I remember how it was -- JR
The War on History Comes for Abraham Lincoln
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.
This isn’t a slippery slope, it’s a freefall without a parachute.
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.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/12/17/the-war-on-history-comes-for-abraham-lincoln
San Diego teachers forced to attend trainings in which they are called racistsHundreds of teachers in San Diego have attended a 'white privilege' training in which they were asked to commit to becoming 'antiracist' and acknowledge that they meet on stolen land taken from Indigenous peoples.
An article written by journalist Christopher F. Rufo, claimed the training is 'mandatory' for all teachers within the San Diego Unified School District.
Initially it was reported that the documents were leaked, but a spokesperson from the San Diego Unified School District told DailyMail.com that the book the session is based on is available on Amazon.
'Following the murder of George Floyd, we provided teachers with voluntary trainings from the Racial Healing Handbook. The contents were not secret,' a spokesperson for the district said.
According to the district, 'the training was not mandatory' and 'hundreds of teachers participated voluntarily'.
As part of the training, the teachers are to discuss how they would feel if they were told: 'You are racist.'
Teachers were also asked to discuss how they'd feel if they were told: 'You are upholding racist ideas, structures, and policies.'
'We are a majority minority district with a majority white teacher workforce. The ability to hold honest conversations about race with grace is important, which is why we offered the training and why so many teachers elected to enroll,' the spokesperson told DailyMail.com.
'Our students benefit from being able to talk about race and other difficult issues, regardless of their background. Most of all, we believe every open and sincere conversation about race -- no matter how it begins -- provides an opportunity to learn from one another, for hearts to open, and for minds to grow,' the statement continued.
According to the spokesperson, the district also created a tool 'to help families talk about race and to help students who have been hurt by racism'
The documents show the outline of the discussion and the talking points, including 'how to become antiracist' and defining 'white fragility'.
In addition to the aforementioned, the seminar also included a section on 'land acknowledgement'.
'We acknowledge that we meet on stolen land, taken from Indigenous peoples. I am speaking to you from Kumeyaay land. We must acknowledge the hidden history of violence against Indigenous peoples in an effort to move towards justice,' one slide reads.
The acknowledgement was referring to the Kumeyaay tribe of Indigenous peoples who were forced off their ancestral lands. They lived at the northern border of Baja California in Mexico and the southern border of California in the US.
According to Rufo's article, he believes that teaching 'white fragility' will do nothing to help students improve their academic abilities.
He says 'it will only serve activist teachers who want to shift the blame to “systemic racism".'
Such trainings stem from the reckoning that the nation faced this summer over racial injustice in policing and other spheres of American life following the Memorial Day death of George Floyd, who died under the knee of a white police officer.
President Donald Trump condemned such trainings in September and moved to end racial sensitivity training for federal government employees, claiming it is 'divisive, anti-American propaganda'.
The Commander-in-chief said at the time that he wanted to cancel taxpayer funded seminars on 'critical race theory', describing them as 'a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue'.
Betsy's Battle With Big Education
Billionaire philanthropist Betsy DeVos made a difference, despite shabby treatment from the Big Ed bureaucracy.
“Every great cause,” said philosopher Eric Hoffer, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
Hoffer wasn’t speaking about the Department of Education, but he could’ve been. How else to explain a 4,000-employee cabinet-level department, earnestly created by Jimmy Carter in 1979, which has continued to grow and gobble up taxpayer funds while cranking out an inarguably inferior product and being viciously resistant to reform?
If our Department of Ed were a car, it’d be a Trabant, but with porcupine spikes. Don’t touch!
None of this, though, is the fault of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, an outsider who was vilified by the Left before her first day on the job — an outsider who, nonetheless, fought the good fight for fundamental civil rights like school choice and due process.
DeVos, whose younger brother, Erik, founded the private security firm Blackwater USA, came to Washington from a wealthy and patriotic family with high hopes for enacting educational reforms and addressing our nation’s deplorable achievement gap. She’ll leave next month unbowed, but with a realist’s view of the forces arrayed against meaningful educational reform in this country.
“DeVos, a longtime champion of school choice and critic of traditional public-school systems, was greeted by an unrelenting fusillade of criticism from the very beginning,” writes National Review’s Frederick Hess. “Most who’ve previously filled her office have been treated gently by the press and politicians. But her nomination had barely been announced before the New York Times ran a scathing critique blaming her for the state of Detroit’s schools, even though she’d never held any position with power over education in the city (or Michigan, for that matter).”
Perhaps DeVos should’ve known what she was in for from the start. Confirmed by the Senate on a 51–50 vote, hers was the first time in U.S. history that a cabinet nominee’s confirmation was decided by the vice president. Republicans should remember this, er, spirit of cooperation when they’re deciding whether to confirm Joe Biden’s cabinet picks.
