. In fact, neither diversity nor equality is valuable at all in its own right. Some diversity is bad. For example, if slavery is inherently wrong, as I suspect we all think it is, then a diversity of views about the morality of slavery is worse than complete agreement that slavery is wrong.

Similarly, equality is not to be desired for its own sake. Nobody is equal in all respects. We are all different, which is to say that we are all not the same, which is to say that we are unequal in many ways. And that is generally a good thing. But it is not always a good thing (see the previous remarks about diversity).

Related to this: You do you not know what the word “fair” means. It does not just mean equality. Nor does it mean something you do not like. For now, you will have to take my word for this. But we will examine fairness from time to time throughout this semester.

Third, you should not bother to tell us how you feel about a topic. Tell us what you think about it. If you can’t think yet, that’s O.K.. Tell us what Aristotle thinks, or Hammurabi thinks, or H.L.A. Hart thinks. Borrow opinions from those whose opinions are worth considering. As Aristotle teaches us in the reading for today, men and women who are enslaved to the passions, who never rise above their animal natures by practicing the virtues, do not have worthwhile opinions. Only the person who exercises practical reason and attains practical wisdom knows how first to live his life, then to order his household, and finally, when he is sufficiently wise and mature, to venture opinions on how to bring order to the political community.

One of my goals for you this semester is that each of you will encounter at least one idea that you find disagreeable and that you will achieve genuine disagreement with that idea. I need to explain what I mean by that because many of you have never been taught how to disagree.

Disagreement is not expressing one’s disapproval of something or expressing that something makes you feel bad or icky. To really disagree with someone’s idea or opinion, you must first understand that idea or opinion. When Socrates tells you that a good life is better than a life in exile you can neither agree nor disagree with that claim without first understanding what he means by “good life” and why he thinks running away from Athens would be unjust. Similarly, if someone expresses a view about abortion, and you do not first take the time to understand what the view is and why the person thinks the view is true, then you cannot disagree with the view, much less reason with that person. You might take offense. You might feel bad that someone holds that view. But you are not reasoning unless you are engaging the merits of the argument, just as Socrates engaged with Crito’s argument that he should flee from Athens.

So, here are three ground rules for the rest of the semester.

1. The only “ism” I ever want to come out your mouth is a syllogism. If I catch you using an “ism” or its analogous “ist” — racist, classist, etc. — then you will not be permitted to continue speaking until you have first identified which “ism” you are guilty of at that very moment. You are not allowed to fault others for being biased or privileged until you have first identified and examined your own biases and privileges.

2. If I catch you this semester using the words “fair,” “diversity,” or “equality,” or a variation on those terms, and you do not stop immediately to explain what you mean, you will lose your privilege to express any further opinions in class until you first demonstrate that you understand three things about the view that you are criticizing.

3. If you ever begin a statement with the words “I feel,” before continuing you must cluck like a chicken or make some other suitable animal sound.

********************************

To their credit, the students received the speech well. And so far this semester, only two students have been required to cluck like chickens.

Adam J. MacLeod is an associate professor of law at Jones School of Law at Faulkner University in Montgomery, Alabama.

Education Today...?

When I engaged in substitute teaching, this was exactly the case from 7th grade through high school. There was no point in trying to teach anything, because the students moved their desks into circles and jabbered as if in their own special universes, untouched and untouchable. When I sent the worst miscreants to the principle's office, a great chewing out was received... by me.

Other times I sat in with other "real" teachers, and the situation was identical with them. In a science class, only perhaps 10% of the students watched the teacher's experiments, while the rest pulled into circles or wandered aimlessly or snoozed. It is expected that the students will behave as animals, untouched by education and untouchable by educators. (I found out that a hand on the student's shoulder is assault, and that students WILL scream "assault" if they are touched by a brush of the hand. Also there are a lot of words one may not utter.)

The third and fourth grades were still young enough to respect the teacher, and I enjoyed teaching those grades. But I understand that these days the cultural contamination reaches down into those levels as well.

The Baltimore revelation of institutionalizing the 60% in order to pass everyone including students who never ever attended class might be the norm in many places. Why keep a kid back when s/he's (xir/ir/r) going to just continue to be rogue at a more mature level? Pass them on out of the system - they'll drop out soon anyway.

The photo is intended to reflect the cultural differences between teacher and the multicultural classroom. I'm sure that the photo is staged. Surely kids that young haven't figured out their untouchable status. Have they?

