Alison Collins, right, speaks during a meeting in San Francisco, on Sept. 26, 2018. (Liz Hafalia/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)
Yep, you read it right. Who would have thought it possible, in San Francisco of all places? Voters on Tuesday sent packing three true-believing social justice warriors on the school board for wrecking the educations of the city’s children: school board President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison Collins. Granted, the city’s school-age cohort is proportionally the smallest of any major US city, but residents of all stripes have had their fill of turning the most vulnerable – children – into lab rats for chic political crusades.
Even more striking is the reaction of the city’s Asian-American population. They quickly grasped where this was heading. School board member Collins let the cat out of the bag. She tweeted, and never apologized, that the city’s Asians were cognitively “white supremacists” for complaining of school closures, the obsessive effort expended to rename 44 schools, the erasure of any semblance of merit in doing things like the rejection of competitive admissions for the district’s elite Lowell High School. The woke blokes and blokettes just learned a powerful lesson. Don’t mess with tiger moms!
One parent, Siva Raj, cut to the chase. He said,
“The city of San Francisco has risen up and said this is not acceptable to put our kids last. Talk is not going to educate our children, it’s action. It’s not about symbolic action, it’s not about changing the name on a school, it is about helping kids inside the school building read and learn math.”
Right! Now, what will this portend for the future? Could woke school boards across the country be heading to electoral guillotines as parents across the nation rise up as the newest edition of Committees of Public Safety? The spirit of Robespierre is ripe in the land.
In other words, where are our school leaders leading us?
Parents talk before rally to oppose critical race theory in Loudon County schools, June 12, 2021.
Please listen to the last 30 minutes of the Radion Free California podcast and capture Will Swaim’s (of the California Public Policy Center) interview of Dr. Lance Izumi, Senior Director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute. Click on Dr. Izumi’s picture for the interesting conversation. You’ll find it compelling if you’re worried about the condition of your child’s school.
Dr. Lance Izumi
To be clear, let’s not tar everyone with the same brush. Not every Trump voter cheered the January 6 riot, not every Democrat is, figuratively speaking, in bed with the socialistas of The Squad, and not by a long shot is every teacher responsible for the mediocrity of the schools. During my near 30 years as a public high school teacher, I have seen the great variability in teacher quality but few, very few, fit the bill as truly incompetent and uncaring. Some, like me, failed at their first bite of the apple, but learned the lesson that effectiveness is a dynamic process, experience being the best stylist of good teaching.
Yet, undeniably, something is amiss in our schools, and most emphatically in our public schools. Pre-pandemic, the failings spared no socioeconomic group. Certainly, the pandemic panic exacerbated the situation. Using the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) as the benchmark, schools with overwhelming middle-class enrollment produced dismal results with over half performing at below grade level. It only gets worse when we look at schools with the entire student body on the school lunch program. So, moving to a “better” neighborhood for the “better” schools is a fool’s errand. You’re only getting a student body in nicer clothes and cars, not a better education.
If I was to choose one overriding factor for the dreary situation, it would come down to rotten leadership. And I don’t mean to make administrators as a group the brunt. Poor captaincy stretches from many school board members to professors to superintendents through an administrative descent to the individual school, and, lest I forget, their directors and abettors in state and federal government. Most of this leadership crowd is pickled in a brine of progressive ideology emanating from the political arena and the gatekeepers of credentialing, the collegiate schools of education.
Teachers must also traverse the same gauntlet.
If you’re shocked by racial shaming sessions in your child’s Zoomed Social Studies lesson, well, what did you expect? Today’s progressivism is synonymous with the militant wokeness of neo-Marxist critical theory and it percolates through ed courses and the teams of “educators” who produce the curricula. It’s everywhere and everywhere destructive.
