This Is A Great Opportunity To Destroy Academia

Never let a good crisis go to waste, which in the current crisis means we must use the fact that our universities have shown themselves to be petri dishes swimming with anti-American ideologies, combined with pre-existing trends, to lance this particular cultural boil.

Let’s be clear: Academia today is a pack of rabid reds, and we need to put it down like Old Yeller. And academia itself has loaded up the 12 gauge.

They will say that we oppose academia because we are stupid Neanderthals, just like Trump is (That’s Lie #2 in my new book!). No. We would be stupid to let this undead institution on. This entire wokeness idiocy is the result of hack academics peddling half-baked theories that justify the consolidation of elite power at the expense of those of us who don’t live on the diploma dole. The bizarre language – “We must struggle to decolonialize the cisnormative paradigm to purge the structural racism caused by the male gaze and amplify whiny, entitled voices” – and the performance art aspects of the media-friendly insurrection – notice how they only get frisky in jurisdictions where they can count on the pinko mayor to hold back the constables and on the local DA to merely slap their wrists? – is all a direct result of indoctrination in the colleges that we normal people support.

Why should we do that? We have no moral obligation to subsidize a generation of brats.

Now, the only thing really keeping academia attached to the body politic like the institutional deer tick that it is was the widespread and baseless belief that our universities are somehow our culture’s crucial repositories of knowledge and learning. But it’s kind of hard to argue that when it belches forth graduates who decide to show that black lives matter by toppling statues of Abe Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.

If these bozos are considered “educated,” I’ll stick with the allegedly ignorant. At least someone without an Ivy League degree can give me a hand changing my oil or, you know, defending the Constitution with a rifle.

On the plus side, I like my chances in a revolution sparked by a generation that thinks words can be violence. And since none of them ever heard of Ft. Sumter, because that’s actual history instead of grievance tallying, none of them are hip to the fact that Democrats are already 0-1 on starting fights over their bizarre and repellant racist dogmas.

This decision to use academia’s institutional credibility as a cultural chamber pot comes at just the wrong time. Video and computer technology was already making the old giant lecture hall model obsolete even before the bat soup flu. You get the same level of loving personal attention staring at a iPad in your house as you do staring at the TA 100 yards away from you in a behemoth lecture hall, and you don’t have to breath in either the viruses or the scent of old Pabst wafting off of the unwashed bodies of your fellow students.

And adding insult to insult is the idea that you have to pay upwards of $50,000 or more a year for the “college experience.” The Porsche experience is nice, but most people still choose the Chevy experience. You get there either way – just the latter way you aren’t impoverished for the rest of your life.

Of course, because it’s the Ivy League – that same institution that brought us the Wall Street collapse, Iraq, and a society where the nonsense scribbled down in White Fragility is not immediately laughed out of polite company – we have now Harvard demanding full tuition for the 2020-2021 academic year conducted completely by video learning. It’s basically a public confession that the whole point of the place is getting admitted – as long as at the end of a few years you get a diploma reading “HARVARD,” who cares what goes on during them?

Over-priced, inefficient, and not merely useless but actively detrimental to society – yeah, I’m sold on academia as currently constituted. So, let’s take this opportunity to burst this societal pimple.

First, defund the universities. All the kids love the defunding, right? Let the schools compete in the market. Sure, some marquee schools will flourish – there are always going to be rich daddies willing to pay the premium to send Kaden or Ashleigh to a four-year party on some leafy campus. But it’s going to force the other schools to provide value or die. Good riddance.

Second, tax the endowments. The Ivy League is really a bunch of hedge funds pretending to be schools anyway. Now, it would be tempting to redistribute the endowments to schools that have less money and watch these people scamper away from the socialism they pretend to love like roaches from a kitchen light – shouldn’t they pay their fair share? The problem is that it would be a lifeline to the colleges that will fail, and we want them to die. The taxed money can go to buy weapons to sink ChiCom subs.

Third, student loans need to come from the school and to be dischargeable in bankruptcy. A school is going to be a lot less eager to say, “Sure, go ahead and major in Norwegian Feminist Dance Theory” if they are on the hook when their ardent young scholar can’t get a gig that can pay back the sticker price.

Fourth, enforce not merely free speech on campus but ideological diversity. Diversity is good, right? Okay, in a country where half of it thinks Trump rocks and more than half dig Jesus, having a faculty and administration where literally no one publicly confesses to doing either is UNSAT.

And fifth, we need to stop falling for the notion that our colleges occupy some sort of intellectual, and even moral, high ground. They don’t. They are populated by greedy, malevolent, and stupid people who have done incalculable damage to their students morally, intellectually, and financially, and we should hold them in contempt.

Somehow, along the way, we were sold the impression that college was the gateway to a special caste to which we should aspire. We need to reject that condescending and pretentious notion, and tell academia to kiss our aspirations.

Instead, we must push the Mike Rowe vision of a society where you don’t need a bachelors degree to shift paper from Box A to Box B in a cubicle. The fact is that our lame public teacher unions have done such a crappy job that employers are forced to look for a college diploma to get some shaky assurance that the prospective candidate possesses the basic skills that a high school diploma should attest to. We need to make high school great again. For many, many people, college is a waste of valuable time and money. Every kid should not go to college.

This is our chance to undo one of America’s biggest mistakes in the last century, allowing academia to metastasize into the societal tumor that it has become. Technology and economics were already gut-punching this flabby punk before both the double-strike combo of the pangolin pandemic panic and the woke insurrection revealed that not only did the emperor have no clothes but he wasn’t packing much to speak of besides.

It’s going to fight for its life, and its play will be – surprise – more blood money from us to keep it going. But it has been revealed as yet another undead leftist institution, staggering on long after it should have rested in pieces. Let’s take this opportunity to drive a stake through the heart of academia as we know it.

