These are not liberal schools; they are socialist. Liberalism is all about liberty, and the Constitutional values of individual rights and freedoms. Not this socialism or critical theory practices. To constantly confuse progressive ideology - entirely based on GROUP identities and GROUP power hierarchies and GROUP victimization - with liberalism is to reveal a mindset that has already been thoroughly captured by this linguistic trap used by both political extremes for their own reasons. Don't fall for it. Stick to the very facts the OP supports and stop doing the extremist's work for them.
The Dept of Education might be cleansed or reformed as far as the high school misinformation plagues by the profoundly biased teachers, and indeed parents can make a huge difference speaking up and writing to deans - as I and my son have done with excellent results- , but the huge damage to still young college minds paid for by Qatar and tolerated by our idiocy for so long so far is only tackled by government withdrawal of funds and divestment. Many parents have seen the light - or more accurately, the darkness- , and many of these former Ivies have decreased in repute, private sponsors and registrations. One of my kids has two graduate degrees from Harvard . He has stopped sponsoring and vowed that none of his kids will go there. Not much hope for Columbia, as New Yorkers are themselves insane. Look who they picked for Mayor.
Wasn't it clever of the Frankfurt group of post modernists to capture the the term 'critical' and invert its original meaning in service to their totalitarian ideology? What we call 'woke'
or 'progressive' or PoMo comes from the school of thought called 'Critical Theory' that is literally the polar opposite to critical thinking!
Yes, and yes and yes again. It is often quoted as a self-evident fact, including by people on the "right", that the purpose of education is not to convey facts but to teach people how to think. This is just wrong. Monumentally wrong, in fact. It is simply NOT the business of educators to teach people how to think, but to give them the grounding in reality that will make their thinking worthwhile. Otherwise, thinking can be a downright dangerous business! Kids are naturally curious to grasp the facts that will help them to successfully navigate the big bad world into which they have born. Giving them only half-baked ideologies instead is only liable to result in horrible outcomes, both for them and for society at large - as all too many modern institutions have proved!
Can you hear me cheering, Jenna? I wanted to stand up and applaud when I read your essay! This knowledge deficit—with regard to the whole array of traditional school subjects—is undermining Western culture/civilization at an alarming rate. Please keep speaking up about it as clearly and succinctly as you have done, here. THANK YOU!
The degradation of the educational system really gained momentum when the Vietnam-era Boomers, armed with 60s “I’m ok, you’re ok” attitudes, passed into the general population as K-12 teachers and college professors. This has been happening for decades and unfortunately it needs a massive overhaul. Although personally I’m uncomfortable wearing one’s religion on one’s sleeve, I think that very squeamishness is a problem today. We need a thousand Charlie Kirks going everywhere and speaking calmly and respectfully, yet firmly (and where necessary with a light touch), about what truly matters.
I largely agree, but I also think this can't be our primary focus.
It'd be great to teach everyone basic facts and critical thinking, and we should aspire to do that. But what's more realistic and arguably more important is to draw a line on what sort of speech and behavior is socially unacceptable.
In certain situations, the hateful bigotry is explicit and egregious, and we simply need to uphold our universal moral TABOOS against those who express that hate, ostracizing them out of polite society, as we did to defeat the KKK.
But in other situations where the bigotry is masked and perhaps even unintentional, we need to expose the hypocrisy and double standards and missing context that they often employ to reveal that there is an underlying bigotry against certain groups in play. This may not convince the person engaging in this language, but it should show the observers, the vast majority of our society, that those arguments are weak or even abhorrent and can not be the basis of our society. It will isolate those who continue to chant "from the river to the sea" or make vague pseudo-intellectual and not explicitly hateful claims about "antizionism" while aligning with rabid antisemites.
I wrote about this here recently, as part of my broader mission to try to restore our universal moral TABOOS.
Good question. What I consider our "universal moral TABOOS" are overt hateful bigotry, dehumanization, and the endorsement of violence. In the extreme case, this hate is often not rooted in any science or truth. But even when that hate is rooted in some real or imaginary truths, it can never be justified and socially tolerated, at least not in liberal democratic framework.
I can come up with countless examples to demonstrate how we can approach this in a principled way, which in many ways is how society collectively approached these taboo violations quite naturally for the past 50+ years (with a gradual erosion over the past 2 decades and a sharp turn 2.5 years ago).
OK, to cases. In the USA, American blacks' average (mean) IQ is approx. one standard deviation below the mean IQ of white Americans. East Asians and ethnic Jewish people score somewhat higher than whites. Given this scientific fact, a meritocratic distribution of educational degrees, jobs, salaries, housing, and other social "goods" will result in a disparate distribution across the groups mentioned. Does your "universal moral TABOOS" framework accept that various racial/ethnic groups will perform at different rates to common standards applied to everyone?
