Monday, July 19, 2021



Teacher reveals how cancel culture's made her terrified of saying wrong thing

A few weeks ago, the headmaster of a South-East London school made headlines when he suggested that teachers are ‘walking on eggshells’ and ‘terrified of using the wrong word’.

He cited ‘a righteous generation of children looking for the micro-aggressions that will trip teachers up’. I wanted to cheer. I felt — as the kids might say — ‘seen’.

If you’re blissfully unaware of the word micro-aggression, let me enlighten you. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as ‘a small act or remark that makes someone feel insulted because of their race, sex, etc, even though the insult may not have been intended’.

As a straight, white woman in my 50s, teaching in a culturally diverse inner-city comprehensive, avoiding micro-aggressions feels like just another thing to add to my mental to-do — or don’t — list.

I have taught in challenging situations for more than 20 years, but my job has never felt more fraught than it does today. Because, regardless of my intentions, a simple remark such as ‘Girls, could you stop talking please?’ could see me accused of misgendering a pupil, while carelessly picking a picture for a presentation could well be construed as racism. Think that sounds OTT? Here is an example.

I am a geography teacher, so say I need to illustrate a lesson about wealth distribution. I do a quick Google image search for ‘rich people’ and pick the first photo that pops up. If it only has white people in it, you could be suggesting only white people can be well-off when actually it was just very late, and you were tired and didn’t think.

But in this job, you can’t not think. From 8.30am until the last pupil goes home, you’re on all the time.

Including my form, I teach up to 100 kids every day, and I see hundreds more if on lunch duty. It would only take one of them to take against me — they don’t even need to actively hate me, they might just think my lesson was boring, or that it would be a laugh — and they could seize upon something like this and make my life hell, even lose me my job.

Think back to how you tormented teachers when you were at school. You probably weren’t nasty, just a teenager wielding whatever power you could.

In the current ‘woke’ climate, pupils have more power than ever. They know the slightest slip by a teacher can be weaponised, so we must be constantly on our guard.

We get no training in this at all. It’s something you have to figure out from the mistakes you make, the mistakes other people make and things you read in the papers — such as the teacher from Batley, West Yorkshire, who was suspended in March for showing pupils a drawing of the Prophet Mohammed from French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Although cleared of causing deliberate offence, that teacher has refused to return to work because he fears for his life.

Then there’s the head at London’s Pimlico Academy who resigned after pupils staged a protest about the school flying the Union Jack, which they believed to be racist.

They had previously protested that a uniform code stipulating students could not have haircuts that ‘block the view of others’ effectively banned Afro styles, and so was racist, and demanded that the history curriculum be ‘decolonised’ because it focuses on ‘white kings and queens’.

The problem is, we don’t set the curriculum, and the people who do don’t come to our defence.

The history curriculum does focus on white kings and queens, friends in the English department do have to teach books mostly written by white men — and that’s hard when you’re in a multi-cultural school. But it’s teachers who bear the brunt of it, not the people higher up the food chain.

It’s like walking a woke tightrope. You always feel as if you’re one step away from losing your job.

We’re expected to talk to pupils about religion and racism as part of PSHE — personal, social, health and economic education. That was where I tripped up.

I told the class an anecdote from when I started out in teaching. I aimed to emphasise how bad the language used back then was and show the progress being made.

I recalled speaking to a young girl of Pakistani origin while a (white) parent was waiting to talk to me. As the girl walked off, the parent audibly remarked: ‘I can’t believe I had to wait for you to stop talking to a P***.’

Before I said it, I warned them I was going to use an offensive word that we wouldn’t use these days, but I wanted to say it so they could understand how things had changed and how I hoped they would never face that sort of thing in the future.

A few days later, one of the boys who had been in the class told me his dad was going to ‘get me’ for calling him a P***. I was terrified, not only at the threat of violence, but also about the potential repercussions of being labelled racist.

I went straight to my union rep for advice. Had I been wrong? Could I lose my job? Fortunately the school backed me. They understood the reason why I told the story — but I haven’t told it since, and never will again.

Who knows what the next flashpoint will be? What’s acceptable and what’s not seems to change with the wind.

When I was growing up, racists would refer to ‘brown people’, but right-on types like me would say ‘Asian’. Now ‘Asian’ is considered offensive, as it lumps together everyone from Japan to India. But now I hear pupils using the term ‘black and brown people’.

Six months ago, it was OK to talk about ‘white privilege’, but there’s since been a report that suggests the term holds working-class white kids back. Even something like forgetting a name, or mixing up two pupils, is fraught with danger.

I try hard to remember every child’s name, but am in constant paralysing fear of accidentally calling, for example, one black girl another black girl’s name and that I’ll be accused of ‘thinking they all look the same’ and being racist —when it’s just that my menopausal memory has failed me. Of course, I’d be just as likely to call a white pupil the name of another white pupil.

I’m not sure there’d be disciplinary action, but who wants to be labelled the racist teacher?

It’s like religious festivals — I try to check the dates of any that might mean my pupils are fasting. For if a child is falling asleep in lessons, and I call them out for it and it turns out they’re exhausted as they’ve been fasting, that could be considered a micro-aggression.

Keeping up with this stuff is like another full-time job on top of the (more than) full-time job I already have. And it’s exhausting.