People hold up signs during a rally against “critical race theory” (CRT) being taught in schools at the Loudoun County Government center in Leesburg, Virginia on June 12, 2021. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP)
If you want better schools, clean house of the poison and install leaders with their heads screwed on straight. Start with the state leadership and move like Sherman’s March through the collegiate schools of education and the people who run the local districts. The rot begins at the top, so start there. In the end, the teachers will be better for it.
Oh, before I leave the topic, an important cog in this Borg is the teacher unions. They need to stop being a conduit for this ideological mania. If they are to continue to exist, they must stop seeing themselves in the vanguard of a revolution and more as shapers of patriotic and productive citizens. Got it?
Hillsdale College in Michigan.Student walks past statue of Ronald Reagan on the campus of Hillsdale College.Site of Hillsdale College campus in Placer County near Roseville.
I kid you not: Hillsdale College is coming to California and the true believers of the ruling groupthink are going bonkers. The state is hemorrhaging legacy-cost red ink, businesses, and residents as it is mired in COVID totalitarianism, homelessness everywhere, a crime wave, debased schools, welfare dependency, expensive everything, and public spaces that aren’t fit for children (and adults). And to think that they are frazzled beyond restraint by the appearance of a classical liberal arts college within their playpen. Amazing, absolutely amazing.
If you want to know the reason for the state’s looniness, no better candidate can be found than in the loopy thought processes of many of the state’s college graduates who then scatter into the state’s institutions for employment. An example of the phenomena is 24-year-old Hannah Holzer, “opinion assistant” at the Sacramento Bee. She penned an op ed – really, more of a screed – on January 23 titled “A conspiracy-peddling college is coming to Placer County. That should scare us all” (read here). What does she bring to the table other than vapid sloganeering and ad hominems? Let’s see.
Hannah Holzer
Her LinkedIn resume’ mentions a 4-year stint at UC Davis with an “English – professional writer” degree. Her post-graduate journey winds its way through a news internship at the Bee, a DC communications internship, editor of The California Aggie, editor at SF Weekly, and finally Bee assistant opinion editor/Sunset Beacon freelance reporter at the wizened age of 24. She had plenty of opportunity to ply her trade while infusing her journalism with left wing nuttery.
And it shows. Read the piece. It’s a mental fingerprint of unexamined assumptions and left-wing boilerplate. The opening paragraph is an unacknowledged tribute to the Unibomber’s Manifesto. It’s ripe with “ultra-conservative” (Hillsdale College) and this gem, “. . . extremist institution [Hillsdale College], perpetuating alternative facts and harmful conspiracy theories.” Plowing deeper into the tirade, one finds an excoriation of Hillsdale’s rejection of the lefty bromides of “social justice” and “multicultural diversity”. She then unabashedly and unthinkingly equates the two with “a just nation”. What? A “just nation” is created by the racial discrimination of a racial favoritism? For our intrepid reporterette, lady justice is not to wear a blindfold.
There’s more. She adopts the vocabulary – “dog whistle” – of Democratic Party electioneering. Of course, the phrase is attached to the opponents of the neo-Marxist critical theory and its offspring, critical race theory, leading to this whopper: “. . . they [Hillsdale] view the practice of accurately teaching America’s complex history to students as a threat to white supremacy.” There you have it. “White supremacy” has come full circle to include those who take Martin Luther King seriously.
Hillsdale’s sin is its unwillingness to kowtow to the fashionable tomfoolery that is so commonplace in the modern academy. Hillsdale is an unflinching advocate of classical education – classical means rooted in Western civilization. It’s the same civilization that gave birth to the university, the higher ed that has currently been bastardized to produce the youngins who can’t wait to dismantle it in their ignorance.
Hey, California, the doctor has arrived with a little tough love in the form of Hillsdale College.
At the top of our society is a Brahmin caste of an elect in possession of prestigious degrees. Their high status is drawn from their educations, but the claim can only have legitimacy if their many years of formal instruction truly enlightened. The evidence for that is weakening by the day. Instead, these paragons were marinated in a hot house of radical ideology. It was political activism masquerading as scholarship. Still, off they go to fill positions of power and influence in our culture. They’re everywhere.
