I remember how it was -- JR
Friday, December 18, 2020
How Conservatives Must Counter the Media’s Left-Wing Election Advocacy
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Arlington, Virginia, is widely considered the best high school for math and science in the region. It is the No. 1 ranked high school by the U.S. News and World Report in the entire nation.
“That place is so difficult and so rigorous, that you’re just beaten,” says Asra Nomani, the mother of a Thomas Jefferson student and the leader of the Coalition for TJ, an education advocacy group for the high school. “You don’t even know if you’re going to make it, like as a family, because your child is slogging so much.”
It’s not a school made for just anyone. But the Fairfax County School Board believes that the school needs to diversify at all costs, even at the cost of excellence.
On Monday, the school board decided that it was going to drastically change the admissions process to Thomas Jefferson to force more black and Hispanic students in the school, which is 70% Asian American.
Fairfax officials are proposing two systems: either “holistic evaluation” that gives preferences for being black or Hispanic, or a lottery for admission for anyone with a 3.5 grade point average.
The previous system, which was reliant on grades and test scores, relies on methods that supporters say perpetuate “privilege,” such as standardized exams that can be test-prepped.
Virginia Education Secretary Atif Qarni called test prep the equivalent of “performance-enhancing drugs.” Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson even called the fight over the admissions process “a reckoning over racism.”
These are vast exaggerations that only serve to undermine the nation’s best public school, the home of future scientists and engineers that will invent the next great discoveries.
The issue of opportunity in Fairfax County is not that the admissions process for a single public school is racist against black and Hispanic students.
In fact, one analysis, albeit from 2005, by a George Mason University law professor showed that admissions officers accepted 90% of black students who made it to the second round of the application process, while only accepting fewer than 50% of white students who made it to the second round, suggesting evidence that the bias might in fact be in their favor.
The issue is that the number of black students who made it to the semifinalist round of the application process in the first place was so low.
The semifinalist round is the minimum standard for admissions—it signals you have the requisite academic qualifications to enroll at Thomas Jefferson. In 2005, 507 white students made it to this semifinalist round, compared to just 11 black students.
The problems of too few black and Hispanic students in the semifinalist rounds of admissions cannot be fixed with racial quotas. Not only are quotas in violation of our ideals and laws, but they also paper over the underlying causes of the achievement gap in education—such as the lack of school choice, or high out-of-wedlock rates that leave many children without a father in their lives.
Rather, solving these problems requires addressing them at every level of education.
But the liberal chattering class doesn’t want to hear this logic. They would rather dispense with the idea of meritocracy in general.
The Fairfax County School Board’s own analysis for its merit lottery program predicted an upsurge in admitted candidates for blacks, Latinos, and whites. The Asian population, on the other hand, would drop by a projected 27%.
A coalition of parents analyzed the data and found a steeper drop admittance rate for Asians: 55%. In contrast, the white population would shoot up to 45% of the total student body. And the black and Hispanic representation would both remain in the single digits.
The messaging of woke students, and the woke school boards propping their ideas, is loud and clear: Asians suffer, but that’s OK, in the name of “diversity and inclusion.”
Mind you, it did not matter that these Asian students put in hundreds of hours of work in their school lives and sacrificed social life to give themselves the best shot to enter a school known for its brutal work hours.
This gets at the heart of this battle over race in America. Who does the left consider a “minority” in America? Who are the people the left wants to redistribute privileges to? What does “diversity and inclusion” really mean, if Asian Americans are unfairly penalized by policies enacted in the name of diversity and inclusion?
Or does anyone question the most fundamental fact of it all—the fact that a “merit lottery” would inevitably result in a drastic decline in overall school performance?
The simple mathematical facts beget this utterly logical conclusion: If before you selected the most meritorious in rank order, and now have reverted to selecting from a lottery of students above a lower cutoff point, you sacrifice one immediate, clear principle.
Sacrificing that principle will have a powerfully distortive effect on the overall excellence and reputation of your school, your community, and your world.
That principle is meritocracy.
Rather than lean on “merit lotteries” and “holistic evaluations” in an attempt to ensure that specific groups are proportionately represented in highly ranked schools, we should be working toward a country in which every individual—from any and every group—can realize their full potential, and can go as far as their own merit takes them.
