The closing of the teenage mind is almost complete.

 BOWLING ALONE READS LIKE A NOSTALGIC LOOK AT THE GOOD OL’ DAYS:

What [Robert] Putnam couldn’t possibly have seen at the dawn of the technological revolution is how much worse the “bowling alone” phenomenon would get with the addition of the smartphone and the internet. I was waiting tables during the portable computer revolution. In the course of just a few years people went from dining together to dining together, alone. Entire families eating together, all looking at their phones.

My Gen Z nephews look at the TV like a telephone landline. Why would they be chained to one room, at the mercy of other people’s preferences, when they can roam freely from place to place, consuming whatever content their heart desires?

There is a line in Bowling Alone that made me laugh out loud. Putnam wrote, “Some see hope in the rise of news on the Internet or the all-news cable channels. It is still too early to predict the long-run effects of these new channels,” Putnam wrote. He adds, “That said, the early returns are not encouraging.”

Adorable. Cable news is dead. Cable broadcasts get fewer viewers than many YouTube streamers. Trump will probably be our next president, again. Now we are fat and lazy and also outraged and misinformed and distracted. Our attention spans are shredded by the multiple devices and social media constantly capturing our attention.

And as a result: The closing of the teenage mind is almost complete.

In the 1950s, the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg developed a model for moral reasoning that follows a trajectory similar to Piaget’s model for cognitive development: Children progress from more concrete to more abstract thinking, from more rigidity to more flexibility. Levine says that what alarms her about the rigid, concrete take on right or wrong she sees in my generation is that without the “capacity to hear opposing points of view, you don’t develop empathy. And you’ll need empathy to end up with a good partner, to be a good parent and to be a good citizen.”

Julie Lythcott-Haims, a former Stanford dean, agrees: “We’re in desperate need of humans who can grapple openly with ideas, and disagree, as reasonable people will, without villainizing each other.”

I see teenagers unintentionally becoming more unforgiving and judgmental rather than open-minded and compassionate. When we can’t or don’t talk freely, we lose the chance to find real common ground, acknowledge complexity or grasp that even our own opinions can be malleable. If we listen only to those who already agree with us, we won’t make wider connections. We won’t grow.

Some people told me not to write this piece — that I could get canceled online, cut off by peers and perhaps even rejected by colleges. That’s a risk I’m willing to take.

I definitely don’t have all the answers, but I believe that daring to get past what’s acceptable and engage in open dialogue — as we did walking away from English class that day — is the key way to finding them and becoming the empathetic critical thinkers we need to be as we grow into adulthood.

Let’s start talking.

But that would require reasoning and — heaven forfend — even thoughtful debate! It’s so much easier (for kids of all ages) just to let those knees jerk and tear down the posters when confronted with a liberal ideology that causes them plenty of cognitive dissonance.

I

Ugly State of Affairs in American Universities

 

.Yet it is hard to imagine the current intolerant woke campus will change course unless we have a serious discussion about curbing the government's multibillion-dollar subsidies to elite higher education—winding down the massive research grants, tax-free endowment income, tax-deductible private gifts, and $2 trillion in federally subsidized student loans.

Given the gargantuan Ivy-League endowments and multibillion-dollar annual influx of “research” grants to elite institutions, these presidents and their universities apparently believe they are to be exempt from all criticism and enjoy a birthright to endless federal money.

Again, the only thing that can save the elite universities from themselves, and from their descent into the modern Dark Ages is to return once again to inculcating civic education, ensuring free inquiry, offering inductive courses—and showing some concern for their own middle-class taxpaying benefactors.

I think we can all agree on one thing: Harvard most certainly does not stand for “defending a culture of free inquiry”—at least as it applies to unfettered and free debate over, say, controversies such as Israel, DEI, affirmative action, grading standards, Christianity, Western Civilization, climate change, abortion, fossil fuels, transgenderism and sports, illegal immigration, or firearms.

There was a reason, after all, why The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) ranked Harvard dead last out of 248 universities in protecting “free speech”, and why Gay’s Harvard is infamous for bending to pressure to disinvite guest speakers, attacking any who do not abide by approved vocabulary, ostracizing faculty deemed insufficiently supportive of DEI agendas, and student mobs hounding professors whose published research they do not like.

