I remember how it was -- JR
The Conceit of Wisdom
My university’s writing center revamped their training to include a unit on “systemic oppression.”
To help prepare us to teach a class, one of my instructors told me and several others to read a newly posted article, “The Politics of Academic Language: Towards a Framework for Analyzing Language Representations in FYC [First Year Composition, a.k.a. English 100/101] Textbooks.” In it, Alisa LaDean Russell argues that “composition studies’ professional artifacts and pedagogical materials can perpetuate tacit ideologies about academic language that are in conflict with our field’s larger goals toward social justice and inclusion.” My mentor called it ‘amazing’, and clearly meant to guide us in choosing textbooks so that our students would not suffer from exposure to tacit ideology.
Russell grants herself the permission to make blanket statements such as, “our field’s larger goals toward social justice and inclusion in FYC.” She further argues that the use of coherent English is the exercise of privilege, which may explain the first quote. Yet clarity should be the goal of a composition course titled English 101. Russell also displays the ‘progressive’ obsession with racial identity: “Because academic language as a hegemonic discourse organizes white, northern, middle-and upper-class varieties above others, it is ultimately linked to whiteness.”
How academic language prioritizes white, northern, middle-and upper-class varieties of English, why this prioritization isn’t desirable, and why “whiteness” —undefined in the article itself— should be avoided is not specified. The author assumes the reader knows or infers from the article’s tone that it’s something to be held in contempt. Never mind that English is the third most-spoken language worldwide, with approximately 360-million-plus native speakers and around 500 million who speak it as a second language.
Russell not only misses the point of these textbooks, but the field itself. If the purpose of writing is to communicate ideas, emotions, preference, or other sentiments clearly, then anything which aids the writer in being understood is useful. Without the ability to communicate, we become even more fragmented and more inclined to see each other as strangers.
She commits the same mistake as countless other think-pieces, Tweets and tirades: they use the groups they purport to champion as ammunition, while wrapping themselves in a layer of shallow good intentions. The allegedly victimized groups are fodder for a crusade, one minority interchangeable with another. To proclaim absolutes such as, “this entire institution and others like it [are] openly hostile to everyone in a specific group,” does a disservice to the institution and the alleged victims. It implies the rot is so deep and so widespread that it cannot be addressed, as well as that the group said to be oppressed is too frail, too crippled, to succeed.
My university’s writing center revamped their training to include a unit on “systemic oppression.” After slogging through condescending, muddled and over-long tirades on how everything surrounding them is solely designed to grind minorities into a fine powder, teachers-to-be are asked to respond to the readings before moving on to the next lesson. This is a trick, as only certain kinds of response are acceptable. To question the lesson results in a face-to-face conversation with just the right tinge of concern to correct the wayward apprentice. The Politburo would be proud. The unit, designed by a ‘diverse’ staff of three upper-middle-class women who have only worked in academia, is dishonest and destructive. It presents opinion as fact and tells the incoming tutors to believe in a fundamentally mean world and hate the university they should support willingly, if not with some measure of pride.
Defenders of this ideology are possessed of a contradictory self-loathing, hating the institutions, the nation, and their colleagues, even as they reap the benefits of each. Every proclamation is shot through with contempt for their surroundings, their peers, and ultimately themselves. By its very nature it encourages fragility, pearl-clutching outrage, and an overall air of indignation.
People such as Russell tiptoe on eggshells, chiding and shushing others, claiming to be protectors of an individual or group that may not know or concerned about the alleged slight. They are eternally vigilant for failings, ready to find fault in others while willfully ignoring their own, spurred into rage by the whiff of any opinion they find objectionable. To them, someone who says “Hey, I feel bad for those falsely accused of rape,” is the same as someone who calls for genocide. There’s no sense of scale or nuance.
One only has to look at the cycle of public shaming which is played out ad nauseam: Someone —or a group of someone’s— with at least a modicum of fame says or does something labeled offensive. The person is then swarmed with angry Tweets, screamed at outside his or her home, or has their employer pressured to fire the person. Said offender caves and apologizes, but this is always found to be insufficient by the mob.
To them, the gaffe was honest and deliberate, the apology duplicitous. The cries for blood, for perpetual reprimand that will stymie the alleged oppressor at every turn until nothing is left of the person’s career. To the mob there are no unacceptable tactics, as the grand end —even if they cannot articulate what that is— justifies any and all means. Robespierre, the Bolsheviks, and the Khmer Rouge thought the same.
In advocating for permanent victimhood, the progressive mobs also advocate for an arrested development: a permanent immaturity where one is never responsible for one’s own opinions, actions, or fate. The masses cannot be trusted to decide for themselves; instead, they must be saved.