To De-Politicize Art Schools, Students Need to Fight Back
It has never been harder to teach artistic individualism in America.
A religious devotion to the causes of social justice dominates the ideas of professors in the academy, and David Randall’s report “Social Justice Education in America” has made clear that their evangelical zeal for teaching students the merits of intersectional political activism is topped only by the enthusiasm of university administrators for it.
The cultish creed has permeated throughout universities, with moderate professors bowing to the mob and leaving the tiny minority of their conservative colleagues paranoid and fearful of speaking out against the ideology that has dominated them. Their voices are silenced by the threat of anonymous denunciations and by the examples that have been made of bullied colleagues who endured threats of violence, unemployment, lost homes, and the harm caused to their families.
Thus, the burden of making change happen within art schools may rest upon the shoulders of art students who abhor demands to politicize their work.
The social justice warriors’ ongoing takeover of American education extends to attacks upon art museums, which is where education meets the public sphere. They recently forced the closure of a traveling retrospective show of paintings by Philip Guston. Why? The museum’s boards were frightened that Guston’s paintings of Klansmen might “trigger” their visitors, despite the fact that the artist always used them as symbols of evil.
The exhibit was canceled due to fear of the social justice mob.
Museums are among the targets of the faithful because they are seen as public symbols of the oppressive power structures that subjugate racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. They are easy targets: A majority of them have claimed to be bastions of old-fashioned liberalism since the 1930s, the New Deal era that was the high-water mark of the American left. Art museum leaders operated, as they understood it, in allegiance with minorities, and believed that they lived up to their ideals by occasionally showing the work of ethnic and gender-oriented groups.
However, they failed to grant representation to racial minorities, women, and LGBTQ people on their boards and administration. Thus, now they are ill-equipped to deal with activists’ accusations of condescension and hypocrisy leveled against them.
John Dewey, the famed progressive American philosopher of the 1930s, is a foundational figure to social justice warriors in their action against museums and art galleries. Dewey condemned museums as “memorials of the rise of nationalism and imperialism.” Even collecting art was a symptom of capitalism which was indulged in by people who wished to show off their success and good standing. Communities and nations built galleries and opera houses and museums to show off their collective superiority—this was an elevated form of racist snobbery.
Museums are among the targets of the faithful because they are seen as public symbols of the oppressive power structures that subjugate racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities.
Those same accusations are now leveled at the museums again, by activists under the Marxist banners of Black Lives Matter, by radical feminists, and by LGBTQ groups who shrilly reproach the galleries for being symbols of white supremacy which must be “decolonized.”
Such tediously didactic activism has replaced the bourgeois avant-gardism that once dominated American university art departments, and museums and art magazines.
The consequence of its success in the cultural sphere naturally has been an explosion of narrow propaganda—ranging from the sophisticated (Guerrilla Girls) to the sentimental (Titus Kaphar) and the simple. One of the distinctive features of the riots in American cities has been a proliferation of murals duplicating photographs of dead martyrs to the social justice cause. Slogans painted on city streets and walls are claimed as art.
Magazines like ArtNews and Hyperallergic are packed with stories of social justice-oriented art activism, sometimes to the extent that it is hard to see how the hook of their stories has anything to do with actual art-making. (Unsurprisingly, Hyperallergic is funded by activist foundations including The Ford Foundation, The Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation).
Under such circumstances, how should art students respond? Many surely feel compelled to create left-wing propaganda if they are to satisfy their teachers and their indoctrinated peers—or to have any hope of appearing in museums and magazines. Many surely acquiesce to the fervor and become propagandists for the new religion.
But Randall’s report suggests that student dissent is a powerful tool to wield against the political takeover of the universities. Fortunately, artists—especially young ones—are feisty and rebellious people. They can find clear guidance from the history of the long conflict between the egalitarian left and the individualists. Artists are unusually individualistic and tend to dislike being told what to do.
