Category: education and schooling

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education and schooling First Amendment rights social media

Our Authoritarian Moment

Youtube, censorship

Was it something I said?

Yesterday, YouTube removed the video of my latest episode of This Week in Common Sense. Why? The platform claims I violated its “terms of service” and “community standards” by providing “medical misinformation.”

Funny, YouTube did not specify which statement in the video was incorrect, much less provide any citation to back up its “misinformation” claim.

This sort of authoritarianism is quite common these days. We’re just supposed to take the Authority’s word that It Possesses the Whole Truth.

No debate. No dissent.

There is not even a reference or consult.

Which is what Dr. Byram W. Bridle, PhD, Associate Professor of Viral Immunology Department of Pathobiology at the University of Guelph discovered.

He refused to provide evidence of vaccination. So his Canadian university “banned” him “from campus for at least a year.” And sat by while colleagues and students abused him for being “anti-science.”

Thing is, as he points out in his Open Letter to the academic institution, not one of the tenured immunologists of the University of Guelph thinks there should be mandatory vaccination. All are very concerned about the goal of universal vaccination. Since not one of the available vaccines appears effective enough to produce sufficient immunity in recipients “herd immunity,” the goal must be mere “herd vaccination.” 

Dr. Bridle is especially annoyed that the university does not allow him to demonstrate his natural immunity to the disease, which simply does not interest the pro-vaccination bureaucrats.

Worse yet, at no point in the university’s deliberations over the vaccine mandate did administrators consult their own immunology department!

That’s not “following the science.”

Like at YouTube, it’s a political campaign: science not required.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: I first heard about both stories from my podcasting sparring partner, who produced two stories on his website regarding Dr. Bridle and tipped the hat to historian Tom Woods.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights

Combatting Campus Cancel Culture

education, wisdom, cancel culture

We keep hearing how students and professors are being targeted for saying stuff they’re not supposed to say — from the perspective of the hard-left students, professors, and off-campus third parties who launch most of the attacks, that is.

Which seem to be happening more and more often.

The numbers confirm it. New research by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) indicates that attacks on professors for impolitic speech have increased since 2015. Most of the attacks — 74 percent — have resulted in sanctions against the accused.

According to FIRE, “calls for sanction” of a professor rose from 24 in 2015 to 113 in 2020.

Three fourths of the tallied incidents, 314 out of 426, have led to punishments like suspension or termination.

The attacks tend to occur on university campuses with “severely speech-restrictive” policies. Like many Ivy League schools.

One of the researchers, Komi German, says that university administrators and presidents must “explicitly state that the protection of free speech and academic inquiry supersedes protection from words that are perceived as offensive.”

Good idea. Let them do that.

Why aren’t the censorious administrators doing it already, though? 

Probably because they lack allegiance to the value of freedom of speech on campus.

Until these academics all have Damascus-level conversions, parents and students must do what they can themselves to discourage these censorious policies. This means, abstaining from attending and paying tuition at schools that penalize professors and others for wrongspeech.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling national politics & policies

Gaslight Theory

Joy Reid, Karl Marx, Marxism, CRT, critical race theory

“[P]arents are fighting with school boards in cities and towns across the country,” MSNBC’s Joy Reid informed her audience, “over curricula that they believe teaches white kids that they are racist.”

Reid asserted that “none of this is actually happening,” 

She spoke with Kimberlé Crenshaw, the executive director of the African American Policy Forum and a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University. Crenshaw invented the term “Critical Race Theory” and told Reid that CRT was merely a “boogey-man,” adding: “I think I would know if we were being taught in K-12.” 

The “GOP freak-out over Critical Race Theory,” offered Reid, was a “highly manufactured strategy created by seasoned political operatives looking for the perfect wedge issue.”

Reid ignores parents across the country actively encountering this racist anti-racism. Back in April, parents in Loudoun County, Virginia, documented half a million tax dollars going to programs titled “critical race theory.” After being told there was no such thing. It’s happening all across the country.

But fear not: the National Education Association to the rescue! 

A few days ago, the nation’s most powerful teachers union cleared it all up by passing New Business Item 39 to defend the use of CRT in K-12 public schools, including by providing “an already-created, in-depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society, and that we oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/or The 1619 Project.”

The NEA may be on the wrong side, but nevertheless buries the disingenuous psy-op of the left intelligentsia, for whom no lie is too big to push.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling general freedom

Handicapping the Best

Harrison Bergeron, egalitarianism, equality

The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.

That’s the first sentence of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story about how everybody with above-average intelligence, looks, or talent is chronically handicapped, by law. To enforce equality.

“Harrison Bergeron” is satire. Vonnegut exaggerates and invents. Our world will never be like the world he depicts.

But not for lack of trying.

The latest episode ripe for satire? The decision of the Vancouver School Board to kill honors programs to enforce “equity.” 

What is that?

Don’t bother using an old dictionary.

Today, equity is a code word for bringing everybody down to the same low level in defiance of the real differences in abilities among students — not to mention effort expended.

