DARTMOUTH NIGHTMARE: It’s worse than you might think

President Philip Hanlon
Dartmouth College
Hanover, New Hampshire

Dear President Hanlon,

On October 23, I spoke at your college. I was invited by members of College Republicans and Students Supporting Israel. They probably wanted to hear what I had to say because I am one of the most prominent conservative intellectuals in America, having published over twenty books, three of which were New York Times best-sellers and one of which was nominated for a National Book Award. The feminist Camille Paglia has said of me: “I respect the astute and rigorously unsentimental David Horowitz as one of America's most original and courageous political analysts…. As a scholar who regularly surveys archival material, I think that, a century from now, cultural historians will find David Horowitz's spiritual and political odyssey paradigmatic for our time.”

Despite my credentials, and even though these conservative students pay the same tuition - $75,000 per year – as your leftwing students, I was forced to raise the money to underwrite my visit and lecture. This was particularly galling to the Dartmouth conservatives who invited me, because the previous spring Dartmouth’s “Office of Pluralism and Leadership” sponsored a visit by notorious anti-Semite and terrorist supporter Linda Sarsour – who has no academic credentials to speak of – underwriting her expenses and paying her a reported $10,000 honorarium for her talk.

My hosts were also probably interested in what I had to say because over the preceding decades, Dartmouth has purged conservative intellectuals from its faculty so effectively that the students could only name two Dartmouth liberal arts professors who were conservative. This reflects a collective faculty attitude that intellectual diversity is dangerous and unwanted. This is a disgraceful fact of academic life, which could easily be remedied, which prevents Dartmouth students from getting a decent liberal arts education, where all issues are controversial and intellectual diversity is the only guarantee that students are being educated rather than indoctrinated, or that there are reasonable checks on unchallenged leftist professors going off the deep end. As it happens my visit elicited a professorial outburst showing just how far leftwing bigotry and anti-academic discourse can go on your campus. I will come to this in a moment.

Before my arrival, an anonymous leaflet was circulated, apparently by the Dartmouth Socialists club. It was filled with lies about my work, calling me a “racist, sexist and ignorant bigot.” These slanders were drawn from the Southern Poverty Law Center, an institution so discredited that it recently had to pay a devout and moderate British Muslim $3.4 million after it libeled him as “a violent anti-Muslim extremist.” None of the students behind this slander sheet was apparently aware that I have a 50-year public record as a civil rights activist, or that I have published three books in the last 20 years dedicated to Martin Luther King’s vision of an America in which people are judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. And why should Dartmouth students be aware of my views since Dartmouth’s leftwing faculty obviously has no respect for conservative perspectives, which is why conservatives are as rare as unicorns on your faculty.

Leading the pack of Dartmouth character assassins who mobilized to combat my presence was Professor Annelise Oreleck, an out-of-control Gender Studies professor who tweeted: “Long-time hater, Islamophobe and anti-intellectual David Horowitz is speaking today in Rocky 3 at 6pm. He is a hater of the first order. If you’re so inclined, support students who are organizing a protest – Bring signs. Turn your back. Stage a walkout.” What justification can there be to have such an angry, close-minded individual teaching Dartmouth students?

Professor Oreleck’s protest instructions happened to be – and surely this was no coincidence - exactly what the Dartmouth Socialists were planning to obstruct my lecture -  namely to turn an academic talk into a circus so that no one would pay serious attention to anything that was said. They came in force to play loud porn videos, put on headphones to block out my words, unfurl distracting banners with slogans like “Trans Rights Are Human Rights” and “ICE is the Gestapo,” and to periodically walk out of the room throwing jibes in my direction as further distractions before they left. One transgender person, dressed as though she was going to Mardi Gras, sat herself near the front and eyed me intensely in the hope I guess that I would find her disturbing.

All the disrespectful antics of the protesters were in fact disturbing – not least because they were displays of Ivy League students wasting what could have been a valuable educational opportunity, and demonstrations of their total lack of interest in what someone who disagreed with them, and was far more educated, might be saying. When I was a college radical, as I told them to no effect, I always wanted to hear what our opponents were saying because I thought it would make me a better radical. Apparently, today’s radicals are so dedicated to self-righteous know-nothingism that they couldn’t care less what they are fighting against. As for the transgenderism, like many other conservatives, I am actually a very tolerant person. I happen to have a transgendered grandson who graduated from an Ivy League school and would never think of attending a college lecture only to mock it.

Wondering how students paying $75,000 a year for a Dartmouth education could throw away such an opportunity, it occurred to me that maybe they were not paying anything at all, but were so-called “marginalized” and “under-served” affirmative action scholarship cases. What a travesty that Dartmouth would encourage them to squander the opportunity their scholarships provided by not insisting on behavior appropriate to an academic community. When educators encourage closed minds, what is left of the learning process?

As it happens there were several Dartmouth administrators overseeing this event, including Keysi Montás, the Director of Safety and Security who was in charge. Unfortunately, they were not there to enforce an educational decorum but to encourage the protesters by tolerating their antics and refusing to eject them.