The great French defender of individualism in the late 19th century, Emile Zola, once warned the proto-communist Pierre Joseph Proudhon that artists
are peculiar people who do not believe in equality, who possess the strange mania of having a heart, who sometimes push nastiness to the point of genius. They are going to agitate your people, disrupt your communal intentions; they will resist you and be nothing but themselves.[i]
Contemptuously, he recommended changing the title of Proudhon’s last, quite authoritarian book, The Principle of Art and its Social Purpose which insisted that artists must bury their own interests beneath their obligation to political activism, to “The Death of Art and its Social Uselessness.”[ii]
Like our contemporary social justice warriors who have weaponized cancel culture, Proudhon concluded his book by demanding the banishment of artists who would not support his revolutionary socialist ideals. Zola defended them for their individuality, their unaffected sincerity, and their self-sacrifice, telling Proudhon:
I think I can answer you, in the name of artists and writers, of those who sense the beat of their heart and their thoughts within themselves: “To us, our ideal is our loves and our emotions, our tears and our smiles. We want no more of you than you want of us.
Your community and your equality sicken us, we make style and art with our body and soul, we are lovers of life, every day we give you a little of our existence. We are in nobody’s service, and we refuse to enter into yours. We report only to ourselves, we obey only our own nature; we are good or bad, leaving you the right to listen to us or to block your ears. You proscribe us and our works, you say. Try, and you will feel such a great emptiness in yourself, that you will weep with shame and misery.”[iii]
Here was the fundamental difference between the utopian, socialist artistic avant-garde proposed by proto-communists Henri de Saint-Simon, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Proudhon and their acolytes, and the broader, richer, bourgeois-bohemian art world.
Both sides recognized the need for a new art for a new time, but the former placed artists in service to their political ideals and prioritized the use of art as political propaganda, while the latter cherished the artist’s unique personalities and their distinctive and original work.
The most important characteristic of these artists was to assert themselves and their work as original and independent, and this insistent individualism was the antithesis of socialism. When Zola chided Proudhon that artists were “peculiar people who do not believe in equality,” he meant that they were in the business of crafting a successful life for themselves by making unique and commercially successful art, and he was raising the battle standard of individualism against the drab flags of uniformity.
Now, independent 21st-century student artists have the responsibility to fight again. Art must be defended against demands for it to conform to the political fads of the day.
The uneasy alliance between bohemian artists and the bourgeoisie who collect their art will doubtlessly bear the fruit of creative excellence in this new time. Student artists! Resist the pressure upon you to conform! Stand firm on your individuality! Be yourself!
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2020/12/to-de-politicize-art-schools-students-need-to-fight-back/
Language cuts risk Australia's regional relationships -- or do they?
It is a common view among educated people that we all should learn a foreign language. Although I personally gained a lot from my studies of German, Latin and Italian, I do not agree. I get a lot out of classical music and what I gained was an enhanced understanding of those three languages as part of classical music. With the honourable exception of Russian, those three languages are the source language of almost the whole of the classical music repertoire. If you want to undertand the words in a Bach cantata, it helps a lot to know German. And you need Latin for the Stabat Mater etc.
But how many people really enjoy classical music? Best estimate is 2% of the population so why should the rest of the population study languages?
In answering that I hearken back to the fact that only a tiny percentage of English-speakers who study (say) French ever become fluent in that language. I have a small gift for languages but even I am fluent only in English. So the time spent studying a language is a waste for most people in the English-speaking world. And that goes A fortiori for students of Asian languages. Asian languages are so alien to us that even many years of exposure to them in adulthood will not suffice to bring native fluency
But is partial fluency useful? Perhaps for tourists but for business a very accurate understanding of the other person is usually important, which leads us to the real important factor in foreign language utilization: The fact that we have among us a large number of foreign-born people who have learnt both English and their ancestral tongue during childhood.
So they constitute an easily available pool of near perfect translators. We do not ourselves need to learn a foreign language when we have large numbers of good translators at hand. The are a valuable resource that we should use. They can aid international communication where our own abilities at that would be pathetic.
The author below recounts a pleasing life journey that resulted from his decision to study Indonesian. Indonesia is a country and a culture well below the intellectual horizons of most Australians. But is it nonetheless imporant to Australians? It is one of the world's largest bodies of Muslims and is rather close to our Northern borders, so its strategic importance must be allowed for but as a source of cultural products or economic relationships it is of negligible importance to us. There are many more things we could study which would be more gainful than the Indonesian language
La Trobe, Swinburne, Murdoch and Western Sydney University. These are some of the Australian universities considering axing various Indo-Pacific language programs from Indonesian to Hindi. It’s feared other universities may follow suit.