 How to Really Fix America's Higher Learning Institutions

How to Really Fix American Higher Education

Bari’s view. Peter Savodnik’s counterpoint. Plus, Mathias Döpfner on ‘things I never thought possible.’ And Niall Ferguson on ‘the treason of the intellectuals’—then and now.

Petr Savodnik

Our own Peter Savodnik believes that Magill’s resignation is lamentable:

Niall Ferguson

The Treason of the Intellectuals

Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill morality has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich.

Mathias-Dopfner

The Things I Never Thought Possible—Until October 7

Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner on the many illusions shattered by Hamas’s pogrom and the orgy of antisemitism it inspired.

George Orwell:Boy Did I Call It., Or What?

 ROGER KIMBALL: Stanford’s Naughty and Nice List.

The scarifying bulletin offers advice on the language that you should—and, more to the point, language that you shouldn’t—use in several different situations. With respect to language that touches on prowess and disability, for example, it suggests that instead of saying “addict” one say “person with a substance use disorder” (not that the person mainlining heroin had any choice in the matter, you see). Instead of saying “basket case,” consider saying “nervous.” Instead of saying “committed suicide,” say “died by suicide”—as if it just happened; no agency or responsibility involved. And on and on through the usual lexicon of supposedly hypersensitive but really obtuse insanity. 

The website proceeds through all the usual politically correct categories, with entries on “ageist” language, 57 varieties of “gender identification” and, of course, endless handwringing entries dealing with race. Don’t say “bury the hatchet,” for heaven’s sake, say “call for peace, call a truce. ” Don’t say “low man on the totem pole,” say “lacking seniority, don’t have the power or prestige.” By the same token (is that permissible?), don’t say “balls to the wall” (I could have told you that), say “accelerate efforts,” don’t say “chairman” or “chairwoman,” say “chairperson, chair.” 

Naturally, you shouldn’t even think about using personal pronouns or the word “man” as a collective noun or as a verb. Don’t say “black hat,” “black mark,” “black sheep,” “blackballed,” “blackbox,” “blacklist.” Don’t even say “brown bag” because—well, you know. Grandfather, father, mother, daughter, son: they’re out, and so are most uses of the word “master”: “master list,” “master a subject,” “master plan.” You can’t say “rule of thumb” because, the document explains, “this phrase is attributed to an old British law that allowed men to beat their wives with sticks no wider than their thumb.” It actually has its source in Muslim practice, but they’re a protected group, so we’re not supposed to mention them. 

Note that the version of this pathetic document I link to exists on a server at the Wall Street Journal. Stanford, facing blowback (that word must certainly offend someone!) hid it from public scrutiny. As the Journal’s column put it, “without a password, you wouldn’t know that ‘stupid’ made the list.”

The Newspeak Dictionary doesn’t shrink itself, you know.

20Posted at 12:44 pm by Ed Driscoll   

 August 23, 2022

So where do NEA teachers' union dues end up?

By Monica Showalter

 

Joe Biden has proudly touted a new tax break for teachers through his beefed-up IRS, allowing them to deduct the cost of $300 in classroom materials instead of $250, as his means of helping them beat the inflation monster he created.

Please clap.

The beleaguered teachers, a huge number of whom are leaving the profession in growing shortages of teachers, though, really do have bigger problems on their plates than that $300 chump change dangled by Biden can supposedly fix.

According to the New York Post:

The head of the most prominent teachers’ union in the United States raked in more than $500,000 in pay as the group showered liberal causes with money and fought to keep schools closed during the pandemic, tax forms provided to Fox News Digital show.

 

Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association (NEA), the country’s largest teachers’ union, pocketed $534,243 in compensation from the NEA and its related organizations between September 2020 and August 2021, an increase of $25,000 from the previous calendar year, newest tax forms show.

“Becky Pringle lined her pockets with over half a million dollars and peddled politics at the expense of returning to in-person learning,” said Caitland Sutherland, executive director of Americans for Public Trust, who provided the tax forms to Fox News Digital.

