I remember how it was -- JR
‘Brutal Minds’ is a Devastating Critique of the Brainwashing in Higher Ed
Award-winning Professor Stanley K. Ridgley has written a book exposing how badly higher education has become infested with dogmatic progressivism. Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities.
“Many call themselves ‘marginalized voices’ and are declared off limits to criticism,” he explained. “The fact is they are not marginalized. They are lionized, they are feted, they have a canon of books and seminal thinkers, they have a zealous following, and some earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for diversity consulting.”
“If folks think of the university as an aristocracy of the learned, of the best and the brightest, the reality in the bureaucracy is increasingly that of a ruling clerisy of the worst and the dullest,” he went on. Ridgley said the activists “are trying to transform the university into an institution more appropriate to the thirteenth century” that will “ensure ideological conformity.”
He compared the status in higher ed to Václav Havel’s real-life essay, “The Power of the Powerless.” The former Czech president explained how a small business owner in 1970s communist Czechoslovakia put a sign in his window that said, “Workers of the World, Unite!” not because he supported the communist movement, but “because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble … someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life.”
Ridgley revealed that much of the indoctrination and wokeness is imposed by the Student Affairs departments in universities. Students need to be prepared to be assaulted “intellectually, verbally, psychologically, ideologically [and] racially.” He warned that “these folks aren’t satisfied just performing their handsomely subsidized antics on the campuses. They’re on a mission to ‘boldly transform higher education.’”
He explained how it is allowed to continue happening. “Sleepy boards of trustees are feted and given PowerPoint presentations that show progress of a sort, with metrics sufficiently abstract and yet seemingly on point.” The book is peppered with recent outrageous incidents that have occurred at universities around the country, and he described a few of the most outrageous professors.
Ridgley compared the indoctrination to that of cults, using the Unification Church as an example. Cults “prey on the weak and well-meaning, the uncertain and unaware.” They are directed like “sheep” into one group. Whereas “the strong, assertive, confident, grounded, morally secure student with a strong belief system” are akin to goats, and “quickly returned.” He said, “Cultspeak” is recognized as “big smiles and the mantra of inclusion and belonging.” He laid out several revealing red flags, such as keeping recruits “occupied to such a degree that they don’t get around to thinking about what they are doing or what is being done to them.”
Phrases like “Critical Race Theory” are no longer used since the public is onto them. Instead, it’s “learning about race” or “antiracist pedagogy.” Ridgley has a gift for breaking down the propaganda and defining it at its root level. “The content of antiracism is a mash-up of pseudoscientific speculations inspired by psychopathic paranoia and codified into a conspiracy theory,” he explained.
One chapter goes over the extracurricular workshops the do-gooders push on students, while another focuses on “hook and hammer;” how the “authoritarians” craft a “seductive, idealistic, visionary” message to hook students, then hammer them “with the stark message of racial reality” to “move them quickly along a conveyor belt of conversion.”
Ridgley offered solutions. He said parents should push back, since they are paying huge amounts of tuition. He ridiculed the correspondence universities send to parents, “They offer upbeat, wholesome mails couched in the occasional jargon-laden abstractions.” There is nothing on the parents’ portal or “school’s website about destabilizing the student’s sense of self and replacing the student’s belief system with a crypto-Maoist doctrine in a process of unfreezing-changing-refreezing.”
The universities can be sued over workshops and racial caucuses that violate anti-discrimination laws regarding race, gender, etc. He provided a list of 15 key steps that may be taken, such as cutting all ties with the radical leftist American College Personnel Association (ACPA) and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA). Ridgley decimated the organizations. Their national “[c]onferences are places where student affairs staffers go to be somebody,” he said. “It is there they can be taken seriously, no matter now vapid … they take selfies with the high gurus of the faith.”
He recommended that students contact the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education for free speech issues, the National Association of Scholars to find helpful faculty, and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni for resources promoting “academic excellence, academic freedom, and accountability in our universities.”