Micro-Aggressions Get Promoted to New Status

Professors advised to treat racial microaggressions in classrooms like assault

I recall clearly that being white is a micro-aggression, and that even if a white renounces his/her privilege, then s/he is a liar as well as an aggressor. After all, whites cannot get rid of their privilege, because, well it's obvious: they are white, and therefore have privilege.

So being white is now an assault on non-whites. I suppose that a deep tan (or orange) doesn't absolve the sin of whiteness. And blue eyes and/or blond hair, well you might as well stand up against the wall and wait for Antifa to figure out their weapons.

Prof Claims Criticism = Repression

Professor: Journalism, outrage over academics’ provocative statements is ‘technique of repression’

Don't criticize US! You Oppressors, you! We'll call for your genocide without any lip from you!

Manchurian Teachers Trained at Columbia U.

Your child's brain on Columbia trained teachers:

Columbia Trains Future Teachers In Feminist And Neo-Marxist Theory

A school affiliated with Columbia University trains future teachers in feminist, neo-Marxist and other social justice-oriented theories, according to its 2017 course catalog.

The Teachers College at Columbia offers a variety of courses and programs which teach graduate students to incorporate social justice principles into their future students’ coursework.

C&T (Curriculum & Teaching) 6517 Contemporary Curriculum Studies examines “a range of theoretical stances, including neo-Marxist, feminist, post-structuralist, postfoundational, critical race theory, and queer scholarship.”

“One topic that will be pursued in depth is the relationship between curricular knowledges (formal and informal) and student subjectivities/identities” reads another part of the description, a reference to identity politics.

Meanwhile, doctoral students specializing in diversity and equity in education must take C&T 6523 Advanced Seminar in Diversity and Equity. The course will examine concepts like “diversity,” “inclusion,” and “multiculturalism,” students and will learn to “question, reframe, and interrupt dominant ideologies of schooling.”

“This will entail troubling ideas about whose knowledge counts, and learning from legacies of community struggles for educational equity,” insists the description.

Other courses explore how “ableism” functions in schools, how disability, race and gender interact with “the construct of giftedness,” and how “gender-sensitive curricula” operates in the classroom. Aside from the aforementioned perspectives, students also examine issues from postcolonial, transnational lines of thought.

The Teachers College at Columbia offers two social justice-oriented programs named “Elementary Inclusive Education” and “Secondary Inclusive Education.”

“Our stance is that there is no single truth in education,” claims the former program. “[We require] individuals who understand the limitations of fixed formulas and who enjoy reaching out into the unpredictable world created by the diversity and the uniqueness of each child and each group of children.”

“[We] necessarily interrogate and work to actively challenge the many sociocultural, institutional, bureaucratic, and interpersonal ways in which children and their families experience marginalization and exclusion (e.g., on the basis of race, ethnicity, social class, dis/ability, gender, nationality, sexuality, language, religious [non] affiliation, etc.),” reads the description for the secondary program. “We simultaneously inquire into how such resistance can be translated into meaningful engagement with existing systems and schooling practices in order to effect change.”

The Daily Caller News Foundation reached out to the Teachers College at Columbia University for comment but received none in time for press.

Racist Reversion to the Mean... Or Less

Jeff Sessions' Justice Department goes after affirmative action's institutional racism

Admissions programs frustrate accountability because schools wield “holistic review” as a shield to frustrate scrutiny, judicial or otherwise. Holistic review can serve as a cover for the illegitimate use of race.

For example, Princeton professor Thomas Espenshade found that Asian students applying to selective private colleges are six times less likely to be admitted than Hispanic students with the same academic qualifications and 16 times less likely than black students. And despite being the fastest-growing population in America, Asians are admitted at Ivy League schools in remarkably similar numbers and percentages year-to-year.

That’s strong evidence that schools are discriminating based on race. It all hearkens to the less-than-illustrious history of the so-called Harvard Plan, which began as an alternative to explicitly capping the number of Jewish students.

Those are the sorts of things that the Justice Department should look into. Government lawyers must open the “holistic” black box and hold administrators’ feet to the constitutional fire. And that’s before we even get into the harm to the beneficiaries of racial preferences!

"Holistic selection" is merely Social Justice Class War in action. The designated "Victimhood" Class members will get preference despite their below-mean capabilities. And that is at the expense of above-mean applicants that are not in the "Victimhood" Class. The clue to the truth of this is the approval from SCOTUS for driving for "diversity" in student populations (qualifications become secondary to ideology). And true to Leftist/Democrat Uber-Racist history, diversity means discrimination based on skin tone and genetic heritage.

