Silly People vs. Serious People
By Jonathan Rosenblum
7/04/2021
Writing last week in the Wall Street Journal, William Galston, a former senior policy advisor to President Clinton, enumerated five broad pillars of Chinese president Xi Jinping’s strategy for world dominance.
One of those is technology. Xi’s “Made in China 2025” seeks to secure China’s lead in the “technologies that will dominate the global market in coming decades, many of which have military applications.” Another pillar of Mr. Xi’s strategy is military. China possesses the largest navy in the world, and is busy establishing a “global system of ports to give its forces access all over the world.” And its land forces are far better equipped than they were a decade ago.
President Joe Biden appears to recognize the threat, and spent a great deal of his time on his recent European trip marshalling support for confronting China.
Yet in that confrontation, the United States is seriously handicapping itself: As one comedian put it recently, it is a confrontation between a serious people (China) and a silly people (the United States). China, he said, builds major dams in the time we spend arguing over what to name them. In the time China has taken to build 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail, the state of California has not quite managed to connect Bakersfield and Merced, the raisin capital of the world, despite spending $6 billion to do so. In 2019, the United States issued more degrees in visual and performing arts than in computers, information science, and math.
The battle between China and the United States for world leadership will largely be determined by technological superiority, and that in turn will depend on our respective educational systems. And it is precisely with respect to education that the United States is deliberately hamstringing itself. Rather than identifying our top students and fostering their development, we have declared war on standards and all the ways in which students once distinguished themselves.
The Princeton classics department recently declared that knowledge of Greek or Latin will no longer be required for an undergraduate degree in classics. Admittedly, the quality of our classics scholars will have little impact on our global competition with China.
But the war on standards in pursuit of “equity” — representation for “oppressed” racial and gender groups, according to their percentage of the population — certainly will.
That leveling impulse is running rampant in American education. California has done away with advanced math classes below grade 11. Standardized testing, which once served as a boon to good students without familial connections and the like, is now suspect. The California university system no longer requires SATs as part of the admissions process, and by 2023 will not even consider SAT or ACT scores if students choose to submit them as part of their application. The tony Dalton School (tuition $54,180 per year) has decided to do away with high-level academic courses by 2023 if the performance of black students is not on par with non-black students.
Getting rid of all objective measures gives full rein to all those deans of inclusion and diversity to create perfectly balanced classes along racial lines.
Instead of increasing the quality of the math curriculum and develop math skills, the state education departments in California and Oregon have declared that current math instruction places too great an emphasis “on finding the right answer.” That focus, according to the Oregon Department of Education, manifests “white supremacy.” If you had to predict the future technological development of a country, would you bet on the one emphasizing getting the right answers to math problems, or the one with a more touchy-feely approach?
Instead of upping the time devoted to math instruction, the Seattle school board created social justice resources for math teachers to introduce into their classes that focus on “power and oppression” and “the history of resistance and liberation” within mathematics. The implicit message to minority students is not one of empowerment — “You can learn to do math” — but the opposite: “You can’t do math, but it’s not your fault.”
The solution to every academic failure is to lower the standards. When the University of North Carolina discovered that over a quarter of students received a D, F, or withdrew from math and statistics classes, the response was to revise the general education math requirements to make them more “applicable and equitable.”
The exhibit on “whiteness” at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture lists among the qualities of “whiteness”: “the scientific method,” “hard work,” “objectivity,” “punctuality.” Identifying the “scientific method” with “whiteness” should go a long way to encouraging more black scientists.
INSTEAD OF ENCOURAGING HARD WORK, a silly people will punish it or seek to lessen its rewards. Asian-Americans are the victims of the latter today. Mention the “Wuhan flu” and one will immediately stand accused of being a “white supremacist” and a “racist.” And yet that same accuser will have no problem with the systematic discrimination against Asian students in admissions to elite colleges and universities.
Asian-Americans are the Jews of a century ago. Once, New York’s Stuyvesant High School, one of America’s best public schools, was 80 percent Jewish. Today, it is approximately three-quarters Asian. That imbalance has generated repeated calls to do away with Stuyvesant’s rigorous entrance exam, most vociferously by outgoing New York mayor Bill de Blasio.
When it comes to college admissions, however, schools find ways to get away from objective scores and the like. A suit charging Harvard University with discrimination against Asians, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University, has been wending its way through the federal court system for seven years. According to the Harvard’s own Office of Institutional Research, Asian-Americans would constitute 43.4 percent of Harvard undergraduates if only grades, SAT scores, and extracurricular activities were considered. In point of fact, they make up only 23 percent of the undergraduate population, which is still four times their percentage of the general population.