Prime example: professional sports, or Big Sports, Inc. An aristocracy of athletic talent earning six figures, sometimes seven, eight, or nine, is managed by a metropolitan administrative apparatus of people marked by paper credentials. It’s an insular social caste far removed from the fan base that is not so well-endowed with these modern markers of prestige. The interests, tastes, social norms, and biases of this caste in the clouds escapes serious cross-examination due to uniform social reinforcement. Nearly everybody around them thinks the same way. It’s the dumb lacking any self-awareness of their dumbness.
How else can the sloganeering of campus neo-Marxists seep onto the helmets of athletes with astronomical salaries, the normal expression of patriotic unity in opening ceremonies be debased by overt racial anthems, and the change of venue of a long-scheduled all-star game after the wailing of small-minded activists be realized? Radicalism becomes fashionable when there’s no competing voices.
Nothing escapes infection including the on-field attire. The NFL has an approved list of slogans for their helmets that includes “Stop Hate”, “End Racism”, and “Black Lives Matter”, all of them taken from people who previously chanted “pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon”. We know from where the adoption of extremist slogans come. It comes from people whose agenda exceeds the simple and generic meaning of the words. “Stop Hate”? What hate? Do they mean the garden variety of hate exhibited in domestic abuse, or the kind shown by a thief pistol-whipping a store clerk for resisting, or a jihadist taking synagogue worshippers hostage? I think not. The whole “Stop Hate” gambit became a cause because a viral video of an abusive cop was exploited as evidence of a systemic racial hatred. In point of fact, it was a singular incident of a bad cop, not proof of the KKK in blue.
It says more about our time’s hyper-communicability of bad behavior to every corner of the planet, whereas before it would be put in the context of a local incident to be handled locally.
“End Racism”? What racism? Widespread racial animus shows up in no respectable poll. In fact, whatever it is, it’s declining and widely condemned as shameful. So, where’s the “racism” that needs to be “ended”? Instead, a revolutionary agenda is at work. Cutting to the quick, our new fashionable revolutionary cadre want to end “acting white”, the Enlightenment, rationality, math, the scientific method, the constitutional order, anything that they assert stands in the way perfect categorical equality. This is the “racism” that they’re trying to “end”. Of course, none of this is achievable without a totalitarian state. That’s how you really kill the Enlightenment. Mao or Che would be proud.
As for “Black Lives Matter”, it came into vogue as if people needed to be reminded of the obvious: black lives do matter. Though, try saying “All lives matter”, the essence of the Gospels, and see how quickly the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion Department and Twitter mob pounce. All lives don’t matter to the chic radicals because they are consumed by the oppressor/oppressed shtick of Karl Marx and his later kindred spirits, of which there are many in the country’s thousands of faculty lounges. Things don’t turn out equal in racial enumerations, so the egregious non sequitur “use racism to combat racism” – in the immortal words of the high priest of Anti-Racism, Ibram X. Kendi (Ibram Henry Rogers) – becomes the latest slogan to be turned into policy preference. Until the numbers come out equal, ALL lives don’t matter in this sewer of the mind.
Look to the knit caps worn by people on the sidelines. Prominently stitched is the word “Equity”. Just yesterday, “equity” was consonant with justice. Today, it’s consonant with racial vengeance. It’s back to Kendi’s bunk of “use racism to end racism”. That’s right, enact cash payouts for being black (reparations). Hiring, promotions, and admissions should place race as the topmost criteria. If one race shows up too prominently in the crime stats, redefine crime, end bail, and avoid prosecutions. If you haven’t enough miscreants of other racial categories in the prosecutor’s hopper, invent them in campaigns to ferret out “white supremacy” as the new “domestic terrorism”, but define it broadly so you can bag your political opponents.
Why is it that “equity” crusades all too often stray into the ugliest despotism?