Abolishing language programs is a dumb move. Australian universities are a key ingredient in the government’s commitment to engagement with the Indo-Pacific.
Universities are essential training grounds for a future generation of Indo-Pacific literate Australians.
The decline in programs corresponds with a decline in enrolments. This is evident with the Indonesian language.
In the 1990s, enrolment in Indonesian language was at its height, with 22 programs at Australian universities. In the decades since then, there has been a major decline.
According to David Hill, emeritus professor of south-east Asian studies at Murdoch University in Perth, in 2019 there were only about 14 Indonesian language programs left at Australian universities. As a result of COVID-19, that number may fall further.
Australian universities must retain language programs, which are vital to equip the next generation for smart engagement with the Indo-Pacific.
Institutional commitments to language programs by universities are crucial because studying a language requires a significant investment of time, commitment and money.
As part of my Arts degree I undertook an Indonesian language program, building on my four years of Indonesian language studies in high school.
Yet this was in mid-2000s, when I was one of about 400 students studying Indonesian in Australia. By 2014, those numbers dipped below 200 equivalent full-time students. It is feared that in the future the number of students could be much less.
At university, I was privileged to be taught by the likes of Arief Budiman, a well-known activist and scholar, and Professor Ariel Heryanto, a cultural studies expert.
As part of my degree, I also took Indonesian studies programs like politics, media, religion, law and society. This helped me to appreciate the great diversity and richness of the country’s history, people and culture.
My university also facilitated several internships in Indonesia. It was through contacts at university that I heard about the Australia-Indonesia Youth Exchange Program. This collective experience with a group of 15 Australians and 15 Indonesians set me on a course of lifetime engagement with Indonesia.
Many of the Australians on that youth exchange program have found exciting and fulfilling careers in diplomacy, business, academic, education and the civil service. Their skills in the language and their knowledge of Indonesian enabled them to achieve the vocations they now pursue.
Through my university, I also received support from my faculty to undertake an internship with the Office of the Ombudsman in Yogyakarta.
These short-term trips would not have been as rich and meaningful if I did not have basic competence in the language. In short, my years of studying the language in high school and at university equipped me for deep engagement with Indonesia.
Our universities are now at risk of curtailing access to Indonesian language programs for a future generation of students.
If the decision by some Australian universities to close language programs is dumb, then the Australian government is dumber.
Over the past two decades, the government has been told time and time again that student enrolments in languages of the Indo-Pacific are falling, particularly for Indonesian. This is a well-established fact.
Yet the federal government has done nothing about it. Short-term study abroad is no quick fix for an Indo-Pacific literacy crisis. It's great to have the Governor-General of Australia studying Indonesia, but what about the future generation?
The government frequently refers to its commitment to the region and its Indo-Pacific strategy, as set out in its 2016 Defence Paper and 2017 White Paper.
Yet it has failed to live up to this aspiration with real policies that create incentives for Australian students to study languages of the Indo-Pacific and the necessary funding for institutions to make this happen.
What we are left with is a future where there are fewer graduates of Australian universities than ever with basic competence in one language of the Indo-Pacific.
These graduates are going into business, diplomacy, academia, education and science with less knowledge than ever before about our neighbours.
Collaboration and partnership in the Indo-Pacific region require mutual understanding.
Australia’s bilateral relationships are strengthened when Australians take the time to learn a language.
To take one example, the landmark Indonesia Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement should see more Australians incentivised to study the language, rather than less.
The more students studying Indonesian language, the greater chance we have of building strong relationships with our most important neighbour. Our economic, diplomatic and cultural ties remain hollow without a basic appreciation for the language.
The dual lack of commitment by Australian universities and the government to invest in language capabilities affects our engagement in the region.
Even the embassies based in Australia agree. That’s why the recent consultations to axe language programs at some universities have received a strong and swift response from both the Indian embassy and the Indonesian embassy.
That’s right, our neighbours know it’s important for us to learn their language more than our own government and universities do.
And there lies the challenge for 2021: both the government and Australian universities must work together to ensure Asian language programs not just survive, but thrive, post COVID-19.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
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://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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