Too bad this book wasn’t required reading for every student entering college. It would eliminate a lot of unnecessary divisiveness and they could avoid learning the hard way later in life that they’re really conservatives.
**********************************************
CA School Board Caves to 'Bully' Gov. Newsom's Hefty Fine to Force Adoption of New School Curriculum
On Friday, the Temecula Valley Unified School District (TVUSD) board convened for an emergency meeting, amid controversy surrounding their school curriculum and Governor Gavin Newsom’s intervention.
The controversy originated from the curriculum’s inclusion of material on Harvey Milk – the first openly gay political office holder in California, and accompanying allegations of his involvement in pedophilia.
Called in response to a considerable fine levied by Governor Newsom, Friday’s meeting led to a resolution. Board members unanimously agreed to adopt the disputed curriculum.
Earlier on Wednesday, a 3-2 vote saw the district board members reject a state-endorsed social studies curriculum that referred to Harvey Milk’s role as a gay rights activist. This was the second instance of the district rejecting such material.
Subsequently, Governor Newsom penalized the district with a $1.5 million fine for what he termed as a “willful violation of the law.” Additionally, Newsom planned to burden the district with the $1.6 million cost of the new textbooks for students.
Congressman Darrell Issa, in a press release, rebuked Newsom’s authoritarian approach and voiced his support for the school board and the parents. “I stand with the parents of Temecula,” he asserted, commending the School Board’s efforts to heed parents’ and educators’ concerns and work collectively to sensibly select educational content.
He called out the governor stating, “Governor Newsom has resorted to bullying and intimidation, even going so far as to threaten a multimillion-dollar bill to Temecula for what he falsely terms a ‘fine.'”
TVUSD Board President Joseph Komrosky, who had been in an ongoing verbal feud with the governor, issued a statement post the fine, indicating that the district was still engaged in refining the curriculum for the 2023-2024 academic year.
Accusing Newsom of brash intervention, Komrosky expressed, “What he calls inaction we see as responsible considerations for all of our community’s viewpoints as we come to a final decision and with time left to do so.” He criticized Newsom’s attempt to undermine local control and his perceived wastage of taxpayers’ money.
In Friday’s meeting, board members voted first on whether to retain the district’s existing 17-year-old curriculum, inclusive of textbooks from 2006. Subsequently, marking the third such vote in the past two months, they decided to adopt the new curriculum.
The board will continue its efforts to refine the new curriculum, hoping to find alternative material to replace references to Milk, while still adhering to state mandates.
After the resolution, Governor Newsom posted a statement on Twitter. He argued that the debate was not about local control or parents’ rights, but about an alleged “extremists’ desire to control information and censor the materials used to teach our children.” He further claimed that the board members still have a civil rights investigation to answer for.
*********************************************
Teachers cannot teach what they do not know
Well, here we are with another review of teaching. Australia has itself a bit of déjà vu with a well-meaning Education Minister who wants to do his bit to fix the problems in our schools – this time by focusing on how we train our teachers.
To be fair, the Minister seems to be asking some of the right questions. Given the money we spend on education, why don’t we do better as a nation? Looking at how teachers are trained is important – they cannot teach what they do not know.
Here is a practical example. After recently marking the first essays of first year teacher trainees, I saw the need to do some revision of grammar. I asked the group a simple question: ‘What is a sentence?’ One of the young students, who was embedded in a school while doing her degree, said, ‘I don’t know, but my teacher is doing that with her year 5 students – I’ll look it up.’ The answer she found from her mentor teacher was: ‘A sentence is a clump of words that makes sense.’ Really…
So, my experiences would agree that there is core content that we simply do not consider important to teacher training, so a review might help there.
But it may not. There are complexities that go much deeper than simply adding ‘what the latest science says we need to do while we get back to basics’ (which is the reported framework through which the Minister is thinking).