We can’t even watch a football game without getting a steady diet of the politicized word salad. I can’t think of my San Francisco 49ers without Colin Kaepernick and the kneeling craze crossing my mind. Ditto for the San Francisco Giants. Taking it further, San Francisco is more aptly “San Fransicko” (Michael Schellenberger’s book of the same title). The city’s muddied reputation proceeds all. Ditto for California.
Most members of the San Francisco Giants kneel during a moment of silence prior to an opening day baseball game against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Thursday, July 23, 2020, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)Hunter Pence #8 of the San Francisco Giants looks on during batting practice before the game against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Dodger Stadium on July 23, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)
And corporate-boardroom NFL parades across our TV screens BLM/Antifa slogans. It’s just one big “Meh”. No enthusiasm and don’t care. I tried to watch 49ers/Cowboys and Rams/Cardinals but, once again, “Meh”. Time to switch to Netflix.
P.S.: The politicization of professional associations is next.
The “woke” on an American college campus.Chinese students inspired by Mao for a Cultural Revolution.
Mao Zedong wrote the playbook that he cast as a Cultural Revolution: animate the young, unleash them on the seasoned and fortunate, and coopt many institutions to make the offensive appear as an irresistible force. Then watch the carnage, but refashion it as the necessary cleansing of the corruptions from the social body.
Sound familiar? If not, it should. Quiet and not so quiet censorship abounds in today’s USA in the imposition of neo-Marxist critical theory on the young in their schools, cancellation of talks and lectures under threat of youthful mobs and their adult abettors, acts of public shaming and ritual self-abasement of the recalcitrant, and media channels populated with the mob’s zealots enforcing their own bans on thought. Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind in 1987 warned of higher ed’s ubiquitous indoctrination that is the enemy of free inquiry. It has only gotten worse since his time. Alas, it has come to pass on our streets, campuses, in school curricula, and in the corporate boardroom and lunchroom.
Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago, etc.
We let it happen through a blind deference to the gatekeepers of degrees and our broad acceptance, in essence, of the schools as glorified babysitters. We thought that all would be well if we turned over our kids to the clutches of indoctrinated and self-interested public employees, and our young reached early adulthood with a BA, any BA. Well, no, all is not well. The paper certificates didn’t produce an informed and wise citizenry and many of our private and public institutions have become the vanguard, the enforcers, of this revolution of the closed-minded.
Examples abound. Google banned money-making on its YouTube platform if it isn’t in accord with the “scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change”. That’s right, you can only enrich your bank account if you peddle the “consensus”, no matter its dubiousness. The “consensus” is a euphemism for a departure from the scientific method and into a coerced orthodoxy. It’s an announcement from on high that such and such is proper thought, something familiar to anyone brought before Stalin’s show trials, employed in Orwell’s Ministries of Truth and Love, or the papal Inquisition of the Renaissance. Amazing, progressives – by definition a group who loudly proclaims the past is dead – look to the past for their inspiration.
Who can forget AG Garland’s new role as thought policeman extraordinaire? A political constituency – namely, the insular and comfy special interests who’ve long dominated your child’s school – feels imperiled and our AG rides to the rescue by promising to chill the rancor and speech at school board meetings with FBI investigations. No one need be arrested to send angry parents home to anxiously await the dreaded late-night knock at the door. Censorship achieved by a threat, Fidel style.
Then there’s this little tidbit. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH, or more accurately “warpath”) protested Abigail Shrier’s interview of a clinical psychologist and vaginoplasty surgeon who question the use of puberty blockers in children in Common Sense with Bari Weiss. Such discussions according to “warpath” should be closeted in unread journals and not be exposed to a broader audience, lest we be made aware that there are many debatable contentions in transgenderism. The New York Times chimes in with its own silencing by not publishing these types of op-eds because they are “outside our coverage priorities right now”. This is how a “consensus” is built, in the dark of night.
