Maggie's Farm

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

Everybody knows about the Naval Academy and West Point, but these two are excellent, rigorous of course, and not just about driving boats:

The US Merchant Marine Academy

The US Coast Guard Academy 

 Last year, students at New York’s elite United Nations International School launched an anonymous social media campaign denouncing the school’s teachers and administrators for their “vast history of systemic racism,” “white liberal racist thinking,” and “direct, intentional, repeated racial trauma.” The students threatened to “cancel” their “oppressors” through social media shaming. Administrators immediately caved to their demands.

San Diego’s school district tells white teachers that they are guilty of “spirit murdering” black children and should undergo “antiracist therapy.”

I have grown weary of linking such reporting, but San Diego? 

Should Blacks Support Destruction of Charter Schools?

Everybody ought to support school choice. Why not? Let a thousand flowers bloom, including home schooling which costs the taxpayers nothing. 

At Quillette, The Lawrence Mead Affair:

 Regarding the claim that “black social problems” are due to “white oppression,” Mead argued, “By that logic, the problems should have been worst prior to the civil rights reforms in the 1960s.” Yet in his reading of events, “The collapse of the black family occurred mostly after civil rights rather than before.” Hence Mead not only suggested that Western culture is better than non-Western culture, at least when it comes to getting ahead in America, but also that higher poverty rates among blacks and Hispanics are attributable to factors other than racial discrimination. As you can imagine, this message was not warmly received...

The campaign against educational excellence spreads to the suburbs.

Last year, students at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, one of the nation’s most prestigious public schools, marked a map hanging in a hallway with their families’ far-flung places of origin: from Seoul to Beijing to Hyderabad. Twenty years ago, 70 percent of TJ students were white; today, 79 percent are minority, most from Asian immigrant families.

TJ is a testament to American meritocracy’s melting pot—but last week, Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Scott Brabrand announced a plan to reduce the number of Asian students at this selective high school. In a four-hour online “work session” alongside the district’s all-Democratic school board, Brabrand laid out an initiative to eliminate TJ’s race-blind, merit-based admissions test and replace it with a “merit lottery” open to all eighth-graders with a minimum GPA of 3.5 in order to increase “equity of opportunity.”

A modest proposal for professors of literature

Word is out on the street: the study of literature is dying; English is breathing its last; no more Beowulf, no more Virginia Woolf either. Or not much of it. There are reasons to listen to the auguries. Most of the teaching in English departments now is done by adjuncts. The number of majors is tumbling. The profession’s on fire, and the deans, provosts, and presidents don’t hear the cries or smell the smoke...

Manhattan Contrarian: Covid-19 Is An Opportunity To Disrupt Education

 Despite overwhelming evidence that opening schools for in-person education is both safe and beneficial for children, teachers unions across the U.S. continue to try to hold families hostage in pursuit of political gains. As the unions overplay their hands, there is a great opportunity for market disruption of the dysfunctional union-controlled status quo.   

Quillette: How to Fight the Enemies of Academic Freedom

 In the worldview of the Woke, America has never been that paragon of freedom, justice, and opportunities for all that attracted us immigrants, but rather a terribly unjust, racist, and corrupt society. Its foundation does not begin with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that we proud and patriotic immigrants venerate, but rather, as the New York Times tells us in its 1619 Project, with the date when the first slaves were brought to these shores. American history is no longer taught dialectically, as a constant struggle for improvements made possible by the magnificent founding principles and institutions of the republic, but, rather, statically as a mindless sequence of acts of oppression against various groups. In fact, the founding documents are themselves often deemed to be racist and sexist, as are the historic figures who wrote them...

About Thomas Sowell's new book

An Old White Professor Speaks to the Class of 2020

How dependent is American higher ed on foreign students?

Quite a lot, especially Chinese kids.  I did not realize the extent, and have no strong opinion on it. However, it is clearly about money. Are some Chinese students spies, of sorts? Of course, if a spy is somebody sent by the government to get information.

Higher education faces challenges that are unlike any other industry. What path will ASU, and universities like ASU, take in a post-COVID world?

I suspect back to the usual, in time. 

Williamson:  What Are Schools For?

 Public schools are a peerless example of the progressives’ conception of society as one big factory that can be scientifically managed with a kind of political (and moral) Taylorism. (Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management was enormously influential among American progressives.) Whether the problem is education or health care or pharmaceutical regulation, the factory mindset of progressives favors unified systems characterized by standardization and homogeneity. The idea of lots of different kinds of schools offering lots of different kinds of education — with many of them operating outside of the direct oversight of the central bureaucracy — gives them the willies.

School Choice Defeats Anti-Catholic Bigotry 5–4 at the Supreme Court

Not just anti-Catholic - anti-Jewish, anti-charter, anti-Moslem, anti-anything with free choice. My view is educational vouchers through grade 12 for all.

Two books survey how the university came to prize ideology over ideas.

Restore Authority to Education

When you read the details, it's remarkable: The University of Texas Succumbs to the ‘Social Justice’ Pandemic