As a result, the reputations of universities and their "education" value suffers. More importantly, those who are graduated without receiving any increase in thinking skills find themselves thwarted when attempting to join the real world.

When the Fortune100 Electronics company I was working for back in the '70s made its attempt at Affirmative Action hiring, I got to see first hand the disaster which ensued. Every summer, the corporation hired from a class of graduating electrical engineers, and put them into a year of quarterly training rotations through various areas in the company (a really good deal for fresh graduates). The year of the AA hiring, graduating black engineers got the AA treatment. But they didn't know anything. Not only did they not know the basics of electricity (even not knowing Ohm's Law), they had no idea of the world itself. One might not know where the Nile River is, but thinking that France is in England is inexcusable.

For the first time, the corporation laid off the entire group of new graduate hires - all of them. It was obvious, although not stated, that the entire class had to go to avoid any semblance of racial discrimination. It would not have been racially motivated of course, because it was based on competence level and ability to perform. But the entire group of new hires paid the price.

Affirmative Action punishes the capable at the expense of the incapable. It is an equalitarian tactic for reversion to the mean, in the sense of "No Child Left Behind", which obviously means that the intelligent are sacrificed to the level and benefit of the least intelligent, and the education materials are designed thus. The runners must walk at the speed of the wheelchair.

The ONLY justification for this is Diversity, as if saddling the acute with the pace of the obtuse is some sort of benefit to education. There is no wonder that home schooling has morphed into home school complexes where students are individuals who are treated as such.

This is Definitely NEW News

Finally, A College Cracks Down On The Left’s Snowflake Fascists

Presumably this will impact their registration at other colleges as well.

It's about time the adults took back their institutions.

That This Sentence Even Exists Demonstrates How Low Education Has Fallen

Algebra is not racist, don't get rid of it

Devaluing the college degree is important to the Left. While PhD degrees are already devalued, there might be a little value here and there... unless you get into the humanities. Women's studies degrees should be handed out to entering freshmen, who are then told to find a job. Pretty much the same for all humanities, which turn into Marxist Critical Theory Regarding Everything Cis-Normal. We know that at the finest schools, say Oxford, literature studies exclude white males such as Shakespeare. So sure, if you're intent on being ignorant in your own field, then by all means eliminate arithmetic.

But know that your degree will be scorned for what it equates to, mathematically: toilet paper.

The Killing of History; The Murder of Customs; The Assassination of Morality; Your Sovereigns will finally Remove the You from You...

...The Death of You

"The point of all this is as it relates to what we see going on in America with the slow removal of Christianity from the culture. The ruling class long ago converted to the new religion of multiculturalism. They have been slowly erasing the old religions from the public institutions and replacing it with their own. Now they have moved into private institutions by forcing Christians to worship at the altar of multiculturalism. The next step, and there are already rumblings, is to force churches to adopt gay marriage or face sanction.

Christianity is not the only religion under assault. The soft, civil religion of Americans, based on equality before the law, individual liberty and the right to be left alone is being erased. The tearing down of Confederate statues is one example. The elimination of freedom of association is another. The rule of law, of course, has been eliminated long ago when the Talmudic parsers cooked up the idea of a living Constitution. The law is now just an endless round of hairsplitting and a morality of convenience.

The toppling over of confederate statues is often seen as a final sweeping up after the Civil War. First they came for the Confederate flags and now they are coming for the statues. Next they will be digging up the graveyards. That’s all true, but it is also an effort to erase America’s past. There are calls to topple over the statue of Jefferson at the University of Virginia. It will not be long before Washington, Franklin, and the rest of those evil pale penis people, who founded the nation, are ruled out of bounds on moral grounds.

The whole point of the exercise is to cut the people off from their past, by taking away their religion and civil institutions. It’s tempting to think of globalism in purely economic terms, but it is more than that. It is a war on the people who make up nations. It is a direct assault on the very idea of a people. If they can destroy the civil institutions and erase the past, they will destroy the identity of the people and the very rationale for countries. The post-national paradise, therefore, is the post-you world. It is the death of you."

But it is OK: Hive-think wastes no energy on creative heresies. Hive-think is calm. Very calm. So very, very calm. Hive-think is the installation of purposeful necrosis into the frontal cortex. You no longer need to know what you thought you knew. Hive-think is here and waiting for you. See your local Donk, and get yours installed today... You'll be perpetually smirkingly smug, and so glad that you are.