The board had already killed English honors programs. Now it’s killing science and math honors programs. To foster “an inclusive model of education.”

Jennifer Katz, professor at University of British Columbia, accuses parents angry about the decision of supporting “systemic racism.”

My family has been subjected to this mentality. Years ago, my daughter was advanced in math, way ahead of other first-graders at a private school. My wife asked the teachers to give her some more difficult problems in addition to what the class was doing so that she wouldn’t die of boredom.

Answer: “No.” Reason: “Then she would be even further ahead.”

We never took our daughter back to that school. How could we? How could we knowingly keep her in a place where she would be allowed to stagnate for the “greater good” of keeping people “equal”?

Whether in my state of Virginia or in Vancouver, British Columbia, children should be free to learn, to progress. Let’s keep Vonnegut’s work fiction, not prophecy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Screenshot from Harrison Bergeron (2013)

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education and schooling ideological culture

The A-word in Our Schools

Banning “Critical Race Theory” in public schools and other government institutions seems like such a good idea that when you read Scott Shackford’s headline at Reason, “Don’t Ban Critical Race Theory in Education. Embrace School Choice Instead,” you may balk. 

“Conservatives in Florida, Idaho, and the nation’s capitol are attempting to block public schools from teaching Critical Race Theory,” Shackford writes, describing CRT as “an ideology that holds that racism is historically fundamental to how America’s political, legal, and cultural institutions are structured.” His problem with this political move is that it is “an authoritarian proposal that would cut off classroom debate about hot-button political issues.”

My issues really begin with the a-word.

From what I can tell, CRT is itself authoritarian, and groupthink-oriented, class-based and generally racist. The program looks designed to implement a sort of Cultural Revolution indoctrination-and-social control system into American institutions, definitely not to encourage “classroom debate.” 

While Shackford makes the obvious point that America’s past institutional make-up was indeed racist and structurally so, and that learning this is important for a decent education, CRT did not add this to “the debate.” This has been widely acknowledged for years.

Besides, CRT activists go much further, calling “whiteness” a disease and white people ineluctably, “systemically” racist.

Though Shackford’s main point — that we should take the occasion to offer the best way out, “school choice” — is indeed a great one, letting socialist radicals and weak-minded educrats enshrine a racist theory about racism into public institutions amounts to a kind of brinksmanship, a “collapsitarian” approach.

Couldn’t we put government education’s allotted doom on the back burner, stop teaching CRT or other woke indoctrination, and also empower parents and students with freedom of choice?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Asian Privilege?

Seventy-three.

That’s the number that stood out to me in George Will’s Sunday column, “Anti-Asian racism disguises itself as ‘diversity.’”

Seventy-three percent of the smart students at Thomas Jefferson High School happen to be Asian. TJHS is a highly-rated STEM magnet school in Virginia’s Washington, D.C. suburbs, where entry had, until recently, been based on an admissions exam. 

That’s more than three times the percentage of Asian Americans among Fairfax County, Virginia, public school students. 

European-American students make up the largest racial block at 38 percent, but account for only 18 percent of attendees at this elite high school. Hispanics represent 27 percent of all students and African Americans 10 percent, but garnered, respectively, 3 and 1 percent of the coveted slots.

Are educators specifically advantaging Asian kids? 

Well, more than 80 percent of Fairfax County teachers are white, 7 percent black and only 5 percent Asian, says a separate Post report. Asian privilege seems unlikely.

So . . . what are Asian American students doing differently?

Studying? 

Will recounts complaints by the county superintendent about Asian American parents spending too much on test preparation and the Virginia Secretary of Education compared such studying to using “performance enhancing drugs” in sports.

Another factor in having “crazy” parents who obsess about their children doing well in school could be doubling the odds by having not one, but two parents — not to mention an extended family structure. Among blacks, Hispanics and whites, out-of-wedlock births account for 69, 52 and 28 percent of all births, respectively. But for Asian Americans, out-of-wedlock births are under 12 percent.

One can jigger the rules for getting into TJ High. Sure. 

Jiggering the rules for getting ahead in life? Much harder.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Interrogators

It’s the feel-good story of the year — or at least the year’s first five months.

In South Carolina, a man named Jovan Collazo, carrying an Army-issued rifle, hijacked a school bus. (This isn’t the feel-good part.)

Collazo wanted to go home. It’s unclear why he didn’t just thumb a ride or take a bus the old-fashioned way. But, whatever; criminals are not always the most rational actors.

Bus driver Kenneth Corbin says that 18 students, some in kindergarten, were scattered throughout the vehicle when the hijacker got on board. Captor Collazo decided that the best thing would be to group everybody toward the front so that he could keep a better eye on them.

Big mistake.

The regrouping laid the groundwork for what the UK Independent calls “incessant kindergarten questions” about Collazo’s background, motives, and intentions.

Rattled by the interrogation, he soon brought the bus to a halt, ordered everybody off, and tried to drive the bus himself. Not long after, he was arrested.