The whole travesty was sealed by the school newspaper, The Dartmouth, which bills itself as “The Oldest College Newspaper,” and which sent a reporter named Andrew Culver to cover the event. Before I began speaking, I gave Culver a recorded interview at his request. In it, I defended myself against the slanders in the anonymous leaflet, and showed him exactly how and why they were gross misrepresentations of the facts. For example, I was called a “sexist” for pointing out the scientific fact that men score higher on mathematical aptitude tests than women. What the slander sheet left out was that I also said, women score higher than men on verbal aptitude tests, and that I brought up these facts in defense of Harvard’s liberal president, Larry Summers, who was under fire for stating them first. I also described my public record as a civil rights activist, mentioned the fact that I had three black grandchildren, and was probably the only conservative in the country to defend Trayvon Martin during the trial of his killer George Zimmerman.

The Dartmouth reporter Andrew Culver failed to print a single word of my interview. Instead he opened his article by repeating the lies in the leaflet – namely that I was a racist, a sexist and a bigot. Culver’s mis-reporting of the event closed off the possibility that anyone in the Dartmouth community at large would be exposed to anything I had actually said. Only the slanders would remain. This is the state of education at a once admired Ivy League institution, where students can go four years without encountering a conservative adult. Moreover, if one is invited to campus to speak, he will be drowned out by students who shouldn’t be in college in the first place.

You had no personal role in these travesties, but you are president of the institution that made them possible. I’m not going to ask you to have your “Office of Pluralism (how Orwellian is that)” sponsor a return visit from me, since it might well provoke a faculty riot. I just want you to think about these signs of a damaged institution. and the warping of the educational experiences of your students.

I would like an apology from you on behalf of the Dartmouth community. I would also like to see some instruction from you to your staff on the importance of promoting educational values rather than encouraging close-minded political bigotry at your school. Perhaps hiring a dozen or so conservative administrators might help.

Sincerely,

David Horowitz

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4 Pros of Homeschooling (and 4 Challenges)

All parents want what’s best for their children. But when it comes to schooling, the field of choices can be murky and the decisions difficult. Parents don’t always get a close look at what goes on in their kids' schools, nor can they fully understand the demands of homeschooling until they’ve made the leap.

Both options incur financial and intangible costs; both offer benefits that can be enticing. An increasing number of parents, though, are making the financial sacrifice to stay home and educate their children themselves.

Homeschooling fosters deeper connections between kids and parents, allows a more tailored approach to education, and accommodates the family schedule, among other positive effects. It can also leave children isolated from peers and social interaction without the resources offered by traditional schools. Before deciding whether or not to homeschool your kids, it is important to examine all the facts—the clear advantages as well as the challenges that homeschooling families face.
Pros of Homeschooling

    One-on-one attention: To prepare for homeschooling, many experts recommend modifying the home to create a classroom or area designated especially for schooling. While this transformation can be costly depending on its extent, the potential benefits are many. Being together in that classroom every day enables your kids to spend one-on-one time with you.

Not only can this potentially strengthen the parent-child relationship, but it also gives you time to devote special attention to exactly what your children need to learn. If they require more time to concentrate on a particular subject or lesson, you’re free to spend the extra time necessary to ensure that they fully understand the concepts. Class can pause at any time without the usual pressure to keep up with other children. Conversely, if your child excels in a certain subject, that lesson can be taught at an increased pace.

    Flexible schedule: Kids who need a very rigorous schedule may benefit from taking part in traditional schooling, but those who require a more flexible schedule can prosper in a homeschooling environment. Homeschooling’s flexible schedule allows parents to take time for doctor appointments or private lessons. If your child is sick often, lessons can wait until they’re feeling better. If your kids are more productive during certain hours of the day, school can easily be reserved for that time period. And if your child is having a particularly bad day, they don’t have to feel overwhelmed by going to school; instead, they can learn in the comfort of their home.

    Teach in your child’s style: Parents and teachers know that different kids learn in different ways. Some may learn spatially, using images and dimensional understanding; visual learning and photographs should be implemented in their lessons. If your child is an auditory learner, consider integrating music and sounds into their learning process. Linguistic learning requires speaking and writing to understand concepts. Kinesthetic learners prefer to assimilate ideas through the sense of touch, so hands-on activities are a must. Different learning styles use different parts of the brain, so it’s important to integrate elements of all of these learning styles when homeschooling your child. However, particularly difficult concepts can be taught in the style that helps your child understand best.

    Cover topics that schools don’t teach: Most public schools are good at teaching reading and math, but they might not delve into practical things that don’t appear on standardized tests. Homeschooling gives you the freedom to teach math in the context of budgeting and show your kids how the stock market works. You can blend science with cooking. If your child is obsessed with a particular subject like trains or dinosaurs, you can work that into your curriculum.