Modern academia is a rich source of “consensus” building through censorship and thought control. Dorian Abbot of the University of Chicago, eminent professor of geophysical sciences, was invited to speak at MIT, then disinvited after protests by the Red Guards of critical theory because he criticized the new racialism and favored “Merit, Fairness, and Equality”. Unsurprisingly, the school relented to the mob. Professor Robert P. George of Princeton got wind of the fracas at MIT and extended an invitation to Abbot. The talk was held at Princeton on the same day. Thank God that the spirit of inquiry and debate still flickers in some little precincts of the lands of ivy-covered halls.
More from the college funhouse. Bright Shen of the University of Michigan, a man who lived through Mao’s original Cultural Revolution, faced our own Red Guards of denunciation when he showed Shakespeare’s Othello, Laurence Olivier starring in blackface. The hyper-politicized sensitivities of the childish goons shrieked, Shen experienced the ritual self-abasement, and he no longer teaches his music course turning Othello into an opera.
This kind of thing can only survive in the darkness of obscurity. Sunshine, after all, is a disinfectant.
Mao, sadly, is an inspiration for far too many of the young. It’s more proof that we’ve failed to transmit our civilization’s legacy to our children. We have willingly, or unwillingly, mostly by ignorance, let the minds of our children get away from us. We are reaping the consequences of the many little Maos in our midst.
Operation Z commenced without warning at 7:48 a.m., Sunday, December 7, 1941. After the last wave of Japanese aircraft left Pearl Harbor, 2,402 were killed and 1,178 wounded. On this day, every American should be reminded that it is one of the highest civic acts to visit the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor at least once in their life to pay their respects. I did in 2016.
The USS Arizona as a burning hulk, Dec. 7. 1,177 sailors and Marines were killed.
Certain days provide cringing lessons. We’ve had a few since that harrowing day. The heart-wrenching scenes of the evacuation of the US embassy in Saigon in 1975 would be one. Another would be 9/11. Now, Kabul airport in August of 2021 would qualify as still another. Two of these were at the hands of others while two were the culmination of our own actions. Two rallied the nation to confront the threats. Two were disgraceful and will result in calamitous decades to follow.
Honor the sacrifices, remember the dead, and learn the lessons of history . . . if history isn’t molested in the classroom by a fashionably extremist ideology so it can’t be remembered properly. Remember, but remember well.
Arthur Brisbane, newspaper editor, wrote the following in 1911: “Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.” Yep, it is, since words require more brain juice than eye candy. Visual images strike our limbic system with greater force than words on a page. Goebbels and Lenin knew this from the get-go. Many times, illustrations or cartoons, more so than photos, get right to the point without the limitations of reality. The uber-left activist Craig Froehle in 2012 gave to his ideological compatriots an iconic absurdity. His tall-to-small threesome behind a fence on crates (see below) appeals to the zealots but does nothing for understanding.
A big part of the problem lies in the vacuousness of the political sloganeering that is “equity”, the point of the image, and one third of the verbal contraption “equity/diversity/inclusion” (Interesting to note, the more apt acronym DIE is possible by changing the order.). Oftentimes, “equity” is used without definition, as if it burst from the brain of God and to the mouths Lori Lightfoot and the radical activists running the show in the Biden administration. “Equity” is the criminal cousin to “equality”. We have at least a playground understanding of “equality”, but “equity” at the hands of our racialist carnival barkers isn’t what lights our eyes after our house’s assessment. It’s a weapon. It’s forced equality of outcome. And, for that, our lives are left open to state-run malevolence and malfeasance writ large.
A crowd whose brains have been softened to the agitprop will miss the folly and danger. Equity is a crutch for activists traumatized by life not being equal. Everywhere they look, they are horrified by inequality, inequality everywhere. They are forced to confront disparities in everything from size, talent, quick-wittedness to the incidence of low-birthweight babies by race, genitalia, income, bed partner, whatever. It’s enough to drive the traumatized to thumb-sucking.