According to Corbin, Collazo “sensed more questions coming and I guess something clicked in his mind and he said, ‘enough is enough already.’”

That’s one way to escape a kidnapper. The strategy may not always work, obviously, but we can be glad it worked in this case.

Parents, the next time your toddlers pummel you with metaphysical queries about the universe, try to indulge the budding philosophers. 

Their expertise in the Socratic method may come in real handy one day.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Discord Meets Democracy

San Francisco, schools

When it comes to public schools, “no city has experienced the level of discord as that in San Francisco,” reports The Washington Post. 

That’s because, as The Post posits, “the San Francisco school board has been operating” with “a heavy focus on controversial, difficult racial issues, and slow progress on school reopening.”

A sampling:

  • “In January, the school board voted to rename 44 schools” with purported “connections to slavery, oppression and racism” — though The Post notes “the alleged ties were thin or, in some cases, historically questionable or inaccurate.”*
  • One of the most controversial moves by the board was “[c]hanging the admissions process for the elite Lowell High School — eliminating grades and test scores and admitting students by a ranked-choice lottery.” As The Post explains, “the change means that students with the best grades and scores may not be admitted.”
  • The school board removed Commissioner Alison Collins as Vice President in March, after her anti-Asian tweets from 2016 came to light. She called Asian Americans (who happen to disproportionally earn entry to Lowell) “house n****rs” who employed “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’”**

“Through all this, the city’s school buildings remained closed,” notes The Post, “even as private schools in the area and public schools elsewhere in the region operated in person.”

Thankfully, San Franciscans have launched a recall campaign against three members of the seven-member school board: President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison M. Collins. 

The best thing for public education in Frisco will be to school these “first” recall targets in the power of the citizenry.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

* Facing a lawsuit, the board voted unanimously to rescind their renaming of those “‘injustice-linked’ schools” — just a few months after the original vote.

** In response, Collins is suing the board for $87 million.

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education and schooling initiative, referendum, and recall

Organizing an Ouster

Learning Under

Despite everything, public schooling can help kids learn some important things.

But this schooling is also something that kids have to survive. If and when Johnny can’t add, spell, figure out who’s buried in Grant’s tomb, or relate premises to a conclusion — the lessons and educational theories he’s been subjected to often have something to do with it.

Now Johnny is being told, if his skin is white, that he must feel guilty about his skin color and work to find, dwell on, and exterminate super-subtle racism buried deep within his privileged soul. He can’t just be happy and learn.

The rationale for this assault on the individual is called “critical race theory.” And in some school districts, this mislabeled “antiracist” indoctrination is being imposed on students (as it is also being imposed throughout society).*

Parents in Loudoun County, Virginia, are fighting back by forming a PAC with the mission of ejecting purveyors of critical race theory from the school board. The PAC is led by Ian Prior, who says that county parents “cannot wait until 2023 to elect new leaders.”

Board members must be recalled because of the board’s failure to reopen schools, its imposition of “dangerously divisive critical race theory,” and its cooperation with “tactics designed to intimidate students, parents and teachers from exercising their First Amendment rights.”

Good luck, parents. 

And if you can find a way to educate your kids without sending them to public schools, I suggest that you consider that alternative.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Take Action

* “On April 19, 2021, the Biden Administration proposed a rule,” alerts Heritage Action, “that would allow the Department of Education to prioritize recipients to receive K-12 grants if they include critical race theory in their curriculum.” The Federal Register is accepting public comments on the proposed rule here until May 19.

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De-colonize Our Music?

music, freedom

Music is, arguably, the crowning artistic achievement of our civilization. 

It grew out of many folk and ecclesiastical practices, but one of the great innovations that allowed both Bach and The Beatles, Beethoven and Broadway, Bartok and “beats,” is the theory of music. 

Which rests on that great innovation, musical notation.

Not my area of expertise, alas, but I tip my hat to the educators who know the physics and the art in precise and powerful ways.

Unfortunately, stupidly racist anti-racism has infected even music education. The latest example? The University of Oxford is considering a plan to get rid of teaching music through teaching notation.

“Sheet music is now considered ‘too colonial,’” explains The Telegraph, “while Beethoven and Mozart, and music curriculums in general, are believed to have ‘complicity in white supremacy.’”

While mainly an attack on classical music, our popular music rests upon a lot of basic western technique, too. The idea that musical notation is racist is itself bizarrely racist. Do these people think because whites invented musical notation, non-whites are oppressed by it? Yes, the opponents of western musical notation, who include “activist students” as well as “activist professors,” are apparently ashamed of a tradition focused on “white European music from the slave period.”

But until fairly recently, all civilization was “the slave period.” And Europe, which developed the tradition, wasn’t the world’s most slave-ridden society during the period of western music’s development: Africa and Asia were. 

Slavery is bad. Very bad. Freedom is good. Very good. But you don’t reject good things because they once upon a time touched bad things. We can have both freedom and music. 

And musical notation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Image from William Creswell

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