That 23 percent is slightly higher than the percentage of Jews among Harvard undergraduates in 1922 (my grandfather’s class), when alarums went off in the head of Harvard President Abbott Lawrence, who proposed a Jewish quota of no more than 15 percent. He worried that too many “insensitive, aggressive, and ill-conditioned” Jews would drive Christian gentlemen away.
Similarly, Harvard today consistently ranks Asian applicants lower on such personal qualities as “positive personality, likeability, courage, kindness, widely respected.” Amazingly, these negative evaluations are meted out by admissions officers who have never met or spoken to the applicants. Talk about racial stereotyping.
A cottage industry exists in advising Asian applicants to Ivy League schools. They are told to never mention how hard they work. And if they happen to win a national science contest or the like, not to write their essay about it, lest they appear to be too serious.
THERE IS YET ANOTHER, MORE SUBTLE WAY in which America’s woke educational system has helped destroy its natural advantages: by undermining a culture of vigorous debate, which has been a hallmark of Western culture back to the Greeks. In his landmark The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently — and Why, Robert Nisbet notes that American scientists won 44 Nobel Prizes in the 1990s, while only one Japanese scientist did, even though Japan spends heavily on scientific training and research. West Germany and France, which spend far less than Japan on science, garnered five and three Nobel Prizes respectively.
Some Japanese scientists themselves attributed the deficit in the highest level scientific work to the absence of debate and intellectual confrontation in Asian culture. Peer review and criticism are rare in Japan. One Japanese scientist offered the example of two eminent American colleagues, who were personal friends. But at conferences and in scientific journals, they would go at it tong and nails. In Japan, he told Nisbet, such a thing would never occur. It would be considered unforgivably rude.
But that Western emphasis on debate and a free marketplace of ideas finds ever less space on the campus today. It is incompatible with a culture of “You can’t say that.”
And that has seeped down into science, in which Twitter and Facebook have increasingly become the arbiters of what scientific and medical opinions can be publicized. Last October 4, Professors Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, and Jah Bhattacharya of Stanford published the Great Barrington Declaration, in which they expressed their opposition, as epidemiologists, to the lockdowns then in effect, and urged a focus on protecting vulnerable populations instead. The existent policies, they argued, protected young, low-risk professionals working from home on the backs of children, the working class, and the poor.
As the lockdown failures became increasingly clear, instead of the debate intensifying, censorship increased, according to Kulldorff. YouTube censored a roundtable in which the three eminent scientists stated that children do not need to wear masks; Facebook closed an account of theirs arguing for prioritization of older populations in receiving vaccines; Twitter censored a Kulldorff post in which he said children and the previously infected do not require vaccination, and later locked his account after he wrote of the death of an older couple, with whom he was friends, who had relied too much on their masks to protect themselves at the expense of other forms of social distancing.
As long as American culture continues on the path of “silliness,” at the expense of open debate, rigorous standards, and fostering merit, the future will belong to Chinese autocrats.
Source: http://www.jewishworldreview.com/jonathan/silly_serious_people.php3
Yes, Virginia, There Is Critical Race Theory in Our Schools
By Elizabeth Schultz
7/04/2021
School districts across Virginia have been expending resources, directing staff time, and hiring consultants to address “equity” in curriculum delivery and for professional development of teachers and other employees. Fairfax and Loudoun County, the two largest counties in the Commonwealth, have set the lead in driving the changes in education and embracing critical race theory and “anti-bias” in their respective divisions.
Critical Race Theory (CRT) pushes the distorted concept that the most important thing about a person is their race, separating it above the person as an individual. It divides people by those who are “minoritized” and those who are “privileged” and “oppressors”, advancing Marxist ideology that, by default, all interactions are derived from racism, our history and nation is built on racism, and all inequities are, yes, ascribed to racism. The color of one’s skin defines whether they are racist, not their beliefs or actions.
As a result, to undo the professed mantle of inherent racism in all aspects of society, CRT demands “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, addressing “justice”, and, according to activists like Ibrahm X. Kendi, the Center for Antiracist Research director at Boston University, requires people to become “anti-racist”.
Efforts to rewrite social studies curriculum with a goal of teaching from “diverse perspectives” began with Fairfax County teachers in 2018, joining with teachers from Albermarle, Charlottesville and Virginia Beach City. It later became a statewide endeavor to create an “anti-racist and culturally-responsive” curriculum, joined by teachers from Madison and Powhatan counties. The effort centered first on rewriting the fourth grade Virginia Studies curriculum.
At that time, Fairfax County Public Schools’ (FCPS) social studies coordinator, Colleen Eddy, identified that the work was intended to address the “overrepresentation of white and Eurocentric history” and the lack of “diverse perspectives in education.” The overhaul of the curriculum was done in collaboration with the framework created by Teaching Tolerance, an extension of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has since been re-monikered to “Learning for Justice”. The objective was to “examine materials, events, and institutions critically attending to power, position, and bias”, with the intended use in 3rd, 4th, 6th, 7th, and 11th-grade classrooms.
