Browser tabs have been building up with far more interesting things than I can possibly blog about, so here are a few which I want to pass on. Today’s theme centers on education, and the ideological battle about race issues going on there.

  • Bari Weiss published a guest essay from a high school teacher from Manhattan who refuses to stand by while his students are indoctrinated to treat people differently on the basis of their race – that is, to be “antiracist” by grouping people by race. The author writes: “The morally compromised status of ‘oppressor’ is assigned to one group of students based on their immutable characteristics… 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.” Read the whole thing.
  • Tom Knighton asks, “Are schools about education or activism?”. This looks at how a New York City school dealt with recent events in the middle east crisis by telling teachers to take action to support Palestinians and to bring sanctions against Israel. The article asks the question, “So is school about education or activism? Well, for far too many so-called educators, it’s both. There’s a term for that, though, and it’s indoctrination, where one’s activism colors what they try to teach to such a degree that it may have absolutely no relation to reality.”
  • Bari Weiss brought together several different people’s perspectives on What is Systemic Racism? and it’s worth reading to get an idea of the range of perspectives and issues involved. These brief articles are helpful, and highlight some of the complexities and unintended complexities. For example, one author notes: “In New York and San Francisco, concerns over ‘systemic racism’ have led lawmakers to largely abandon their responsibility to actually fix chronically failing schools. What have they done instead? Degraded admissions standards for their best-performing magnet programs because there were too many Asian and white students.” One article also highlights systemic racism against Asians at our top schools and universities, including showing how the percentage of Asian-Americans at Ivy League schools has stayed flat even as their test scores have gone up. A graph of college enrolllment trends
  • At Georgetown (in law!), some professors were caught on video discussing how concerned they were that many of the lowest scoring students in their classes were black; this resulted in the professor being fired because it is apparently “abhorrent” even to discuss such things. The linked article, from a professor at Georgetown, looks at the broader implications and context of this. Part of the issue here, of course, is that now even our elite academic institutions are having a hard time figuring out how to discuss reality without being accused of racism.
  • California passed its new ethnic studies curriculum based on critical race theory.