Reflecting on that experience, says DeVos, “confirmed my belief that entrenched interests were going to do their best to protect the status quo, their power, and their jobs no matter what.” Indeed, she added, “It’s been truly disheartening to see just how far some people in Washington and elsewhere will go to distract from the abysmal results of ‘the system’ and protect their power.”
It’s no doubt disheartening, too, when the mainstream media takes what a cabinet secretary says and maliciously twists it into something it isn’t. Take, for example, her remarks from an all-staff meeting on Tuesday: “Be the resistance against forces that will derail you from doing what’s right for students,” she said. “In everything you do, please put students first — always.”
Please put students first — always. And yet, as The Federalist’s Jonah Gottschalk reports, “The left-wing media sphere swarmed. The articles cherry-picked the word ‘resistance’ out of her full statement and used it to falsely claim that DeVos was orchestrating some kind of insurgency against Joe Biden. The irony, of course, is that numerous U.S. Department of Education staffers have participated in the organized leftist ‘resistance’ against the policies of the duly elected President Trump.”
Secretary DeVos didn’t need this. She could’ve easily and more comfortably continued her educational activism and philanthropy from a safe distance, away from the Beltway media and The Mob. But, like a true Patriot, she answered the call. “Parents today are more aware of what their children are — or are not — learning,” she says. “And they’re more aware of who’s standing in the way. More than ever before, they are raising their voices for more options, for more choices, for freedom.”
Betsy DeVos made a difference, and she did so despite the nonstop slings and arrows. And for that, we owe her our thanks.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/76557-betsys-battle-with-big-education-2020-12-18
Australia: Restrictions on foreign students have gone too farAs 2020 draws to a close, it’s pretty clear the last COVID-related restriction that will be lifted is the international movement of people in and out of the country.
The exact timing of international borders becoming fully open is unclear. The second half of 2021 is probably the best guess at this stage, but you wouldn’t bet your house on this. The take-up and effectiveness of the vaccine will be important in determining the outcome.
When it comes to international students, the immediate effect of the restrictions on international arrivals was not as great as expected as the majority of students were in Australia at the start of March. (There had been a scramble to get Chinese students, in particular, back into the country in February by letting them transition through third countries.)
A reasonable proportion of international students who have not been able to return to the country have continued their studies online.
However, the mid-year intakes have pointed to bigger effects, with the Reserve Bank noting: “Australia’s education exports have fallen further in the second half of the year. The number of international student enrolments has declined.”
It is also mentioned that “the size of the fall in new enrolments has varied across different types of programs”. The largest decline has been in English-language and foundation programs that serve as pathways to higher education or vocational courses. This has implications down the track.
The universities, in particular, have reacted with angst, with a number of leaders pointing to the negative consequences for higher education and the economy.
What is less often mentioned is the fact that international student numbers had been growing at an extraordinary pace prior to the onset of COVID-19. In 2019, there were 11 per cent more international students in the country than in 2018. And in the five years ending in 2019, the number of international students had nearly doubled, with China being the biggest single source country.
That there have been negatives as well as positives associated with this rapid growth is a point too rarely conceded by senior managers in the education sector. In particular, the lack of language proficiency on the part of too many overseas students needs to recognised. The potential for domestic students to lose out due to large numbers of international students — contrived group assignments and lower standards being two examples — should also be acknowledged.
There is also the dubious figure of about $40bn of “exports” associated with international students, a figure often quoted by education lobbyists. In fine mercantilist style — exports good, imports bad — they bemoan the loss of export earnings associated with fewer international students.
Now most people understand the term export to mean the sale of domestically produced goods and services to overseas buyers — think iron ore, wheat, LNG. But because international students studying in Australia will use foreign currencies, at least in part, to pay for their education, the Australian Bureau of Statistics counts all spending by international students as export income.
The reality is quite different. About $17bn of the total figure are tuition fees, with the remaining being international students’ living expenses while living in Australia. But, given that many international students work while in Australia, particularly to cover living expenses, and are paid in Australian dollars, it is a conceptual mistake to equate the $40bn as being export income.
We know the majority of students from India and Nepal — there has been strong growth in their numbers in recent years — work while in Australia. We also know international student workers are more likely to be exploited than young Australian citizens, in part because of their strong need to work as well as the restrictions on their work patterns arising from visa conditions.
The lobbyists continue to press the case for establishing facilitated paths of entry for international students in early 2021. This push has seemingly been met with some sympathy by state governments. They also point to the increasing attractiveness of other destinations for international students, such as Canada and the UK, because of the ease of entry and the option of students becoming permanent residents in these countries. This latter point is unlikely to generate much sympathy here if international students are seen to be more interested in securing permanent residence than being educated.
It’s time federal and state governments came clean about the role international students should play in our education systems. Most people accept there are benefits of having a small proportion of language-proficient students from a range of countries at our schools, colleges and universities. But the open slather of the years prior to COVID-19 should not be repeated.
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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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