Perhaps Michel de Montaigne put it best: “I gladly come back to the theme of the absurdity of our education: its end has not been to make us good and wise but learned.” These academic wokescolds think themselves virtuous and wise when they are neither, nor do they support learning. Instead, they’re censorious, destructive zealots.
https://dailytorch.com/2020/12/the-conceit-of-wisdom/
Money for Nothing: The Worst of Student Loan Debt Hits College DropoutsI can’t remember a single alternative to college proposed to me, for me, my entire school-age life. That I would go to college after high school was presented by adults and taken by me as a given.
How I would pay for it was always a thing to be figured out later. My mom had a modest state-based Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) account for me; it was assumed I would be awarded some merit-based scholarships, and whatever remained could be paid for with student loans. I started college in 2008; my freshman year required all of the TAP funds, a chunk of my mom’s 401k, a Pell Grant, federal loans, and a private loan.
Oh, and I guess I did get $750 from the school for academic achievement.
My story is an all-too-common one; the public policy of American higher education has left over 100,000 25-39 year-olds with some college, no degree, and, most likely, significant debt. Yet, in policy discussions, we rarely hear from this group. The problem goes deeper than student loan forgiveness.
I commuted to a school near home in Pennsylvania that year, so it took all of that money just for in-state tuition and fees. The next year, that money my mom had taken from her retirement savings would put us over the income threshold for a Pell Grant, and I transferred to an even more expensive private university in Washington, DC.
A year at the private school, and then I transferred again, staying in the DC area but moving to a slightly more affordable public university. I wasted credits every time I transferred—usually general education requirements for one school that didn’t fit the criteria of the next. Already annoyed with being required to take (and pay for) classes outside of my chosen areas of study, I opted to only take classes in my majors—anthropology and economics—in my first semester at the new school. This was the only semester I made the Dean’s List.
Eventually, I changed my economics major to a minor so I could finish a degree and get out of there as quickly as possible with something to show for it. That was 2012. It’s 2020 now, and I’ve been sitting with 119/120 credits toward my degree and three classes remaining since 2016. I’ve been working in the retail/service industry for four years and defaulting on my student loans as I struggle to get on my feet in Pennsylvania, living at home with my family.
Sometimes I think back to my freshman year of high school when the vocational/technical school gave a presentation to encourage students to sign up for vo-tech. I felt inspired by it and talked to my parents about their culinary program that night. The response I received wasn’t exactly “you’re too good to learn a skilled trade; you’re going to go to college,” but that’s what I took away from it. The next year, I doubled up in science and honors classes and chose extracurriculars that would boost my college application.
I have no interest in avoiding accountability for the decisions I made that got me to where I am: in debt, living at home, and without an undergraduate degree to show for it. For her part, my mom regrets enabling or not challenging my insistence to go deeper into debt.
But I have to give myself some space to reflect (or deflect) that the amount of foresight and self-knowledge required here is a bit of an unreasonable ask of 18 year-olds. They have been told that they’re bright for their entire lives and they must go to college so they can succeed—which, it turns out, was also a lie. I don’t blame them, but it didn’t help that my parents didn’t go to (or stay in) college and couldn’t offer much advice for choosing colleges, degree programs, and financing options.
Individuals carry responsibility for unwise decisions, but there’s a larger, institutional problem in education that comes from telling young people the only path to success is through college.
Some organizations, such as the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, are doing their best to promote non-college pathways to success. But the political discussion around higher education and student debt forgiveness spends too much time questioning the morality and intelligence of student debtors, rather than questioning the federal student loan system. Higher education depends on young people borrowing tens of thousands of dollars for college. Yet tens of thousands of them have little hope of completing a degree or repaying their debt.
Things need to change in the provision of higher education, to be sure, but that may need to begin with changes in our cultural attitudes toward having a college degree and, perhaps especially, toward not having one.
Educational attainment and the credentials that come with it are signals, whether or not they signal what one intends. Their absence is also a signal, even when we don’t equate holding a degree with holding job skills. I get it, to some degree; making a college degree a job requirement is or seems less risky to employers.
There’s a larger, institutional problem in education that comes from telling young people the only path to success is through college.
But how is that signal working out for employers? And how many people with college degrees feel tied to their underemployment because of their loans? Is the money they spent or the future they mortgaged for their degree worth the job market access it gave them? If credentialism is barely working out for graduates, imagine how well it’s going for the college “drop-outs” trying to pay off their loans while working at Starbucks or choosing not to have assets lest they be seized for repayment of unpaid and unpayable loans.