Possible Homeschooling Drawbacks (and Their Solutions)

    Lack of art and sports facilities: Public schools usually have gymnasiums, sports fields, science labs, and other facilities that can be hard for homeschooling families to replicate. But that doesn’t mean homeschooled students have to miss out on traditional extracurricular activities. To make sure your kids can still take time for art and sports, sign them up for classes outside of school. Many art supply stores offer art classes for children, providing the materials for the craft and teaching your kids to do it themselves. The kids get to take the finished product home. You can also stock up on basic crafting supplies and turn to Pinterest or YouTube for ideas. Also consider signing your children up for extracurricular sports through clubs or organizations in your community. Outside art and sports classes allow homeschoolers a chance to socialize and experience elective activities with other kids their age, as well.

    No special education therapists: If your child has special needs, they’ll be missing out on having access to an in-school special education specialist or therapist. While this can be inconvenient for in-the-moment issues, many homeschool parents sign their children up to see a specialist outside of school, absorbing the added spending as part of their child’s overall health care costs. The more flexible schedule offered by homeschooling can allow for lessons to be planned around these other appointments outside of school.

    Peer interaction: Children who are homeschooled miss out on the classroom dynamic. They’re the main focus of the class, as opposed to being only one among a number of students. To help kids stay social while being homeschooled, sign them up for extracurricular activities. Sports and art classes are a great place to start, or think about letting your child join a club (a scouting or other outdoor group, for example). Many parents who homeschool also network with other homeschoolers, allowing them to hear advice from other parents on how best to navigate curricular, economic, or other homeschooling challenges. Networking with other families who homeschool also presents the potential for group field trips and outings, and allows kids to make friends among others with whom they have something in common, further improving their social skills.

    No nurse: Homeschooling means that unless you happen to be a nurse, there is no nurse. If your child falls and scrapes a knee or feels sick, no one with medical training is around to help. To address this problem, consider taking some basic first-aid classes, as well as CPR classes. Keep a first-aid kit handy in your classroom in case of an accident.

At the End of the Day

When deciding whether or not to homeschool your child, it’s important to keep in mind both the positives and negatives of homeschooling. If traditional schooling is difficult for your child, homeschooling may be the answer. The negative aspects of homeschooling often have straightforward solutions to make the process easier for both parent and child, meaning that homeschooling your son or daughter has the potential to be a success.

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Australian curriculum reform must be based on evidence, not fads

The NSW school curriculum review is no trivial matter, and will have serious consequences for the state’s students. The importance of the curriculum – what students are expected to know and be able to do at each stage of school – by far outweighs jousting over funding, although it gets far less public attention.

Curriculum development is a balancing act and involves compromises and trade-offs. Children spend a limited number of hours in class each year, and there are many competing demands for this time: from foundational skills in literacy and numeracy, to general knowledge of the world and its history, health and physical activity, using technology, and now so-called general capabilities such as collaboration and creativity.

This balancing act is growing more fraught. There is strong advocacy to add to an already crowded curriculum in significant ways. Decisions have to be made about what to keep and what to jettison. These decisions must made with advice from subject matter experts, without recourse to superficial and dangerous propositions such as that from “21st-Century skills pioneer” Charles Fadel, who recently suggested trigonometry should be out and mindfulness should be in.

Care must be taken that curriculum does not implicitly or explicitly prescribe teaching methods. In theory, curriculum is agnostic about teaching. It specifies the content students should learn and the skills they should master, but does not state how these things should be taught.

The Australian curriculum says children should learn to calculate percentages by the end of Year 4, but has nothing to say about whether this should be learned sitting at a desk or playing in a sandpit. Schools make judgments about which teaching strategies are most likely to be effective.

However, in reality a curriculum can and often does encourage certain teaching practices. An example is the recommendation in the second ‘Gonski’ report to “strengthen the development of the general capabilities, and raise their status within curriculum delivery, by using learning progressions to support clear and structured approaches to their teaching, assessment, reporting and integration with learning areas”.

Creating a set of learning progressions is not a straightforward exercise. It heightens the influence of curriculum on teaching methods, and drives a particular approach to assessment. The Gonski report proposes “developing the general capabilities into learning progressions that will provide a detailed picture of students’ increasing proficiency.”

There are two risks in this. One is that it will authorise and promulgate the misguided notion that general capabilities are independent of knowledge of facts and concepts – including the fallacy that “learning how to learn” is the ultimate goal of school education.

The other is that the proposed policies and practices overshoot the existing evidence base, and therefore risk wasting valuable time and resources – not least the time of teachers who generally
already have a heavy administrative workload, and that of students whose education is at stake.

The general capabilities listed in the Australian curriculum – digital capability, critical and creative thinking, personal and social capability, intercultural understanding, and ethical understanding – are inarguably valuable for the world of work and for life more broadly. The crucial questions are whether they are really generic skills that can be conceptually sequenced on developmental progressions, and if they can be taught and assessed separate from content knowledge. The evidence at the moment suggests the answer to both questions is no.

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