This is a great example, and I think points to common feedback I get about "what counts as "overt hateful bigotry"'. I've actually built a framework to address this and ran a survey to show that there is already consensus around it.
The tl;dr is that we must distinguish between the different type of speech/views that are all lumped as "bigotry", try to understand which of them have intent to cause harm or are indifferent to doing so, and use a process that evaluates the full context and not just the initial offending speech.
To answer your question specifically, I think it can be quite problematic to make the Essentialist argument about IQ, but it is not necessarily taboo or hateful to simply Observe differences in IQ, and especially not if somebody makes clear that they do not hold Essentialist or hateful views.
No biggie, just wanted to make sure your thoughts were properly directed.
You can cut and paste your comment into the comment window on the first page of comments, then post it, followed by going back to the wayward comment, click on the ellipsis (...), select "Delete" and voila!, everything as it should've been.
Haha I don't know how to respond to that. I am a very principled person and try to speak that way especially on topics like this that I believe require it to get broad buy-in.
And I like to use neutral or positive language online, assuming the best intent from other commenters, to create the conditions for good discussions and debate.
I generally cherish feedback on the substance of my writing but I welcome feedback on my style too. Keep it coming.
I appreciate that! I also realized that starting my responses with a positive "that's a good question" does sound like AI in a way. But I generally want to welcome positive and intellectually honest discourse, even when there's disagreement, so I like to show that I'm empathetic to their concerns and questions, especially online where tone and attitude are hard to discern.
As a high school science teacher I wholeheartedly agree. But not only for civics, there is the same sea-change in science education (NGSS and engineering) that no one is talking about. Young adults need context about real-world phenomena in mind in order to evaluate science and medical hype. Science content has been thrown out and replaced by the skills-based lessons in argumentation. Although I teach argument from evidence as an important skill, I see vast swaths of science content removed from current K-12 standards and replaced by climate change dogma. No plants are taught. No human body organ structure names (just how one organ relates to another). Curricula are judged and marketed as high quality that actually are given ratings that are sub-minimum standard. Math is thrown out of middle and high school science education standards in fear students won’t know the algebra required. I shared my concern with a newly minted hospital resident, only to have him agree he is very worried about the quality of our future doctors.
First, babies and very young children are trained. They act and they experience consequences and regardless of IQ get to form the habit of mostly choosing to avoid painful, frightening and unwelcome consequences and repeat pleasant and rewarded experiences.
Education comes to replace this in later years increasingly.
Brain development continues from birth until puberty along a smooth course and then is abruptly and disconcertingly interrupted by the arrival of sex hormones which are the strongest mind altering substances most people will ever experience. We warp into another biological and social dimension.
There is a time in life when students need to understand facts to move on to the next phase of applying facts to other facts. This time is usually early in life for simple facts, but as the student grows, progress is applying complex concepts to other more complex factual information. As he or she develops in cognition, the need to express thoughts orally and through written language becomes necessary for growth. This is called the rhetorical stage of learning in Classical learning. We don’t actually need schools once a child reaches this mark, except to give tests with essay questions to strengthen the expression of ideas in print.What is necessary is books, newspapers and lots of them. Complex ideas are compared to other complex ideas via the written word.
My point is that understanding factual data has its time in life, but as the mind grows, stages of learning do too, requiring focus on sharper tools.
FYI, it would be helpful when you say "schools" whether you are referring to K-12 Schools or higher education schools. What is going on in these to parts of our education system is VERY different.
Having taught critical thinking at the post-secondary level for many years, may I assure you that evaluation of information includes researching background and context, as well as scrutinizing framing.
We have failed to watch over our schools. Left them to the liberals. This has to change
Go to school board meetings. Find out exactly what is happening to YOUR schools.
CALL THEM OUT.
Be present an accounted for
Most teachers are graduating from LIBERAL/Progressive schools. We can’t have that!
These are not liberal schools; they are socialist. Liberalism is all about liberty, and the Constitutional values of individual rights and freedoms. Not this socialism or critical theory practices. To constantly confuse progressive ideology - entirely based on GROUP identities and GROUP power hierarchies and GROUP victimization - with liberalism is to reveal a mindset that has already been thoroughly captured by this linguistic trap used by both political extremes for their own reasons. Don't fall for it. Stick to the very facts the OP supports and stop doing the extremist's work for them.