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Idaho Lawmakers Mull Fate of State's Common Core Standards

As the national debate over Common Core curriculum standards continues, Idaho lawmakers and education officials are considering the future of the state’s version of the program.

The House Education Committee rejected the Idaho Content Standards for the 2020-2021 school year in math, science, and English, on February 5.

Idaho state Rep. Dorothy Moon (R-Stanley), a member of the Education Committee, says her constituents are frustrated with the program because it hasn’t delivered for their children.

“Common Core in Idaho has been a 10-year failed experiment, and our students deserve better,” Moon said.

“Ten members of the House Education Committee voted to reject the English Language Arts, Math, and Science Standards,” Moon said. “After all of the testimony in committee and the pleas of constituents, a vote to reject Common Core was the right thing to do.”

Committees Take Conflicting Actions

Idaho’s Senate Education Committee approved all the content standards, and all its teacher preparation and certification standards, in a unanimous voice vote on February 12.

The full Senate also passed a resolution introduced by Education Committee Chairman Dean Mortimer (R-Idaho Falls) calling for an interim legislative committee to begin the process of developing new school standards, on February 12.

The two committees agreed to send a letter to the governor and state education agencies proposing to formulate a replacement for the standards to be considered by the Idaho State Legislature when it meets next. There was no further action before the legislature adjourned in March.

‘Scrapping These Standards’

Legislators should reject standards based on Common Core, says Teresa Mull, an education writer and policy advisor to The Heartland Institute.

“Idaho lawmakers would do children, teachers, parents, and, indeed, their fellow citizens as a whole, a huge favor by scrapping these standards,” Mull said. “Common Core and the similar standards produced in its wake have been a disaster, like so many programs created behind the closed doors of government bureaucrats.

“Common Core has been in place for far too long as it is, and it’s high time Idaho and other states that still have these standards in place replace them with something that will benefit the poor students who have endured them for too long already,” said Mull.

Disappointing Results

Introduced in 2009 by a bipartisan group of governors, education experts, and philanthropists, the Common Core Standards Initiative aimed at improving the performance of students through the adoption of a uniform set of standards. Universal goals were set for mathematics and English (notably reading) and, actively supported by the Obama administration’s then-U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the National Governors Association, Common Core was initially adopted by more than 40 states.

With Common Core in effect in most states in various guises for more than a decade, the results have been less than what its proponents promised. The 2018 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) showed U.S. students made no statistically significant improvements since 2000 and have improved in overall global rankings only because some other countries have declined.

There have been a few improvements in certain areas in some states. Reading levels among fourth graders in Mississippi, for example, have risen by 10 percent since 2013, and PISA reading scores are now on par with the national average. Scores in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, on the other hand, have declined.

Teachers and education officials in charge of Idaho’s 300,000 schoolchildren appear split over whether to continue with the Idaho Content Standards. Although teachers testifying at hearings before the House Education Committee in January said they wanted to keep the program, some lawmakers, citing complaints from disappointed parents, say they support doing away with the program.

Common Core ‘A Nightmare’

The standards are inflexible, making them difficult to use, says Idaho state Rep. Judy Boyle (R-Midvale).

“Common Core is an entire package, as everything aligns with the standards: curriculum, teacher professional development, textbooks, [and] testing—the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium, or SBAC,” Boyle said. “All are copyrighted, and states are only allowed to change up to 15 percent. It has been such a nightmare for teachers, administrators, and, most of all, the students.”

Coming up with new state standards will require a large amount of work, says Boyle.

“We still have a huge job before us, to either borrow another conservative state’s standards or attempt to write our own, find textbooks, various curricula, teacher professional development without Common Core being entwined—and accomplish this as quickly as possible,” Boyle said.

“Every year we delay is another year our children are harmed by something which was never piloted nor internationally benchmarked,” Boyle said. “Instead, it made Bill Gates and the Pearson Company very rich by convincing the governors and state superintendents to throw out all their tried-and-true methods for a new and shiny object.”

Boyle says she hopes Idaho will have some good examples to follow in creating new standards.

“I am hopeful that Florida’s new Common Core-free standards will be available soon, along with other states’ efforts which have erased Common Core from their schools,” Boyle said. “Idaho can finally return to commonsense, age-appropriate learning.”

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Good Reasons Exist to Reopen Schools, Fauci Says

Dr.  Anthony Fauci, who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a radio interview that going back to school during the coronavirus pandemic may be a good idea for children.

“If you keep children out of school, the unintended negative ripple-effect consequences can be profound with regard to what the parents do,” Fauci said Wednesday during a SiriusXM program hosted by Dr. Marc Siegel, a physician and associate professor of medicine at the NYU Langone Medical Center.

“Stay off from work to be able to take care of their children, what about child care?” Fauci asked. “What about children who rely on schools for their lunch? Maybe the most important nutritional meal that they’ll get.”

Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, said that not allowing children to go back to school has significant ramifications.

“Within the context of doing whatever you can to safeguard the health and welfare of the children, we should try to get the schools open,” he said.

Siegel, also a Fox News Channel medical contributor, said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that it was good to hear Fauci speak positively about reopening schools this fall.

“I was so glad to see Dr. Fauci finally taking that position,” Siegel told Carlson. “When you consider the position that we need to take is ‘We are opening the schools,’ how do we go about doing it, what guidelines can help us? Not the guidelines getting in the way of it.”

Siegel said clarified guidelines expected next week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “may be more personal” and “maybe they will actually work.”

New COVID-19 cases in America reached record highs by climbing to about 50,000 a day, USA Today reported Monday.

About 3 million Americans have contracted the virus and more than 130,000 have died, data from Johns Hopkins University shows.

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