I remember how it was -- JR
Now More Than Ever, America's Children Need a Strong Civics Education
After being officially sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden wasted no time in pushing his executive privilege to the limit. Biden and Co. are framing his executive orders as necessary first steps in addressing the “four crises” facing our nation. In reality, however, Biden’s EOs are more attacks on actions taken by the Trump administration than they are substantive policy measures. They are a gesture aimed at the American public, as if to say, “I am the polar opposite of Donald Trump.”
Nonetheless, these executive orders are still harmful and worthy of our concern — especially when they have the potential to hold sway over the education of our children. In one of his first acts as president, Biden signed an executive order to dissolve the 1776 Commission. This commission was assembled by former President Trump during his final months in the White House as a response to the anti-American sentiment and inaccurate rewrites of history that have been gripping our country’s corporate offices, bureaucracies, and, most alarmingly, school civics lessons. Within minutes of President Biden taking office, the 1776 Commission’s report, along with all its pro-America content, was deleted from the White House website.
Dishonest and widely discredited academics may go on reframing the whole of America and its history as unequivocally racist and irredeemable, but these kinds of educational programs should not receive encouragement from the leader of the free world himself. The president would be terribly remiss to let anti-American attitudes continue unchallenged throughout the nation’s school halls.
But by dissolving the 1776 Commission, Biden has made it clear that he counts himself an ally of those who wish to destroy traditional civic education in America. With him in office, they only will increase their power and influence.
That’s why it’s more important now than ever that our nation’s students receive a strong, nuanced civics education that instills within them a love of country and an appreciation for the American founding and Constitution. A solid civics education should not shy away from the evils of slavery and racism — it should make them fully apparent. But in relaying a fair, all-encompassing picture of our remarkable history, we need to make an unmistakable distinction between teaching the complexities of history and rewriting them entirely.
Accomplishing this includes providing students with a critical analysis of slavery and its post-Civil War outgrowth as much as it includes spending time on other threats that the U.S. has faced throughout history, including communism and progressivism. It includes giving a full view of the good and the bad that America has both endured and inflicted. At its core, a successful civics education rests on the understanding of our founding principles and Constitution — that despite even our most egregious moral failures, America is built on liberty, which will always triumph in the long run.
That founding principle is unique to America and is something to be unapologetically celebrated and emphasized in civics lessons above all else. The dark periods in our past should not be ignored, but that doesn’t mean they have to define us.
San Francisco School Board Cancels Lincoln, Washington for ‘Dishonorable’ Legacies
Editor’s note: The San Francisco school board voted Tuesday to rename 44 public schools in the school district. Among the figures with “dishonorable” or racist legacies, according to the school board, were Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.
In December, Jarrett Stepman wrote about how the war on history has even come for Lincoln and what the larger agenda of the iconoclasts is. Here is the article:
Abraham Lincoln didn’t do enough for black lives, according to militant proponents of the woke revolution.
In October, the San Francisco Unified School District School Names Advisory Committee suggested a list of school names to be replaced in the city. On that list was a school named after Lincoln, the Great Emancipator.
In just a few years, the discussion about history and monuments has gone from whether we should keep Confederate monuments to erasing the president who orchestrated the Confederacy’s destruction.
Regarding Lincoln, it seems the woke and John Wilkes Booth are now in alignment.
A recent report by the San Francisco Chronicle that has been making the rounds illuminates just how bad things have become in some education circles.
“Lincoln is one of dozens of historical figures who, according to a school district naming committee, lived a life so stained with racism, oppression or human rights violations, they do not deserve to have their name on a school building,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Part of the criticism of Lincoln is about how he treated Native Americans badly, particularly the Sioux tribe. This has always been an unfair charge, but he was simply added to the renaming committee’s list without debate.
According to the committee chairman, this isn’t the only reason for abandoning Lincoln.
“Lincoln, like the presidents before him and most after, did not show through policy or rhetoric that black lives ever mattered to them outside of human capital and as casualties or wealth building,” Jeremiah Jefferies, the chairman of the renaming committee and a first-grade teacher, told the Chronicle.
Lincoln conducted a war, signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and got shot in the head for black lives, but this wasn’t enough to keep him from being unceremoniously ditched by modern social justice warriors.
If Lincoln doesn’t qualify as doing enough for black lives, then who does?
I wrote about this whole San Francisco schools travesty when their list was released. The extensive criteria was clearly designed to appeal to the most fervently woke:
Anyone directly involved in the colonization of people.
Slave owners or participants in enslavement.
Perpetuators of genocide or slavery.
Those who exploit workers/people.
Those who directly oppressed or abused women, children, queer, or transgender people.
Those connected to any human rights or environmental abuses.
Those who are known racists and/or white supremacists and/or espoused racist beliefs.
This led to not just Lincoln, but George Washington, John Muir, Junipero Serra, and even an abolitionist being added to the rolls of the damned.
The Daily Signal contacted the San Francisco Unified School District about whether the name changes can still be prevented, but it did not respond.
The problem with the woke revolution is that as it wages war on the past, it operates entirely outside of the human experience.
If the criteria were really taken to its logical conclusions, then it would lead to erasing pretty much every leader and people in all human history.
Every person, every leader who does not fit the agenda of the modern woke left is subjected to impossible and often absurd standards. No president could make it through the roulette wheel of social justice created by activists who need only preach to like-minded apostles rather than lead a large, complex society.
On the naughty list was also, humorously enough, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who was condemned for replacing a vandalized Confederate flag in 1968. Feinstein may be a progressive, but she’s clearly angered some on the far left.
