Today, I’ll link to and just briefly comment on a few interesting things I read recently.

“Why listen to abhorrent speech?”

I enjoyed this excellent analysis on why it’s sometimes worth listening even to views and arguments you find abhorrent; in this case the speaker at hand was controversial philosopher Peter Singer. Standard arguments for listening are:

  • You might learn something
  • It helps you debate against such views
  • It helps you understand people who hold such views

This article adds “because it helps you reconsider premises you might already hold”. The article notes:

Singer is a thoroughgoing utilitarian. Sometimes that strikes others as saintly, as in his advocacy for animals or the global poor; sometimes it strikes others as monstrous, as in his relative disregard for human beings or the global non-poor. But the saintly parts and the monstrous parts aren’t easy to disconnect. Arguments like Singer’s aren’t just sneaky efforts to get you to believe unacceptable conclusions; they’re also efforts to show that these conclusions follow from somewhat-less-than-obviously unacceptable premises.

And it adds:

… The fact that Singer actually believes both the premises and the conclusions is less important, for this purpose, than the quality of his efforts at connecting them: someone could read his whole oeuvre as if it were contained in block quotes, followed by the line “And this is why these premises are wrong.” In theory, anyone else could make that kind of argument. But perhaps because Singer does believe it so strongly, very few people do it better—which strikes me as a decent reason, abhorrence notwithstanding, to think about what he has to say.

I thought this was an excellent point; sometimes lines of argument or even worldviews lead to logical conclusions that most would very much disagree with or even find detestable. Sometimes, it helps to follow these lines of thought through to their logical conclusions and see if we agree with where we end up. For example, doesn’t Darwinism lead to eugenics (as Darwin himself advocated)? If not, why not? And if it does – doesn’t that mean we’ve got a problem with our premises?

A refusal to grade black students differently resulted in a professor’s dismissal

At my university, we’re beginning to get asked whether our course grading practices result in minorities and first-generation students getting lower grades – and if they do, what we’re doing to change our grading practices, presumably with the assumption that fair grading will result in an equal distribution of grades across all racial, gender, ethnic and economic categories (something I obviously think is not true). I’m a bit concerned about what will happen if/when our grade distributions don’t result in the equal outcomes that we are supposed to see.

That makes me particularly concerned about stories like this one where a professor had actually (illegally) been suspended because he refused to grade black students by different standards. This happened at UCLA! Ultimately, after lawsuits, etc., the professor (Gordon Klein) prevailed, but after a great deal of harm had been done. Here’s the concluding blurb:

The damage from weaponized students, often aided and abetted by woke faculty and weak administrators, has had a profound chilling effect in academia. People like Prof. Gordon Klein deserve hero status, they stood tall and refused to bend the knee or apologize for insisting on treating all people equally.

Gene Veith had two posts looking at changes in homeschooling and classical education, with the first looking at how black Americans are discovering classical education and the second looking at how the largest surge in classical education post-COVID has been among black families. Veith notes:

The elite boarding schools of both the United States and the United Kingdom, favored by those who could afford the very best education for their children that money could buy, employed a classical curriculum. If that is “elitist” the solution is not to do away with it, but to extend this “elite” education to everybody else, to ordinary Americans of all races, economic levels, and walks of life.

He quotes an article from Jeremy Tate which says:

Moreover, to dismiss classic literature as “dead white guys” does a great disservice not only to the books themselves (many of whose authors, like Dr. King or St. Augustine or Mary Shelley, were not white or guys), but to young people we are trying to educate. Everyone has a right to this material. The novelist Saul Bellow once asked “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” The journalist Ralph Wiley replied, “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus. Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” Tolstoy is not the exclusive property of Russia: He is, in the old sense of the word, catholic.

Another article took a look at the homeschooling boom in California, with 160,000 students leaving the public school system between 2020 and 2021. In Los Angeles, private school affidavits (which some use to homeschool) doubled. This has even been true for minorities:

“Among African Americans nationwide, the percentage homeschooling families skyrocketed from 3 percent to an amazing 16 percent—a five-fold increase from spring 2020 to fall 2020. Among Hispanics, the proportion of families who are homeschooling their children doubled from 6 percent to 12 percent. By fall 2020 that percentage had more than doubled to 11 percent reporting homeschooling children.”

Suzy Weiss had an article looking at the same phenomenon, called “American homeschooling goes boom”. She relates some anecdotes of parents who began homeschooling as a temporary, stopgap measure due to COVID and now intend to continue. The article notes:

The number of kids going to school at home nationwide has doubled over the past two years. In 2019, there were about 2.5 million students learning at home. Today there are nearly 5 million. That means more than 11 percent of American households are educating their children outside of traditional schools.

This paragraph notes some of the forces at play:

The American Schoolhouse was in serious disrepair before 2020 — about that no one would disagree. But the events of last year tore the whole thing down to the studs. First, the pandemic. Then, the lockdowns. Then the summer of unrest: George Floyd, the protests, the riots, the mea culpas. Many local school boards seemed more concerned about teaching critical race theory and renaming schools than reopening them. Parents didn’t know what to do — what was safe, what was right, whom to trust. It was like being inside a tornado.