I wonder if Minister Clare has done his homework in order to understand just how complex this apparently simple problem is? My suggestion is that The Minister should start his homework by reading Chapter 1 of the 2014 Donnelly and Wiltshire review of the National Curriculum, as commissioned by former Prime Minster Tony Abbott. These two reviewers fairly note improvements nationally with the introduction of ACARA – for we now have a curriculum that can translate across borders, to an extent.
But a decade ago these reviewers highlighted two deep areas of structural difficulty within the education system. Each of these aspects bring with them assumptions about the purpose of teaching, and therefore which ways of teaching are privileged over others. As Donnelly summarised later in his book How Political Correctness is Destroying Education:
As noted by the late Ken Rowe in the Commonwealth inquiry into the teaching of literacy, the prevailing orthodoxy in teacher education is based on constructivism; an approach to teaching that emphasises child-centred, inquiry-based learning and less explicit forms of teaching.
Such ‘child-centred’ approaches do not simply imply knowing your students well so that you can teach them better. It implies that teachers cannot impose sequential core knowledge into their lessons. Why? Because, according to the constructionists, all we need to do is to help our students think, and they can find the rest on the internet.
So, when the terms of this review suggest getting back to the old fashioned teaching core of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, it begs the questions, ‘to what end’, ‘in what way’, and ‘with what content?’
For example, is the purpose of our education simply utilitarian – aimed at getting everyone to work in the government’s priority areas, which include environmental alarmism, anti-family identity theory, and victim-blaming anti-Judeo-Christian history?
To help the Minister understand these dynamics better, he might also do another piece of homework that involves reading Professor John Sweller’s work. His theory flies in the face of the popular notion, supported by pseudo-science, that students do not need to learn anything off by heart because it is on the internet. The fact that the internet is also littered with conceptual rubbish seems to escape proponents of ‘21st Century education’. The constructivist process of education is given so much privilege that we have students who simply do not know enough (like, ‘What is a sentence?’).
But neither do the teachers of these trainees know good content, because they have not learnt about it – the problem is generational. After reading Sweller’s work, the Minister could then graduate to E.D. Hirsch’s Why Knowledge Matters, and the report by the John Hopkins Institute, What We Teach Matters. Or he could read the case study about Sweden’s decline in standards by Henrekson and Wennstrom.
So, does the Minister understand that the methods by which teachers teach reflect their deeper assumptions, or what we used to call ‘philosophy of education’? And similarly, does he understand that these presuppositions which we bring to our teaching also have an impact on what we consider is good content? This is where Minister Clare needs to do even more homework. An ideology is the belief system in which we put our faith. Such deep beliefs steer what we believe is essential content for education. That is why the IPA report that came out earlier this year by Bella D’Abera and Collen Harken would be the next homework piece for the Minister.
This report revealed afresh the depth of distortion in the content of the ninth iteration of the National Curriculum. This national document is what the teacher trainers will still be expected to work too. But as the authors summarised:
As this report reveals, where the National Curriculum is failing in one area, it is succeeding in another. Instead of teaching children how to read and write, it is indoctrinating them with identity politics, radical race theory, and radical green ideology.
These emphases reflect the priorities of the current political elites. The authors note ‘… as this report demonstrates, Version 9 of the National Curriculum is a highly politicised document; it reflects the current ideologies held by bureaucrats who have control over what is in the curriculum.’
These privileged emphases are in line with the ideologies of the Labor Party. Will the Minister really reject his party’s ideology to release teacher trainers to revise the content away from environmental and pantheistic alarmism, the racially biased critical race theories, and the emphasis on history that downplays the constructive aspects of Western heritage?
I doubt it – we have been plagued by Ministers who seem to lack experience with these educational philosophical assumptions, knowledge of the National Curriculum, and an understanding about the teaching of teachers. Yet here we are, with another Minister trying to evaluate whether teachers and their trainers know enough about going back to the basics in schooling…
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/teachers-cannot-teach-what-they-do-not-know/
******************************************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
******************************************************
No comments:
Post a Comment