I do not want student loan forgiveness, at least not without the federal government exiting the student loan industry altogether, forever and ever, amen. But more than anything in terms of policy, I’d like to see more alternatives to college available to people leaving high school, and I’d like to see companies and organizations spend more time getting to know job candidates beyond the presence or absence of a degree on a resume.
Over the last decade, the labor force participation rate of people who have completed an associate’s degree or some college fell by 5.1 percent, compared to a 4.5 percent drop for people who didn’t go to college and a 3.1 percent drop for people with at least a bachelor’s degree.
One way to try to improve that rate is to make job interviews comprehensive by thinking through the specific capabilities and competencies a job requires and finding out how well potential employees can do the job instead of where they went to school. Except where needed for legal compliance, employers should stop requiring applicants to have a college degree, officially in job postings or de facto while sorting through applications.
What may seem like a costly lift on the front end of hiring could prove to be a wash when employers find better candidates because they think about what kind of person they need, rather than what resume they want. That’s not to mention the boon of different perspectives from people who have had non-standard professional backgrounds—but I’ll stop before this begins to read like a cover letter.
Australian University aims to improve literacy teaching in education degrees
Learning to read isn't as easy as learning to talk, because it is not an innate ability — it has to be taught. At least, that's the battle cry of phonics advocates on one side of the 'reading wars'.
If you turn the debate book over, you'll find other literacy experts who disagree and believe that reading is a natural ability.
But with student literacy levels falling across all states last year, both sides concede that it is time for a rethink on how trainee teachers are being instructed to teach Australian children to read — because they are clearly struggling.
The La Trobe University's new Science of Language and Reading (SOLAR) Lab, co-founded by professor of cognitive psychology Pamela Snow, aims to fill what it sees as a crucial curriculum gap in tertiary education degrees.
The lab aims to give teachers the knowledge needed to teach 'systematic synthetic phonics' more comprehensively in Australian primary schools.
Sometimes referred to simply as 'phonics' or 'structured literacy instruction', the method stems from The Simple View of Reading, a scientific theoretical framework from the 1980s developed by psychologists Philip Gough and William Tunmer.
"The simple view of reading tells us that in order to get meaning out of text, you've got to be able to crack the code," Professor Snow said. "So you've got to recognize that the squiggles on the page — they are print representations of speech sounds, so there is a code."
Professor Snow's first short course at the lab in September attracted more than 800 participants — mostly teachers from around the country who had heard about the method online or from fellow teachers.
"What we hear repeatedly from teachers when we talk about the simple view of reading is — 'I've never heard of this'," she said. "So that's a really good example of high-quality cognitive psychology research that I think is like the family china that belongs to teachers, but isn't being given to teachers."
The basic premise is that children are most likely to become successful readers when they are explicitly taught how to break words down into letter sounds and word parts, and use their understanding of those parts to comprehend the meaning and sound out unfamiliar words.
In the early years, the focus is on attaching individual letters to sounds. Later on, children learn about word parts and their meanings.
Professor Snow said there were many scientific and psychological studies supporting the efficacy of structured literacy instruction, especially with young children.
She said that on the other side of the so-called 'reading wars' was an approach called 'whole language'. "So, [the thinking is] we don't specifically teach children how to talk, so therefore we should not need to specifically teach them how to read, we'll just immerse them in lots of text and they'll somehow intuit the process of reading," Professor Snow said.
Professor Snow said more recently a method called 'balanced literacy' had come into favour, which aimed to strike a balanced between different methods including synthetic phonics and whole language.
Still a divisive issue
Melbourne-based Year 1 teacher Troy Wood said he was shocked by how divisive the issue was when he became an early-childhood educator several years ago. "I didn't know about this debate until a couple of years ago," Mr Wood said.
Professor Snow said she agreed systematic synthetic phonics shouldn't be the only method taught, but it should be more of a focus than it was now.
And despite its opponents, phonics is being adopted increasingly in government policy, albeit slowly and carefully.
Last year, the Federal Government launched a free voluntary phonics health check for Year 1 students, citing a report that found phonics "to be the most effective way of teaching children to read words accurately and fluently".
a woman in glasses at a press conference
The South Australian Government recently reported that it had experienced a lift in Year 1 literacy levels after introducing a phonics check in 2018.
And just last week, the NSW Minister for Education and Early Childhood Learning Sarah Mitchell wrote an opinion piece declaring that phonics had "won the reading wars", and that from next year, phonics would be compulsory for every Year 1 class in the state.
"Study after study shows that if phonics is not taught properly, student outcomes suffer across the board," Ms Mitchell wrote.
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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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