The cure for the anxiety is found in the seizure of power to force equality. Freedom, as in equal opportunity, is repealed by the invention of “systemic racism”, or systemic . . . whatever. Just make the threat improvably “systemic” to empower the commissars to make things equal by imperial edict. The so-called malevolent “system” is a ghost presence but don’t bother with inductive or deductive reasoning for verification. We are coaxed to rely on the ghostbusters instilled with the secret gnosis, like the racialist grifters Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DeAngelo from their tenured academic redoubts.
Karl Marx played the same scam, only he didn’t leave this world with a fat bank account. But his pupils succeeded if you measure success by over a 100 million dead in the 20th century. How much ruination will Kendi, et al, visit upon us?
Back to Froehle’s cartoon scam. It doesn’t take much to dispense with the message. Life isn’t a matter of crate-sharing. Those crates in the illustration are actually other people’s income, jobs, property, and their children’s education. Froehle is actually practicing a zero-sum game: the state takes from one to give to another. And the assignment of forced contributor and assigned recipient is based purely on race, or any other grouping with the political clout to nose their way into the trough.
The cartoon is childish, but even children have an instinctual grasp of the unfairness of it all. They know that one kid getting two suckers based on melanin count isn’t fair. So is the award of benefits due to genitalia, bed partner, or personal declaration that supersedes their chromosomal makeup. A child has a better grasp of intrinsic fairness than some who’ve spent too much time in classrooms, a place where education has evolved into mal-education.
But that’s where we are at: the land of Orwell’s Oceania. The Ministry of Truth practiced “doublethink” and “Newspeak”, a language that undermines language. Language relies on common meanings so sharing and interaction can take place. In this world, everything is political, including words. Language is distorted to push the “defence [sic] of the indefensible”. So, racism and sexism became “equity” to the great detriment of ourselves, our children, and our nation.
Anti-racism – really critical race theory – indoctrination in an American classroom.
Young Pioneers: officially the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization and abbreviated as the Young Pioneers; the main Soviet Communist Party youth organization for young activists aged 9-15 from 1922 to 1991.
Young Pioneers in Moscow parade.Young pioneers greeting Joseph Stalin, 1935. (Photo by Ivan Shagin)
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I’m afraid that too many adults use the schools as daycare. They go to work – or whatever – assuming that these mostly public employees, teachers and staff, will magically turn their offspring into well-balanced citizens. Little do they know that they are handing their kids to schools that increasingly resembles those in Castro’s Cuba or the Soviet Union. The curricula and pedagogy is geared to indoctrination for the Revolution. Their aim is to replicate something like the Young Pioneers of the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization.
Bernie and his bros continually extol the virtues of Castro by citing the regime’s campaign for schools and universal literacy. But literacy for what? Literacy is just another means of mind control in the absence of a First Amendment. The politburo wants you to read, read only their stuff since nothing else is permitted. Would it be better in this context to be illiterate and thus freer from state mind control?
California is hurtling toward velvet-glove Castroism. As a 30-year teaching veteran of California public schools, I know of the many ukases for politicizing the curriculum. The “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum” approved by the state’s education commissars is the newest one and full of interesting tidbits to further the permanent revolution. It’s the latest in a long line of faddish political radicalisms being injected into your child’s head.
For instance, the early Christian pilgrims are accused of “theocide”, the extermination of “indigenous epistemic and cultural futurity” (what impenetrable jargon). With the model curriculum comes model lesson plans. One calls for teacher-led chants to the Aztec god Tezkatlipoka, worshipped in the old days with human sacrifice and cannibalism. So, “theocide” consists of Christ’s Golden Rule – do unto others as you would have done to yourself – replacing the propitiation of nature spirits with human butchery. Hopefully, in the classroom, the rescue of the oppressed from cultural enslavement will be limited to chants.
Contemporaneous depiction of Aztec human sacrifice.
The one caveat is that this cranky lunacy was in the “proposed” draft. Whether it remained in the final edict is something that can’t be determined at this time, but the fact that it was included in the beginning says volumes about the goofs running your schools.