The Dept of Education might be cleansed or reformed as far as the high school misinformation plagues by the profoundly biased teachers, and indeed parents can make a huge difference speaking up and writing to deans - as I and my son have done with excellent results- , but the huge damage to still young college minds paid for by Qatar and tolerated by our idiocy for so long so far is only tackled by government withdrawal of funds and divestment. Many parents have seen the light - or more accurately, the darkness- , and many of these former Ivies have decreased in repute, private sponsors and registrations. One of my kids has two graduate degrees from Harvard . He has stopped sponsoring and vowed that none of his kids will go there. Not much hope for Columbia, as New Yorkers are themselves insane. Look who they picked for Mayor.
Why reform it instead of just dismantling it?
You can't teach the skill of critical thinking properly if you don't have facts and knowledge to think about.
Wasn't it clever of the Frankfurt group of post modernists to capture the the term 'critical' and invert its original meaning in service to their totalitarian ideology? What we call 'woke'
or 'progressive' or PoMo comes from the school of thought called 'Critical Theory' that is literally the polar opposite to critical thinking!
Yes, and yes and yes again. It is often quoted as a self-evident fact, including by people on the "right", that the purpose of education is not to convey facts but to teach people how to think. This is just wrong. Monumentally wrong, in fact. It is simply NOT the business of educators to teach people how to think, but to give them the grounding in reality that will make their thinking worthwhile. Otherwise, thinking can be a downright dangerous business! Kids are naturally curious to grasp the facts that will help them to successfully navigate the big bad world into which they have born. Giving them only half-baked ideologies instead is only liable to result in horrible outcomes, both for them and for society at large - as all too many modern institutions have proved!
Can you hear me cheering, Jenna? I wanted to stand up and applaud when I read your essay! This knowledge deficit—with regard to the whole array of traditional school subjects—is undermining Western culture/civilization at an alarming rate. Please keep speaking up about it as clearly and succinctly as you have done, here. THANK YOU!
Thanks, Kathy! I will definitely keep sounding the alarm on this issue. I appreciate your support.
The degradation of the educational system really gained momentum when the Vietnam-era Boomers, armed with 60s “I’m ok, you’re ok” attitudes, passed into the general population as K-12 teachers and college professors. This has been happening for decades and unfortunately it needs a massive overhaul. Although personally I’m uncomfortable wearing one’s religion on one’s sleeve, I think that very squeamishness is a problem today. We need a thousand Charlie Kirks going everywhere and speaking calmly and respectfully, yet firmly (and where necessary with a light touch), about what truly matters.
Even "long marches" eventually arrive at their desired destination.
It's more thn "I'm ok, you're ok" It's the lack of family values and huge lack of history + civic education. There are too many America haters.
I largely agree, but I also think this can't be our primary focus.
It'd be great to teach everyone basic facts and critical thinking, and we should aspire to do that. But what's more realistic and arguably more important is to draw a line on what sort of speech and behavior is socially unacceptable.
In certain situations, the hateful bigotry is explicit and egregious, and we simply need to uphold our universal moral TABOOS against those who express that hate, ostracizing them out of polite society, as we did to defeat the KKK.
But in other situations where the bigotry is masked and perhaps even unintentional, we need to expose the hypocrisy and double standards and missing context that they often employ to reveal that there is an underlying bigotry against certain groups in play. This may not convince the person engaging in this language, but it should show the observers, the vast majority of our society, that those arguments are weak or even abhorrent and can not be the basis of our society. It will isolate those who continue to chant "from the river to the sea" or make vague pseudo-intellectual and not explicitly hateful claims about "antizionism" while aligning with rabid antisemites.
I wrote about this here recently, as part of my broader mission to try to restore our universal moral TABOOS.
https://elevin11.substack.com/p/the-dunning-kruger-of-hypocrisy
And when science and truth are in conflict with your "universal moral TABOOS"? Then what?
Good question. What I consider our "universal moral TABOOS" are overt hateful bigotry, dehumanization, and the endorsement of violence. In the extreme case, this hate is often not rooted in any science or truth. But even when that hate is rooted in some real or imaginary truths, it can never be justified and socially tolerated, at least not in liberal democratic framework.
I can come up with countless examples to demonstrate how we can approach this in a principled way, which in many ways is how society collectively approached these taboo violations quite naturally for the past 50+ years (with a gradual erosion over the past 2 decades and a sharp turn 2.5 years ago).
OK, to cases. In the USA, American blacks' average (mean) IQ is approx. one standard deviation below the mean IQ of white Americans. East Asians and ethnic Jewish people score somewhat higher than whites. Given this scientific fact, a meritocratic distribution of educational degrees, jobs, salaries, housing, and other social "goods" will result in a disparate distribution across the groups mentioned. Does your "universal moral TABOOS" framework accept that various racial/ethnic groups will perform at different rates to common standards applied to everyone?
This is a great example, and I think points to common feedback I get about "what counts as "overt hateful bigotry"'. I've actually built a framework to address this and ran a survey to show that there is already consensus around it.