Part of what went on was what parents saw in COVID lockdowns:

The parents weren’t just upset about all the screen time their kids were logging. They were upset about what they saw on those screens. For the first time, millions of moms and dads could watch, in real time, their children’s teachers teaching. … “My kindergartener was getting maybe twenty minutes of instruction per day,” said Pauline, a house cleaner in Durham, North Carolina, who prefers using only her middle name to stay anonymous.

The article goes on to look briefly at how homeschoolers do well and aren’t necessarily social weirdos. Here’s part of the conclusion:

Dave Cormier, who runs the Office of Open Learning at the University of Windsor, suggested that homeschooled students are simply forcing a long overdue conversation.

“We used to live in a world of information scarcity,” he said. “At the first universities, 800 years ago, students couldn’t even touch the books, so whatever you wrote down or could remember was fantastic.” In the age of Google, we face the opposite problem: information overload. “This all requires us to ask the question, ‘What are we really doing here?’”

Are we creating a brave new, standardless world stripped of any canonical texts? Or are we reaching backward?

That last bit reminds me of Veith’s remarks on classical education. Anyway, the whole article is worth reading.

Public schools and deceit

Abigail Shrier had an article a while back regarding how schools have been hiding information from parents about gender identity. Apparently, schools are beginning to help students change their gender identity while keeping it secret from parents:

Last week, I spoke with another mother who discovered her 12-year-old daughter’s middle school had changed the girl’s name and gender identity at school. The “Gender Support Plan” the district followed is an increasingly standard document which informs teachers of a child’s new chosen name and gender identity (“trans,” “agender,” “non-binary,” etc.) for all internal communications with the child. The school also provided the girl a year’s worth of counseling in support of her new identity, which in her case was “no gender.” Even the P.E. teachers were in on it. Left in the dark were her parents.

This duplicity is part of the “plan”: All documents sent home to mom and dad scrupulously maintained the daughter’s birth name and sex. But Mom noticed her daughter seemed to be suffering. Although far from alone in declaring a new identity - many girls in the school had adopted new names and gender pronouns – this girl’s grades fell apart. She became taciturn and moody.

She goes on to explain that these plans are essentially a schoolwide conspiracy to create a secret name and gender identity that is deliberately hidden from parents. In all this, there is a contempt show towards parents (and, I would add, their God-given role). The article notes:

The contempt shown parents would be inexcusable even if teachers stuck to reading, writing and arithmetic. In a time when so many public school teachers are properly described as activists, that arrangement strips children of their families’ protection. And families must indeed protect them from an ideology that would turn students against any adult who suggests that a seventh grader suddenly jonesing for hormones and surgeries slow down.

The law grants parents rights with respect to their children’s educational records, but the article notes that schools skirt this by keeping the records in separate locations and other strategies to dodge these requirements. Part of her conclusion is this:

We need legislation that grants parents a right to opt out of any instruction regarding gender and sexuality and stops schools from changing a child’s name, gender marker, or pronouns without the approval of a parent or legal guardian. … For Pete’s sake, the state requires that teachers ask parental consent before they offer a child Tylenol. Maybe the state should require schools ask parents before inculcating a whole new identity for their child.

Other miscellania

  • I enjoy the show The Chosen a great deal, but feel strongly that it has to be watched with particular care because of how it might affect people and their views of Scripture, Jesus, and the relevant historical events. This is a good summary of some of the issues involved; one key point is that the Bible itself is God’s special revelation to humanity, NOT the events described in the Bible. We need no further or better revelation of what Jesus was really like than Scripture itself. The author notes, “I am most concerned about those Christians who take The Chosen the most seriously,” I think in part because he’s concerned that these individuals may be seeking to find a new, better way to know Jesus through The Chosen rather than through Scripture. He adds, “…we must take great care that we do not treat it as a scriptural supplement, as if the Bible alone were not sufficient.”
  • The Atlantic had an article arguing that we should start seeing Facebook like we would a hostile foreign power. The author argues it’s a threat to our democratic society itself. The article adds, “Facebook is a lie-disseminating instrument of civilizational collapse. It is designed for blunt-force emotional reaction, reducing human interaction to the clicking of buttons. The algorithm guides users inexorably toward less nuanced, more extreme material, because that’s what most efficiently elicits a reaction. Users are implicitly trained to seek reactions to what they post, which perpetuates the cycle. Facebook executives have tolerated the promotion on their platform of propaganda, terrorist recruitment, and genocide. They point to democratic virtues like free speech to defend themselves, while dismantling democracy itself.”
  • Relatedly, this author was banned from Facebook for posting quote from Isaac Asimov that advocated the right to free speech.
  • I enjoyed this careful analysis from Mohler on a climate report and how it was politicized