A perusal of the Learning for Justice professional development and materials pre-populated for teachers to deliver in K-12 classrooms includes articles like the one in which a teacher calls for “educators to commit to making schools — at all levels — critical active conscience spaces that center people long denied space, voice and freedom.”
Long before the Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times (NYT) Magazine’s divisive and erroneous “1619 Project”, which the NYT was later forced to quietly correct, the SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance list of “Essential Knowledge” included direction for teaching third through fifth graders that “the United States was founded on protecting the interests of white, Christian men who owned property”, that the foundational growth of the U.S. economy was slavery, and that our founding documents were created to “protect the institution of slavery.”
In a July 2020 press release, FCPS included a comprehensive background on the work done by the division, its influence to collaborate across the state, and the work of Eddy to effect curriculum changes related to “bias, identity, and multiple perspectives” that had been done over the prior 18 months.
Simultaneous to the overhaul of curriculum materials by FCPS staff, Fairfax County residents experienced the unprecedented deployment of the policy known as “One Fairfax”. The Board of Supervisors and School Board swiftly adopted the declaration of a broad new effort to make all decisions in the county — on everything from education, housing, policing, and the budget– through the “lens of equity”. Outside consultants hired to advise staff in the county and school system successfully advanced the “lens of equity” progressive agenda, which has also been embedded in cities across the country and is backed by funding from George Soros.
In like-minded concert, the FCPS School Board secured a presentation by Kendi, expending $44,000 for a one-hour presentation — which they have refused to release publicly — and a supply of his books, inevitably bound for distribution to teachers and staff to further their “equity-driven” professional development.
In short order after the adoption of “One Fairfax”, policy decisions by FCPS on crucial issues such as school boundaries were made by setting the “socioeconomic and/or racial composition of students” as the primary criteria for establishing school boundaries.
The new demand of “One Fairfax” to embed “equity” in all decisions was then turned on the nation’s top ranked Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJHSST). FCPS’ Superintendent Scott Brabrand, who had previously eliminated the executive role of a ‘Chief Academic Officer’ in exchange for a ‘Chief Equity Officer’, announced the revised TJHSST admissions plan to reduce the number of Asian students at the selective governor’s high school.
Brabrand laid out the plan for the School Board to eliminate the existing merit-based admissions test, designed to ensure selection of students with the greatest aptitude for math and science — regardless of race — and adopt in its place a “merit lottery”. The then-proposed and since adopted admissions plan — now the subject of a lawsuit — opened TJHSST to all eighth-graders, merely establishing a minimum GPA of 3.5 to ostensibly increase “equity of opportunity.”
As the effort to revamp curriculum expanded beyond Fairfax County with the statewide work undertaken in 2018 and 2019, FCPS’ Eddy then became appointed to the “Culturally Relevant and Inclusive Education Practices Advisory Committee” to the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE), established by direction of the 2020 Legislative Session of the Virginia General Assembly.
The legislation passed by the General Assembly calls for submission of recommendations on history and social science Standards of Learning by the Committee to the VDOE for a 2021-2022 review, which the Board of Education “shall consider” with required input on matters such as “historical dehumanizing injustice and discrimination” and “acknowledgment of inequity on the individual level, such as biased speech and harassment, and injustice at the institutional or systemic level, such as discrimination, and the harmful impact of inequity and injustice on the community, historically and today.”
The division and statewide-level work that has been cloaked under the guise of being “inclusive”, “culturally responsive”, ensuring “equity”, and embracing “anti-racism” is well documented. The underlying themes are driving people to be consumed about race over individual conduct, promoting race-shaming students, welcoming dangerous Marxist ideology, and working to divide an educational system by teaching young children to see and judge people by race, rather than by class or character.
Parents in Loudoun, including those who survived the Maoist purge, have been particularly vocal about pushing back on their school board, with minority parents decrying the actual racism that is behind and promoted by critical race theory. Parents want authentic conversations about what unites us as Virginians and Americans; they are calling for school boards to end to this hate-promoting, divisive indoctrination in our classrooms.
So, yes Virginia; despite protestations of school boards in Fairfax and Loudoun that they are not “teaching” it, there has been a comprehensive, deliberative, and manipulative effort of school staff and the school boards, under way for years. The tactics have been advised and funded by outside progressive consultants, groups, and money — then intentionally expanded statewide — to embrace and deeply-embed critical race theory in our schools.
This article was first published by the Fairfax County Times; it is republished here with the author’s consent. Elizabeth L. Schultz is a senior fellow at Parents Defending Education. Elizabeth was twice-elected to the Fairfax County School Board, and later served in the U.S. Department of Education. She is a mother of four — three former FCPS students and one current student.