The tl;dr is that we must distinguish between the different type of speech/views that are all lumped as "bigotry", try to understand which of them have intent to cause harm or are indifferent to doing so, and use a process that evaluates the full context and not just the initial offending speech.
To answer your question specifically, I think it can be quite problematic to make the Essentialist argument about IQ, but it is not necessarily taboo or hateful to simply Observe differences in IQ, and especially not if somebody makes clear that they do not hold Essentialist or hateful views.
You can find my framework, the survey results, and a video of me walking through them here if you're interested: https://elevin11.substack.com/p/lawful-but-awful-a-guide-to-moral-2c7
I'll check it out. Thanks for the response.
Addressing the notions of true morality properly named taboos and the nonsense that being good depends on IQ
Now, explain to me which of the below are grounded in hateful bigotry or mindless superstition.
Love one another
Love your enemies
Do no murder
Do not lie
Do not steal
Venerate, support and protect monogamous, lifelong, heterosexual marriage
Just a few for a start, eh?
You addressed this to me. Was that intentional or did you have some other commenter in mind to whom you wanted to pose your challenge(s)?
My apology. Substack does not always work properly in attributing comments.
It should have been free standing.
No biggie, just wanted to make sure your thoughts were properly directed.
You can cut and paste your comment into the comment window on the first page of comments, then post it, followed by going back to the wayward comment, click on the ellipsis (...), select "Delete" and voila!, everything as it should've been.
You sound like AI character, in your replies, as well.
Haha I don't know how to respond to that. I am a very principled person and try to speak that way especially on topics like this that I believe require it to get broad buy-in.
And I like to use neutral or positive language online, assuming the best intent from other commenters, to create the conditions for good discussions and debate.
I generally cherish feedback on the substance of my writing but I welcome feedback on my style too. Keep it coming.
OK. So I reread and not so bad. ;)
I appreciate that! I also realized that starting my responses with a positive "that's a good question" does sound like AI in a way. But I generally want to welcome positive and intellectually honest discourse, even when there's disagreement, so I like to show that I'm empathetic to their concerns and questions, especially online where tone and attitude are hard to discern.
As a high school science teacher I wholeheartedly agree. But not only for civics, there is the same sea-change in science education (NGSS and engineering) that no one is talking about. Young adults need context about real-world phenomena in mind in order to evaluate science and medical hype. Science content has been thrown out and replaced by the skills-based lessons in argumentation. Although I teach argument from evidence as an important skill, I see vast swaths of science content removed from current K-12 standards and replaced by climate change dogma. No plants are taught. No human body organ structure names (just how one organ relates to another). Curricula are judged and marketed as high quality that actually are given ratings that are sub-minimum standard. Math is thrown out of middle and high school science education standards in fear students won’t know the algebra required. I shared my concern with a newly minted hospital resident, only to have him agree he is very worried about the quality of our future doctors.
This is alarming. Thanks for sharing your experience, Hannah.
First, babies and very young children are trained. They act and they experience consequences and regardless of IQ get to form the habit of mostly choosing to avoid painful, frightening and unwelcome consequences and repeat pleasant and rewarded experiences.
Education comes to replace this in later years increasingly.
Brain development continues from birth until puberty along a smooth course and then is abruptly and disconcertingly interrupted by the arrival of sex hormones which are the strongest mind altering substances most people will ever experience. We warp into another biological and social dimension.
There is a time in life when students need to understand facts to move on to the next phase of applying facts to other facts. This time is usually early in life for simple facts, but as the student grows, progress is applying complex concepts to other more complex factual information. As he or she develops in cognition, the need to express thoughts orally and through written language becomes necessary for growth. This is called the rhetorical stage of learning in Classical learning. We don’t actually need schools once a child reaches this mark, except to give tests with essay questions to strengthen the expression of ideas in print.What is necessary is books, newspapers and lots of them. Complex ideas are compared to other complex ideas via the written word.
My point is that understanding factual data has its time in life, but as the mind grows, stages of learning do too, requiring focus on sharper tools.
Paul Harvey 1965
https://youtu.be/dNLyCTt5E7U?si=8UZztVsS9JOSgWeW
https://damemaudhackshaw.substack.com/p/the-blue-questions-in-trivial-pursuits?r=5kmhkr
Excellent article.
Jenna:
Thank you for a thought-provoking commentary.
FYI, it would be helpful when you say "schools" whether you are referring to K-12 Schools or higher education schools. What is going on in these to parts of our education system is VERY different.
The problem is that leftists are allergic to facts.
Having taught critical thinking at the post-secondary level for many years, may I assure you that evaluation of information includes researching background and context, as well as scrutinizing framing.