Maggie's Farm

Half of college students fear expressing ideas in the classroom

I do not think that that is anything new.  

Men abandon higher education in droves, trail female student enrollment by record levels

Maybe they do not wish to enroll in Intro to Trans Studies 

A Telescope for Social Justice

Via Gateway:

 Boyle said in an emailed statement that suspending the reading, writing and math proficiency requirements will benefit “Oregon’s Black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of colour.

I doubt that anybody thinks so, so here's this: Do we still need math? We spend much of our early years learning arithmetic and algebra. What's the use?

And elite universities deserve a huge share of the blame.

Story at Quillette: How All My Politically Correct Bones Were Broken:

... after a decade of teaching students from minimally educated, working poor families, I was thoroughly familiar with the difficulty of bringing unprepared or unmotivated students of any color or background up to anything like a college level. Many students lacked even middle-school reading competence. Many could not write a complete sentence. Some skipped classes and failed to turn in assignments—or just dropped out. But the college mission was to educate everyone. We were an “open door” institution, with a high school diploma or GED sufficient for admission. We were here to give students the chance none in their families had ever had before, and we believed in our mission. Toward the end of the meeting I raised my hand and asked how, given reading and preparation levels, we could possibly increase grades and graduation rates without lowering standards. “What do you teach?” he asked. “English,” I offered. “You don’t teach English,” he corrected me. “You teach White Studies.”

I had no idea how to respond, so I fell silent.

Tyler Cowen: Abolishing tenure is the least of my proposals

When I was young, "strivers" were looked down upon. The "natural talents" were most admired, whether in math, using words, athletics, the arts, etc. Before my time, Jews were the "strivers," but in my time they could be anybody.

I believe that the elite schools seek special talents and qualities in a variety of areas. Of course, IQ and academic potential also. Elite schools could easily fill their classes with kids with perfect SAT scores. There is the issue with meritocracy with college admissions. 

Asian-Americans are the strivers of today. They, on some average, study twice as hard as "white" kids. I do not know whether they are also "resume-builders" like many kids used to be. The sterotype is that Asian kids are all math and violin geniuses.

With ethnic issues dominating the news these days, I'd like to ask a question. Are people with Indian (India) heritage "Asian"? 

MATH IS HARD—HARDEST OF ALL FOR THE LEFT

Some smart comments there. Somewhat related, what are the UK's A Level Exams? 

 More colleges rejecting SAT/ACT scores that are apparently racist

I do not see how we can eliminate exams for everything.

...and are seeking academic success or just mental challenges, there are many resources available for kids who want to advance at their own levels. Kids in "bad schools" can learn all they want, thanks to the internet.

Online classrooms have not proven to be very useful. Probably better than nothing, but barely, but Khan has it figured out for motivated kids.  

Khan Academy is excellent, and free. 

NYC has used tests, some at 5 years old, to determine who is admitted to the city's public accelerated schools. 5 years old seems a bit young to me for that, but the general idea was the same that drove the creation of the SAT: to prevent discrimination other than about intellectual potential.

In NYC, Gifted and Talented enrollment is 43 percent Asian, 36 percent white, 8 percent Hispanic, and 6 percent black.

NYC has many desirable private, parochial, and charter schools too, but, of the latter, only the private schools tend to have entry standards. 

Related,  Kids will pay a steep price for this War on Merit in schools

I was a bright kid without any particular talents, no genius and not entirely dedicated to school. I grew up in an entirely non-diverse neighborhood and town. Lily-white. Every boy wanted to be an Eagle Scout.

The notion of racial disparity did not exist, but there were clear distinctions between the smart kids and the slow kids, the athletically talented kids and the not, etc. I doubt I would have been admitted to a public NYC accelerated school, but I was forced to learn discipline when I went to a private high school with high demands and expectations.

I think what is going on in NY is about skin tone and ethnicity. 

Leftists Rewriting History Week in Higher Education, at Legal Insurrection

Bari Weiss on the elite prep schools:  (h/t K-12 Implosion)

... physics looks different these days. “We don’t call them Newton’s laws anymore,” an upperclassman at the school informs me. “We call them the three fundamental laws of physics. They say we need to ‘decenter whiteness,’ and we need to acknowledge that there’s more than just Newton in physics.”

The entirety of the glorious rant from the father of a Brearley girl. (If you do not know, Brearley is one a few very toney NYC private schools.)

Most parents will probably agree, but will be afraid to speak up. 

From a piece by a Georgetown Law Prof, at Quillette:

 The academy is a different place today than it was only a year ago and was different a year ago than it was five years before. Terror and dread fill academic workers, professors, and staff alike, and it is everywhere. Neither the call for distinguishing between unconscious bias and structural racism; nor for dismantling “merit” so that “minorities” succeed, seem able to do the work the authors of these emails want them to do. They fail to deliver responses of the kind, “Let’s just talk about this. Maybe the problem is overdetermined and is not reducible to ‘unconscious bias.’” What they beget instead is a combination of dread and virtuous self-congratulation. These two sentiments, dread married to virtue, constitute to my mind the affective embodiment of progressive ideology prevalent among white liberals as developed in its most privileged space: academia. They are typical. They are two faces of the same coin: flip and you see dread, flip again and you see virtue.

The Threat to Academic Freedom: From Anecdotes to Data

 Academia has become a closed system, a moral community defined by a set of sacred progressive values. The surge of no-platformings which took off in America in 2015 and hit Britain in 2018–19, or the fivefold jump in the rate of cancelling American academics which took place in 2019, present merely the tip of an iceberg of self-censorship and conformity. In this essay, I present extensive new survey data on the scale of the problem in the US, Canada, and Britain from my new report for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology entitled “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship.” 

Academic freedom? Freedom of speech? In the current atmosphere, these have become dangerous. This is evil, by American values.

Government still can't censor people but your employer can censor you, or worse. It is a climate of fear, as if we lived in some foreign country. "Shut up or we will destroy you" is not an argument.  

At Quillette,  The Threat to Academic Freedom: From Anecdotes to Data

I posted about math yesterday, so today Shakespeare.

Today, math is challenging for many and so is reading Shakespeare. It's not exactly a different language, but it sort-of is.  His plots are not too difficult to suss out and his characters are usually interesting and colorful, but his language is the thing for me.

It is not for kids.  

I wonder whether the teachers just want to avoid things that are challenging to deal with. 

Powerline: WHY MATH IS RACIST

 I  suppose it would be possible to come up with a better plan to destroy black academic performance than by telling black students not to worry about getting the right answer to a math problem, but I can’t think what it would be.

At Legal Insurrection