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Category: education
The Dogmatic method
Contrast with Socratic.
From New York to California parents fear to criticize the Marxist indoctrination of their children.
The Miseducation of America’s Elites
In Los Angeles, teachers union leaders think their membership is so arrogant and stupid that teachers must be warned not to publicly flout their disdain for the CCP virus restrictions they use to avoid doing their jobs.
LA Teacher Warns Union Members Not To Post Vacation Pics While Classrooms Are Still Closed
In Virginia, a Wokerati K-12 unionist cabal conspires on Facebook to suppress the First Amendment rights of anyone questioning Critical Theory. Doxxing and hacking are encouraged. Sort of a cybernetic struggle session.
Loudoun County Anti-Racist Teachers Are Making Their Lists
And to prove the LA union leadership had a point, we turn to Chicago, where a teachers union grandee vacationed in a tropical, CDC designated CCP virus hotspot, and did exactly what they warned about.
Puerto Rico Swimsuit Selfie Is A Lesson On Chicago Teachers Union
Still in Chicago…
Chicago Teachers Union Prez Tells Members: Don’t Reveal You Got Vaccine If It Means You Return To School
Teachers unions are child abusers.
There’s talk about breaking up Facebook, but Facebook is only a symptom. We need to break up public employee unions. Especially those of teachers.
Then we might get more Facebook users who could think.
Get thee to a Memery
As memes go, this is the first time I’ve heard of this one. Still, there are T-shirts…
“When I was young my father said to me:
“Knowledge is Power….Francis Bacon”
I understood it as “Knowledge is power, France is Bacon.”
I empathize: When I was 9 I read Treasure Island, pronouncing “island” in my head as “Is Land” the entire time.
Kids those days. Go figure.
I think it was over a year before I understood my mistake. That is the closest I can come to epiphany regarding the point of postmodern literary critical theory: Not the bits claiming meaning resides solely with the reader, and changes with the reading – no matter the author’s intent – but that I made an egregious error from ignorance. And it damaged my understanding of reality. Which, of course, is the postmodernist’s point.
Phonic reading instruction has its drawbacks, though they are nothing compared to “whole language,” or whatever they’re calling it today. Probably “Intersectional Critical Textual Parsing.”
Grammatically incorrect
Propagandists in the classroom are a luxury that the poor can afford least of all. While a mastery of mathematics and English can be a ticket out of poverty, a highly cultivated sense of grievance and resentment is not.
-Thomas Sowell
Jeff Jacoby has a piece worth reading at Jewish World Review on the Rutgers English department debacle.
Is English grammar racist?
A slice (but RTWT):
Today, of course, Rutgers and its champions of “critical grammar” would regard Churchill’s emphasis on acquiring “the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence” as a primitive abomination. John F. Kennedy said of Churchill that he “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle”; there is little question that the power of Churchill’s well-wrought English rhetoric helped save Western civilization in one of its darkest hours. (The power of that prose also earned Churchill the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.)…
“In short,” observes David Bernstein, a university professor and head of the Liberty & Law Center at George Mason University,
the Rutgers English Department wants to make sure that students who come to Rutgers with a poor grasp of standard written English not only remain in that state, but come to believe that learning standard English is a concession to racism. I remember when keeping “people of color” ignorant was considered part of white supremacy.
Churchill’s majestic command of English was due, in part, to rigorous training. Training of the sort that instills discipline, perseverance and clear thinking; whatever the subject. Rutgers charges over $900 per credit hour to willfully deny this opportunity to its students. Because those virtues have been racialized.
Churchill’s profound grasp of rhetoric didn’t merely serve him well during Question Period, it played a critical role in keeping all of us – including Black, Indigenous, People of Color – from slavery under a global racist tyranny. Countless LBGTQ people live today because a virulently antigay totalitarian was defeated.
At Rutgers, though, it is no longer enough to vilify Churchill with slipshod fantasies of racism, sexism, and colonialism: Now add to his sins an exemplary command of language.
It might be useful to bring the news to Rutgers that among those who shared that facility are Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Martin Luther King.
Bab’l, Towr of
“Under a so-called critical grammar pedagogy, “This approach challenges the familiar dogma that writing instruction should limit emphasis on grammar/sentence-level issues so as to not put students from multilingual, non-standard ‘academic’ English backgrounds at a disadvantage,” the email states. [So long as they are not Asian.]
“Instead, it encourages students to develop a critical awareness of the variety of choices available to them w/ regard to micro-level issues in order to empower them and equip them to push against biases based on ‘written’ accents.””
Well, writing that in Ebonics would be an improvement. At least it would be less confusing about the dogma Rutgers no longer favors.
But, it’s not Ebonics I want to pick on here. Like any useful vernacular it affects the everyday language of most of the population. Words creep into accepted usage as the language naturally evolves. Still, there are standards for spelling, sentence structure and grammar that need not be hastily discarded by imposing Critical Theory memes.
It’s not that Rutgers is returning to rigorous grammar instruction, the dogma most of us would expect to inform University level English courses. They are abandoning grammar/sentence level instruction entirely.
An emphasis on grammar has a place in at least some University English courses, and certainly should be required for an English degree. Poetry, obviously, has different rules from prose, and Creative Writing 201 might encourage you to break rules. But to break them effectively you have to know what they are, and why they are. Entry to a University used to assume that incoming students did know.