It makes one seriously consider pricing out a moving truck. For Cubans escaping Castro’s schools, the crossing of the Florida Straight is 90 miles by raft in shark-infested waters. It’s a bit longer, and safer, for most Californians to seek refuge beyond the reach of the commissars, but think of it as an investment in the sanity of your children.
I’ve previously mentioned my astonishment at the sudden embrace of extremist and exotic ideologies by powerful institutions in the Western world. The spittle-laced fulminations of college social justice warriors and the terrorist-clad thumpings of Antifa groupies are now mainstreamed. What’s happened?
What makes the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Mark Milley, sound like AOC? Or corporate heads like Kimberly Boyd, Hasbro’s senior vice president of global brands, to say something really stupid to defend the removal of “Mr.” from “Mr. Potato Head”? She said,
“Culture has evolved. Kids want to be able to represent
their own experiences. The way the brand currently exists—
with the ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.’—is limiting when it comes to both
gender identity and family structure.”
Everyone of any prominence is jumping on the bandwagon. Lunacy has become the new normal. It’s now everywhere. Your kids are getting it in kindergarten under the pretentious moniker “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI). Personally, I think that “Inclusion” should be moved to the middle to make for a more accurate acronym – DIE.
Soon, we’ll all be lunatics.
Once again, how did we get here? My answer: 2% runs the world. They don’t have to be talented; they just have to be opinionated. The clique is cloistered in high-rent zip codes and on Twitter and Instagram.
This came to mind when researching the relative size of the crowd on Twitter. According to the NY Post, 22% of Americans use the digital grapevine. Of that number, 10% account for 80% of the digital burps (tweets). That means that the rantings of 2% of the American population carry the potential for the jihad. (See the story here)
History confirms the dynamic. Do you think for one moment that the Russian Bolsheviks of 1917 were a popular movement? I don’t even think that they busted the threshold of 2% in popularity or even name recognition. Yet, a cadre of useful idiots and tightly organized zealots can count for more than the silent majority. It’s amazing that revolutions can be a march to ruin on so little.
A photo of Bowman Hall on the campus of the University of Kentucky.
For years, many people – me included – encouraged others to go to college. We pontificated that the only way to break glass ceilings, indeed, all socio-economic ceilings, was to get a degree. I think that we were right in limited circumstances, but then it became a mania. Other routes to betterment were maligned and a full-frontal assault was manufactured to shove young people into collegiate classrooms. Money, money, and more money, along with a full-throated indoctrination campaign from Sesame Street to pop entertainment to the high school guidance counselor were geared with singleness of purpose to get every warm body into a college desk. Looking back on it, the whole humongous effort was a colossal waste. And it shows.
Prof. Richard Vedder
Richard Vedder, Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus at Ohio University, writing in Forbes draws the curtains back to show the emperor to be naked. You can read his eye-opening piece here.
He begins his analysis with a National Bureau of Economic Research study of the recent rise in college graduation rates, a reversal of the previous long-lasting trend. A good thing, right? In one sense, yes, but in another, it’s a sign of the decline of academic excellence. The author eliminated improvements in such things as academic preparation in the lower grades and greater access to taxpayer subsidies as the causes. There’s good evidence of rot in the former and the latter has no connection to anything but tuition inflation. The authors end up with grade inflation for the spike in graduation rates.
Average grades have risen as measures of study time have fallen. Transcripts are littered with anything but coursework in science, math, or classical philosophy. But we have those great GPA’s.
Grade inflation. Look at those declining F’s-B’s, and the leap in A’s.
Many teachers are mightily trying to produce an educated citizenry. I’ve had the pleasure of working with a good number of them. Surely, a good portion of the blame applies to further down the social supply chain and outside of it (politics?).
The increase in college graduation rates is not a time for uncorking bottles of champagne. We’ll have to keep in mind that these numbers arise out of a very troubled educational environment.