“On a local level, Dianne Feinstein chose to fly a flag that is the iconography of domestic terrorism, racism, white avarice, and inhumanity towards black and indigenous people at the city hall,” Jefferies said. “She is one of the few living examples on our list, so she still has time to dedicate the rest of her life to the upliftment of black, First Nations, and other people of color. She hasn’t thus far, so her apology simply wasn’t convincing.”
It’s interesting that Jefferies says the agenda is about uplifting “black, First Nations, and people of color,” but are not all these groups, through the lens of history, also guilty of virtually every transgression on the committee’s list of criteria?
The cancelation list appears to have been selectively curated to avoid targeting more recent left-wing heroes, like famed labor leader Cesar Chavez, whose name adorns schools, streets, and buildings around the city. Chavez fervently opposed illegal immigration as a young man, which should have made him ripe for cancelation.
Clearly, consistency doesn’t really matter here. For the militantly woke, Fidel Castro gets a pass, Lincoln gets canceled.
The bottom line is that the war on history is ultimately about political power and iconoclasm. It’s about tearing down 1776 and replacing it with the narrative of the 1619 Project. The message has little to do with actual history, it’s simply: “Do what we say, or you will be smashed and erased.”
Symbols of opposition will be torn down. You must accept our truth, or else.
Targeting Feinstein sends a clear message that the revolution shall be subject to no law. It’s a warning to public officials not to stop or fix the damage done by mobs and vandals to statues, monuments, and public property.
This is entirely consistent with the ideology of leading “anti-racists,” like Ibram X. Kendi. The world is divided into anti-racists and racists. Every act, every decision, and every person must be put through this lens. Absolute anarchy and absolute tyranny are perfectly acceptable if one remains on what woke intellectuals and officials deem the “right side of history.”
The idea that canceling Lincoln, or any of the other people on the San Francisco Unified School District list, will lead to tolerance or a better society is a joke. If anything, it teaches students to be ruthlessly intolerant, to be utterly incapable of understanding different perspectives and the limitations of human nature.
Perhaps this is the point.
But human civilization wasn’t built by angels, and it certainly wasn’t built by revolutionary Marxists, who have been much more successful at tearing down in a tide of inhuman carnage than building up.
Unfortunately, absurd militant wokeness is not just confined to San Francisco, it’s coming to schools and institutions around the country.
No wonder Americans are increasingly worried about the rise of socialism.
The Shark Tank Approach to Financing a College Education
By RICHARD K. VEDDER
A publicist emailed me recently, promoting a new book by Scott MacDonald, Education Without Debt (which I might review in the future after reading the book). In the email, the serial entrepreneur Mark Cuban (who, among other things, owns the Dallas Mavericks) was quoted as saying, “We can talk about Republican and Democratic approaches to the economy, but until you fix the student debt bubble and the tuition bubble, we don’t have a chance. All this other stuff is shuffling deck-chairs on the Titanic.”
Then it struck me: Cuban is an engaging panelist on Shark Tank, the ABC reality show that I occasionally watch. Several successful entrepreneurs including Cuban interview wannabe entrepreneurs who have an idea for a good or service that they they think the public will buy, but to make it happen they need the panelists’ financial help, which they often get after some haggling over terms. Sometimes the panelists get an ownership share in return for some cash assistance.
That is precisely what Income Share Agreements (ISAs) are about. Students go to an investor and say “I want to develop my human capital and my ability to provide valuable goods and services to the economy, but I need financial help.” And then the investor agrees to provide some assistance, say $80,000 over four years, in return for some “equity” in the student, say 14 percent of the student’s post-graduate earnings for eight years.
This has lots of advantages over student loans. From the student perspective, the financial risk of going to college is substantially (depending on the level of financial involvement) passed from a financially inexperienced teenager to an experienced investor. The government is removed from the process. The terms of the ISA will vary with prospects for financial success. Engineers and accountants attending top flight schools will get dramatically better terms than fine arts or sociology majors attending the College of Last Resort. Students who drop out of school or fare poorly getting a job are not burdened with a massive debt burden.
The labor market largely determines outcomes, favoring engineers and computer gurus over poets and philosophers. Some think that is “unfair” or denigrates the humanities and graduates in other low-paying fields. But arguably it says, “the world does not need a lot of professional (full-time) philosophers, artists, and writers.” Excellent practitioners in those fields still can succeed from either their salaries or sale of their published or performed works. ISAs help redirect scarce resources to areas where they are most likely to serve society well. Moreover, they incentivize students to obtain valuable skills people want, rather than those things the students wish to do based on their perhaps idiosyncratic tastes and preferences.
I always thought it would be cool if there were “little shark tanks,” where successful local entrepreneurs invested in small local business persons, but the concept could be extended to students—a collegiate shark tank, if you will. Students would vie for funds from savvy entrepreneurs, selling themselves—arguing they would be going to schools with prestige that have highly successful alumni, or that they thrived as students in high school and their unusual extracurricular activities show potential for success as an adult. Maybe ABC could devote an episode or two of the original Shark Tank to trying out the concept. Are Kevin O’Leary, Barbara Corcoran, Daymond John, Cuban and other panelists as good at predicting future success of young people as they are at evaluating somewhat more established adults?
Peter Thiel invests in young college-age kids, inducing them to drop out of college and engage in some entrepreneurial passion. Perhaps a panelist might tell a collegiate Shark Tank applicant that she or he would be better off completely foregoing traditional college, going to a coding academy and then joining a small tech-oriented startup, maybe one supported by a panelist. The tradeoff between formal education and becoming an entrepreneur, between getting a bachelor’s degree or continuing for some advanced degree like an M.B.A., etc., all could be discussed, evaluated and resources allocated by groups similar to the real Shark Tank. As Cuban says, our student loan programs are a disaster, and an alternative approach needs to be considered.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13379&omhide=true
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