 So while teachers were getting their $300 in Bidenbucks and supposed to bow down to him in gratitude for it, this well-larded whale was taking home a salary bigger than what the president of the United States makes.

It's not as if this person's money went to anything like performance. Teachers, after all, are leaving the profession, meaning fewer union dues payers. Worse still, this is the creature who was the hardest advocate of closed schools in the hysteria over COVID, doing humongous damage to the development of children, who were either forced to stay home and never see their friends, or else mask up for eight hours a day, and like prisoners, eat their breakfast on the ground in frozen winter conditions.

This was her doing. Worse still, with a big salary like that, one that tops that of probably everyone in the CDC, she was throwing her weight around at that agency, with her union literally giving it its marching orders on COVID shutdowns and lockdowns in schools. That was a bona fide scandal.

 

But big money can do that, and not just this below-mediocre functionary's salary, but in all the other stuff her union doled out their money on.

According to the Post:

The tax documents further reveal that the NEA gave millions to liberal groups in addition to cash to teachers’ associations.

According to the filings, the NEA sent $200,000 to the Democracy Alliance, a left-wing donor club co-founded by George Soros that helps set the Democratic agenda, while adding $100,000 to the Strategic Victory Fund, a nonprofit created by the donor network that has boosted progressive campaign infrastructure in battleground states.

In other words, those big union dues teachers must pay not only go to the inflated, bloated, positively sybaritic, salaries of the losers running the teachers' unions, they go to rabid Democrat causes, making them very, very influential among ruling Democrats and their agenda. Don't jump to their tune? No money for you.

It's frankly, a scandal. These parasites draw money on one end from many federal sources as well as the dues of the little guy, and then turn around and finance far-left Democrat organizations -- to call the shots to government. It works like a washing machine. All the while, huge chunks of these union dues also go to ever-fatter salaries for ever worse union leaders. If there's one thing that needs hosing out when the next Republican Congress takes office, it's these teachers' unions and their vast, unaccountable, octopus of money machines. 

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License

Prager Video (Miseducation of Our Children (WOKISM))

 Miseducation of Our Children (WOKISM)

Universities Pay Up - U of Mich

 

University of Michigan Settlement

The University of Michigan will pay $490M to settle claims from 1,050 people who say they were sexually assaulted by former sports doctor Robert Anderson. Of the total, $460M will go to the individuals, while $30M will be set aside for future claims, the university said yesterday.   Anderson spent 37 years at the university; he retired in 2003 and died in 2008. A firm hired by the university to investigate the sexual abuse allegations previously found university officials were aware of the abuse as early as 1978.   The news of the settlement comes four days after university President Mark Schlissel was fired over an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate.    The development also follows a string of university settlements over sexual abuse claims, including at Michigan State University ($500M for claims against Larry Nassar), Penn State University ($100M for claims against Jerry Sandusky), and University of Southern California ($852M for claims against George Tyndall).

Mitch Daniels : Stands Up at Purdue

 STANDING UP AGAINST FOREIGN COLLUSION: 

Purdue president calls harassment, intimidation of pro-freedom Chinese student ‘unacceptable.’

Daniels was responding to a recent article in ProPublica that detailed the intimidation and harassment faced by Chinese Purdue student Zhihao Kong after he spoke out against the Chinese government.

Kong, an engineering student, had recently gone public with his complaints against China, saying he was appalled that the Communist regime had claimed the COVID-19 virus originated in the United States. He further said China had worsened the pandemic by covering up the presence of the virus.

Finally, he posted an open letter praising the Tiananmen Square protesters who died at the hands of the People’s Republic of China three decades ago. . . .

Chinese officials saw his post and paid a visit to his parents, trying to intimidate them into getting Kong to stop posting pro-democracy statements. When he finally talked to his parents, Kong said they “were crying in the phone call. My father was urging me to stop such activities.”

Members of the Purdue Chinese Students and Scholars Association began threatening Kong in an online chat.