Old News: Leftists Are Racists

Well-off liberals choose mostly white schools

AND they get to choose which school that their privileged progeny attend, while their ghetto plantation slaves do not. The hypocrisy is deep with these.

"This is Better Than a Final"

Arizona State U Lets Students Organize Anti-Trump Protest Instead of Taking Final Exam

Student Alex Corella says, “This is better than a final.”

To be fair, the headline is not exactly right: only one professor did it, not the entire campus. Doubtless the engineering students were sweating out derivations of entropy and electromagnetic theory.

Prof With the Answer

Professor: ‘Trump Must Hang,’ Republicans Should Be Executed For Each Immigrant Deported

A history professor at California State University, Fresno, appears to have advocated for the death of President Donald Trump on Twitter.

Tweets from an account purportedly operated by Professor Lars Maischak call for Trump to “hang” in order to “save American democracy,” and say the only “cure” for racist people is a bullet to their head. The account is not verified, although the bio and interactions between the user and other Twitter users indicate it belongs to the professor.

“To save American democracy, Trump must hang,” Professor Lars Maischak appears to have tweeted in February. “The sooner and the higher, the better. #TheResistance #DeathToFascism.”

You'd think that a history professor would know the difference between a republic and a fascist state. I'm not certain that he does, but if he does, then he is going with the false flag of "anti-fascism" by using fascism himself. On the other hand, he might just be a total Marxist Class Warrior who labels people by identity in order to enable their destruction. Eliminationist fascism and eliminationist Marxism are indistinguishable: both want to kill everyone who is not them.

Sure, send your kid to this place for history instruction.

Masters of Systematic Ignorance: The Generation Without a Culture

Well, I bet they know all the video games. And what happened to Brangelina.

How a Generation Lost Its Common Culture

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.

It’s difficult to gain admissions to the schools where I’ve taught – Princeton, Georgetown, and now Notre Dame. Students at these institutions have done what has been demanded of them: they are superb test-takers, they know exactly what is needed to get an A in every class (meaning that they rarely allow themselves to become passionate and invested in any one subject); they build superb resumes. They are respectful and cordial to their elders, though easy-going if crude with their peers. They respect diversity (without having the slightest clue what diversity is) and they are experts in the arts of non-judgmentalism (at least publically). They are the cream of their generation, the masters of the universe, a generation-in-waiting to run America and the world.

But ask them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks. Who fought in the Peloponnesian War? Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach? How did Socrates die? Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Canterbury Tales? Paradise Lost? The Inferno?

Who was Saul of Tarsus? What were the 95 theses, who wrote them, and what was their effect? Why does the Magna Carta matter? How and where did Thomas Becket die? Who was Guy Fawkes, and why is there a day named after him? What did Lincoln say in his Second Inaugural? His first Inaugural? How about his third Inaugural? What are the Federalist Papers?

Some students, due most often to serendipitous class choices or a quirky old-fashioned teacher, might know a few of these answers. But most students have not been educated to know them. At best, they possess accidental knowledge, but otherwise are masters of systematic ignorance. It is not their “fault” for pervasive ignorance of western and American history, civilization, politics, art and literature. They have learned exactly what we have asked of them – to be like mayflies, alive by happenstance in a fleeting present.

"Mayflies in a fleeting present"... great analogy. No knowledge or curiosity about how their reality happened. Stuff is just there, wasn't it always? And who actually cares, anyway?

It will be interesting to see if any of these massively uneducated millennials generates sufficient curiosity to emerge into full intellectual mode. If the answer is none, then the world is completely out of philosophers and wisdom, and filled instead with maleducated grubbers who never emerge from the lowest rung of Maslow's hierarchy.

Post Rational

Why College Graduates Still Can’t Think

In this view, the key characteristic of critical thinking is opposition to the existing ‘system,’ encompassing political, economic, and social orders, deemed to privilege some and penalize others. In essence, critical thinking is equated with political, economic, and social critique.”

Suddenly, it occurred to me that the disconnect between the way most people (including employers) define critical thinking and the way many of today’s academics define it can be traced back to the post-structuralist critical theories that invaded our English departments about the time I was leaving grad school, in the late 1980s. I’m referring to deconstruction and its poorer cousin, reader response criticism.

Both theories hold that texts have no inherent meaning; rather, meaning, to the extent it exists at all, is entirely subjective, based on the experiences and mindset of the reader.

Thomas Harrison of UCLA, in his essay “Deconstruction and Reader Response,” refers to this as “the rather simple idea that the significance of the text is governed by reading.”