But, in a rush to wokeness, Rutgers “”has moved past bias awareness and prevention and into a focus on “decolonization.””
Put more clearly, bias awareness has become insufficiently patronizing – we now need to let students know that whatever ideas of English they bring with them are as valid as any other ideas, because some students aren’t capable of learning. Because “white supremacy.”
The real irony is that the pedagogical change order was written by a Professor of English trying to impress his peers. If he wanted to help those who can’t grok English grammar he might have abandoned the critical theory box checking and used a comprehensible sentence structure. Instead, we have wordy, woke, Academiot jargon.
One might wonder how those downtrodden souls came to be in an elite college English program. Surely an inability to distinguish an adjective from an adverb should have funneled them into a Grievance Studies discipline (to maintain the fiction that English hasn’t become one), where nouns are regularly made into verbs.
Ignorance of commas: “Protest, shootings, and arson,” rather than “Protest shootings and arson,” might pass in an Applied Critical Theory class where there is only one possible meaning. But it could limit your chances of entering J-school at Columbia.
And, these days, not understanding pronoun disagreement could be fatal to your career.
Lest you think this sleight of hand racism is unique to Rutgers, let’s take a similar example from a Ball State conference:
Professor says grading, good grammar are examples of white supremacy
“White language supremacy, according to [Asao] Inoue, [associate dean of the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State] is “the condition in classrooms, schools, and society where rewards are given in determined ways to people who can most easily reach them, because those people have more access to the preferred and embodied white language practices, and part of that access is a structural assumption that what is reachable at a given moment for the normative, white, monolingual English user is reachable for all.””
Translated: Grades should be given in mysterious ways (though with extra credit for the oppressed) to those who have the most to learn – whether they learn or not. We must assume these people can’t learn another dialect.
A Masters (A word on the way out, and I don’t think we can use “He da man,” either.) in English is now a purely political credential.
So, now I’m wondering about what happens when the “pedagogy” meets the rubric. Starting with why someone would pay over $900 per credit hour, plus room and board, for a English degree from Rutgers?
The English language is the remit (noun) of Professors of English. They are choosing to trash it.
CCP virus
Speaking from the steps of the Confucius Institutes, and standing on copies of the First Amendment:
Major U.S. universities ban saying ‘Chinese virus’
‘Do not allow the use of these terms by others’
OK, I made that first bit up.
But not the part about preventing others from speaking.
Unified Grievance Theory
Intersectionality, (noun)
in·ter·sec·tion·al·i·ty | \ ˌin-tər-ˌsek-shə-ˈna-lə-tē
1. Selective, tribal conflation of every conceivable human grievance.
2. Creative categorization and augmentation of one’s victimhood credentials.
“The physics professor who argued “white empiricism” somehow creates a “barrier” to black women trying to enter the sciences field recently went on a Twitter rant about the recent antisemitic attacks in New York City.
Ultimately, those attacks are the fault of white gentiles, the University of New Hampshire’s Chanda Prescod-Weinstein claimed.”
According to Campus Reform, on her now-protected Twitter account (archived version is here) Prescod-Weinstein wrote on New Year’s Eve that antisemitism in the US historically has been “a white Christian problem,” and anti-Jewish feelings expressed by blacks are due to the “influence of white gentiles.”
Further, the prof wrote that people demanding black leaders speak out against antisemitism are “probably a garden variety racist[s].”
“White Jews adopted whiteness as a social praxis and harmed Black people in the process,” Prescod-Weinstein said. “Some Black people have problematically blamed Jewishness for it.”
Let’s see if I get this: “White Jews” culturally appropriated antisemitism from “White Gentiles” so as to deny agency to blacks. Some blacks, then, can be racist? I’ve been assured by many Professors sharing Prescod-Weinstein’s sense of things that that isn’t possible.
Speaking of speaking out and garden variety anti-semites, Al “Crown Heights riot” Sharpton, Louis “Satanic Jews” Farrakhan, Jesse “Hymietown” Jackson, Ilhan “Benjamins” Omar, and Linda “Stop humanizing Jews” Sarsour go unmentioned. Maybe toning down their agency – i.e., just refrain from fomenting antisemitism – would be enough? Did these leaders-of-color also witlessly absorb their antisemitism from white gentiles? Even so, do they have some responsibility for spreading it?
Professor Prescod-Weinstein is very well qualified to speak her epistemological conclusions to racial, ethnic, religious, sex, and gender intersectionality questions:
I proudly hail from the east Los Angeles neighborhood of El Sereno. The 63rd Black American woman* to earn a Ph.D. in physics, I am a descendant of Afro-Caribbean and Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants.
[link]I am a proudly out and was a founding member of the American Astronomical Society Committee for Sexual-Orientation and Gender Minorities in Astronomy (SGMA), where I served as an executive member for six years.
[link]
She checks off more victimhood boxes than most. She has a PhD in physics. She enjoys a visible internet presence – writing dozens of articles for Medium. For example: Intersectionality as a Blueprint for Postcolonial Scientific Community Building
One wonders how she is allowed any agency as a gay, black, female of Jewish descent. Her example is inversely proportional to her theory.