I think these students should be investigated for doing the work of a foreign power. Mitch Daniels’ comment:

“Joining the Purdue community requires acceptance of its rules and values, and no value is more central to our institution or to higher education generally than the freedom of inquiry and expression,” said Daniels, adding, “Those seeking to deny those rights to others, let alone to collude with foreign governments in repressing them, will need to pursue their education elsewhere.”

Daniels’ whole statement is here.

25Posted at 10:30 am by Glenn Reynolds   

I’

National School Boards Label Concerned Parents as Domestic Terrorists!

 NEWS & POLITICS

Concerned Parents Are 'Immediate Threat' Says National School Boards Association President—Some Are Even Domestic Terrorists!

BY GWENDOLYN SIMS   

It’s completely understandable that many parents around the country are fed up. They’re fed up with not only the onerous and arbitrary pandemic-related safety measures but also the racist and radical left-wing ideologies being forced upon kids in our taxpayer-funded schools. America’s parents are concerned and pushing back.

 What’s not so understandable (unless you’re a leftist) is the reaction to the pushback by those in the top echelons of our educational system. Case in point, on Thursday, National School Board Association (NSBA) president Viola Garcia sent out a hysterical—yet revealing—letter not to school board members or parents, but to the president of the United States, Joe Biden.

After fawning all over Biden’s “leadership to end the proliferation of COVID-19,” Garcia proceeds to ask “for federal law enforcement and other assistance to deal with the growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation occurring across the nation.” The letter cites several articles describing hostile behavior at school board meetings and other events as evidence of an “immediate threat.” And who does Garcia and the NSBA say is perpetrating this nationwide “immediate threat”? Why America’s concerned right-wing parents, of course.

It’s revealing this letter was sent to Biden and not local school boards or local law enforcement. Why would Garcia feel so entitled to contact the president? Could it be she believes Biden owes the left something after supporting his basement-dwelling campaign? Does Biden owe the teachers’ unions and other numerous educational associations something? Is it payback time?

 Tellingly, Garcia writes that “attacks against school board members and educators for approving policies for masks to protect the health and safety of students and school employees” are also “because of propaganda purporting the false inclusion of critical race theory within classroom instruction and curricula.” She deceptively claims that “critical race theory is not taught in public schools and remains a complex law school and graduate school subject well beyond the scope of a K-12 class.” Tuned-in parents know CRT is taught in public schools but that it has simply been renamed “ethnic studies.” Just ask the teachers’ union.

Related:  Teachers’ Union Commits to Shoving Critical Theories Down the Throats of Students and Parents Nationwide

Like a good little leftist, Garcia throws in the obligatory placation for free speech. “Local school board members want to hear from their communities on important issues,” claims Garcia. “However, there also must be safeguards in place to protect public schools and dedicated education leaders as they do their jobs.” However, also like the left, everything she writes afterward negates that placation. You see, free speech is all well and good until parents don’t agree with the job the school board is doing; then it’s time to sic the feds on them for speaking up while labeling that speech “threats” and “violence.”

 “Now, we ask that the federal government investigate, intercept, and prevent the current threats and acts of violence against our public school officials,” writes Garcia, “through existing statutes, executive authority, interagency and intergovernmental task forces, and other extraordinary measures to ensure the safety of our children and educators, to protect interstate commerce, and to preserve public school infrastructure and campuses.” Calling for the federal government to use vague “other extraordinary measures” to “investigate” parents sounds pretty intimidating and threatening to me, Ms. Garcia.

Not only does Garcia, blame parents for “threats and intimidations” instead of her own failed leftist school boards, but she also raises the crazy bar to high by equating upset parents’ attempts to speak at school board meetings as “equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” She even calls for numerous federal law enforcement agencies to target those parents.

“NSBA specifically solicits the expertise and resources of the U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Secret Service, and its National Threat Assessment Center regarding the level of risk to public school children, educators, board members, and facilities/campuses,” Garcia writes. “We also request the assistance of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service to intervene against threatening letters and cyberbullying attacks that have been transmitted to students, school board members, district administrators, and other educators.”

  Instead of writing a letter to villanize taxpaying parents who don’t agree with leftist policies of leftist school boards, Garcia should wake up and realize that she and her leftist cronies have poked the wrong bear.