That idea has been profoundly influential, not only on English faculty but also on their colleagues in the other humanities and even the social sciences. (Consider, for example, the current popularity of ethnography, a form of social science “research” that combines fieldwork with subjective story-telling.)

Unfortunately, those disciplines are also where most critical thinking instruction supposedly occurs in our universities. (Actually, other fields, such as the hard sciences and engineering, probably do a better job of teaching true thinking skills—compiling and evaluating evidence, formulating hypotheses based on that evidence, testing those hypotheses for accuracy before arriving at firm conclusions. They just don’t brag about it as much.)

The result is that, although faculty in the humanities and social sciences claim to be teaching critical thinking, often they’re not. Instead, they’re teaching students to “deconstruct”—to privilege their own subjective emotions or experiences over empirical evidence in the false belief that objective truth is relative, or at least unknowable.

[...]

The result is that, although faculty in the humanities and social sciences claim to be teaching critical thinking, often they’re not. Instead, they’re teaching students to “deconstruct”—to privilege their own subjective emotions or experiences over empirical evidence in the false belief that objective truth is relative, or at least unknowable.

That view runs contrary to the purposes of a “liberal arts” education, which undertakes the search for truth as the academy’s highest aim. Indeed, the urge to deconstruct everything is fundamentally illiberal. Heritage Foundation’s Bruce Edwards calls it “liberal education’s suicide note” in that it suggests the only valid response to any idea or situation is the individual’s own—how he or she “feels” about it.

Unfortunately, such internalization of meaning does not culminate in open-mindedness and willingness to examine the facts and logic of differing views. Rather, it leads to the narrow-minded, self-centered assumption that there is a “right” way to feel, which automatically delegitimizes the responses of any and all who may feel differently.

Departure from rationality leads only to savagery and barbarism, especially when ignorance is "privileged" and actual discernment is delegitimized... to the point of physical suppression. The Left has won a generation or two of intellectual eunuchs.

The Flavor of "Education" Today

Ignorance is pampered and preserved.



If not savages, then what are they? And what will they become?

The Slow Death of Education... Or Not All That Slow

New York State to ditch new teacher literacy exam because too many minorities fail it

This should fix the minority illiteracy problem...

The New York State Board of Regents will consider tomorrow whether to go with a task force’s recommendation to scrap a teacher literacy exam known as the Academic Literacy Skills Test.

“Part of the reason,” NBC New York reports, is because “an outsized percentage of black and Hispanic [teacher] candidates were failing it.”

It is expected the Board will abandon the assessment.

Critics of the ALST say it is “redundant and a poor predictor of who will succeed as a teacher.”

Pace University’s Leslie Soodak, a professor of education who served on the task force investigating state teacher exams, said “Having a white workforce really doesn’t match our student body anymore.”

Translation: having a literate workforce doesn't even matter to the "education" bureaucrats. So: Whites are out; illiteracy is IN.

The Left frequently reduces requirements in order to allow non-qualified people to enter into a field which previously had integrity. My favorite was the decision to no longer prosecute or punish black students who attack teachers and other students (too oppressive for the dears). It's no wonder that they form into gangs for their own protection. Gangs are merely vigilantes protecting their home turf, right? So they've gotta be armed and tough - who else is gonna do it? Not the Left... they have overtly defended vigilantism, remember the federal support for the riots in Ferguson?

So long as the new cadre of teachers get the proper gang tats and speak the local ebonics dialect, they should get along fine. Unless they're required to teach English, History, STEM, etc., instead of Victimhood to the hoods. But that wouldn't happen, I suspect. That would be too white.

Education Terrorists, Thugs, and Fascists

Betsy DeVos being guarded by U.S. Marshals Service

The U.S. Marshals Service says it is providing security for Education Secretary Betsy DeVos after a handful of protesters prevented her from entering a D.C. middle school.

The move is unusual for the Education Department, which typically has a team of civil servants guarding the secretary, and for the marshals, law enforcement officers who are generally responsible for protecting federal judges, transporting prisoners, apprehending fugitives and protecting witnesses.

The last Cabinet member protected by marshals was a director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said Lynzey Donahue, a spokeswoman for the Marshals Service. That office ceased to be a Cabinet-level position in 2009.

Deep State education fascists must be made to see the value of CHOICE, not for abortion but for education. It won't be easy, because removing the Deep State from the class room is a body blow to the Fascist Left and its need to paralyze the minds of students.