I have news for the left: Engaged and concerned parents speaking at a school board meeting are not “domestic terrorists.” Our children do not belong to you. We see you and we see what you are trying to do. The pushback will continue no matter how many letters you write.

Progressives Stymie Education

 Counterfeit Civics

by Peter W. Wood

The National Association of Scholars opposes the proposal, “Educating for American Democracy.” The proposal has attracted some well-meaning supporters, but they are mistaken about what Educating for American Democracy—EAD—would bring into being.

Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy is a “framework” that prescribes how American K-12 schools should teach civics. That word “framework” is part of EAD’s official self-description, and it deserves a closer look. In this case, the so-called “framework” is really a well-developed plan to impose a politically progressive program of instruction on almost all American students. The framework determines the ideas to be taught and the means by which these ideas would be conveyed and enforced. The content of EAD is antithetical to how the vast majority of Americans understand our country.

Precedents

We have been here before, several times. In the early 1990s, the academic Left hijacked the National History Standards. Under the Left, those “standards” projected a dismal view of the nation’s past, but a public outcry, led by former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney, prompted a retreat. In January 1995, the U.S. Senate voted 99 to 1 to repudiate those standards.

Full article

Paying the price of free speech. Woke Universities

 DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: 

Paying the price of free speech.

Consider, to take another example, the fate of our colleges and universities. Once upon a time, and it was not so long ago, they were institutions dedicated to the pursuit of truth and the transmission of the highest values of our civilization. Today, most are dedicated to the repudiation of truth and the subversion of those values. In short, they are laboratories for the cultivation of wokeness. This is especially true, with only a handful of exceptions, of the most prestigious institutions: the tonier and more expensive the college, the more woke it is likely to be.

There are two central tenets of the woke philosophy. The first is feigned fragility. The second is angry intolerance. The union of fragility and intolerance has given us that curious and malevolent hybrid I have called the crybully, a delicate yet venomous species that thrives chiefly in lush, pampered environments.

The 18th-century German aphorist G.C. Lichtenberg observed, ‘Nowadays we everywhere seek to propagate wisdom: who knows whether in a couple of centuries there may not exist universities for restoring the old ignorance.’ Doubtless Lichtenberg thought he was being clever. How astonished he would have been to discover that he was a prophet, not a satirist.

It’s Roger Kimball, so read the whole thing.

 Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll   

 

I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated

 K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: 

I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated.

My school, like so many others, induces students via shame and sophistry to identify primarily with their race before their individual identities are fully formed. Students are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions. The morally compromised status of “oppressor” is assigned to one group of students based on their immutable characteristics. In the meantime, dependency, resentment and moral superiority are cultivated in students considered “oppressed.”

All of this is done in the name of “equity,” but it is the opposite of fair. In reality, all of this reinforces the worst impulses we have as human beings: our tendency toward tribalism and sectarianism that a truly liberal education is meant to transcend.

Recently, I raised questions about this ideology at a mandatory, whites-only student and faculty Zoom meeting. (Such racially segregated sessions are now commonplace at my school.) It was a bait-and-switch “self-care” seminar that labelled “objectivity,” “individualism,” “fear of open conflict,” and even “a right to comfort” as characteristics of white supremacy. I doubted that these human attributes — many of them virtues reframed as vices — should be racialized in this way. In the Zoom chat, I also questioned whether one must define oneself in terms of a racial identity at all. My goal was to model for students that they should feel safe to question ideological assertions if they felt moved to do so.

It seemed like my questions broke the ice. Students and even a few teachers offered a broad range of questions and observations. Many students said it was a more productive and substantive discussion than they expected.

However, when my questions were shared outside this forum, violating the school norm of confidentiality, I was informed by the head of the high school that my philosophical challenges had caused “harm” to students, given that these topics were “life and death matters, about people’s flesh and blood and bone.” I was reprimanded for “acting like an independent agent of a set of principles or ideas or beliefs.” And I was told that by doing so, I failed to serve the “greater good and the higher truth.”

Read the whole thing.

93Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll   

X