Then there’s the pupils who change their pronouns — that’s absolutely fine. If a child is struggling with their gender identity and decides they want to change their pronouns, I will make every effort to use the terms they feel comfortable with — but sometimes I just don’t know.

Maybe they’ve told their form tutor, who meant to send an email but didn’t get around to it. Maybe they sent the email but it was one of the 400 I didn’t have time to read before school that morning. It hasn’t happened to me, but I know of teachers being suspended pending an investigation into that sort of thing. You don’t have to be guilty to be made to look guilty.

I don’t want to suggest pupils shouldn’t have the right to be spoken to in a way that makes them feel comfortable. But equally, teachers need to be given the benefit of the doubt.

No one goes into teaching because they want to insult their pupils. They do so because they want to make children’s lives better.

We’re still trying to do that, it’s just we’re doing it in an era when social media is full of mob-stirring rhetoric that gives pupils ideas, and means already overworked teachers are forever anxious they can’t do right for doing wrong.

The maddening thing is teachers can’t lead the debate on this. If you stick your head above the parapet, you risk your career — that’s why I’m writing anonymously.

And ironically, the people who seem to be setting the rules of what is and isn’t acceptable are not those who know children best, who have done the most research, or are the most intelligent, they’re simply the ones who are most vocal on Twitter.

And it has to stop.

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North Korean defector says 'even North Korea was not this nuts' after attending Ivy League school

image from https://i.insider.com/60c8951a23393a00188e32e8

Yeonmi Park was shocked by the oppressive culture within the university, reminding her of the country she fled.

As American educational institutions continue to be called into question, a North Korean defector fears the United States' future "is as bleak as North Korea" after she attended one of the country's most prestigious universities.

Yeonmi Park has experienced plenty of struggle and hardship, but she does not call herself a victim.

One of several hundred North Korean defectors settled in the United States, Park, 27, transferred to Columbia University from a South Korean university in 2016 and was deeply disturbed by what she found.

"I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think," Park said in an interview with Fox News. "I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying."

Those similarities include anti-Western sentiment, collective guilt and suffocating political correctness.

Yeonmi saw red flags immediately upon arriving at the school.

During orientation, she was scolded by a university staff member for admitting she enjoyed classic literature such as Jane Austen.

"I said ‘I love those books.’ I thought it was a good thing," recalled Park.

"Then she said, 'Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.’"

It only got worse from there as Yeonmi realized that every one of her classes at the Ivy League school was infected with what she saw as anti-American propaganda, reminiscent to the sort she had grown up with.

"’American Bastard' was one word for North Koreans" Park was taught growing up.

"The math problems would say 'there are four American bastards, you kill two of them, how many American bastards are left to kill?'"

She was also shocked and confused by issues surrounding gender and language, with every class asking students to announce their preferred pronouns.

"English is my third language. I learned it as an adult. I sometimes still say 'he' or 'she' by mistake and now they are going to ask me to call them 'they'? How the heck do I incorporate that into my sentences?"

"It was chaos," said Yeonmi. "It felt like the regression in civilization."

"Even North Korea is not this nuts," she admitted. "North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy."

After getting into a number of arguments with professors and students, eventually Yeonmi "learned how to just shut up" in order to maintain a good GPA and graduate.

In North Korea, Yeonmi Park did not know of concepts like love or liberty.

"Because I have seen oppression, I know what it looks like," said Yeonmi, who by the age of 13 had witnessed people drop dead of starvation right before her eyes.

"These kids keep saying how they’re oppressed, how much injustice they've experienced. They don't know how hard it is to be free," she admonished.

"I literally crossed through the middle of the Gobi Desert to be free. But what I did was nothing, so many people fought harder than me and didn't make it."

Park and her mother first fled the oppressive North Korean regime in 2007, when Yeonmi was 13 years old.

After crossing into China over the frozen Yalu River, they fell into the hands of human traffickers who sold them into slavery: Yeonmi for less than $300 and her mother for roughly $100.

With the help of Christian missionaries, the pair managed to flee to Mongolia, walking across the Gobi Desert to eventually find refuge in South Korea.

In 2015 she published her memoir "In Order to Live," where she described what it took to survive in one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships and the harrowing journey to freedom.

"The people here are just dying to give their rights and power to the government. That is what scares me the most," the human right activist said.

She accused American higher education institutions of stripping people's ability to think critically.

"In North Korea I literally believed that my Dear Leader [Kim Jong-un] was starving," she recalled. "He's the fattest guy - how can anyone believe that? And then somebody showed me a photo and said 'Look at him, he's the fattest guy. Other people are all thin.' And I was like, 'Oh my God, why did I not notice that he was fat?' Because I never learned how to think critically."

"That is what is happening in America," she continued. "People see things but they've just completely lost the ability to think critically."

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Defund the Universities

The left’s slogan “Defund the police” makes no sense. It doesn’t follow from the injustice perpetrated on George Floyd. The natural inference from that incident is to hold accountable that particular policeman, together with any of his accomplices. But nothing more follows from that, least of all that all police departments are systematically bigoted and discriminatory. It’s not clear that Derek Chauvin’s treatment of Floyd was even due to his race.

While we shouldn’t defund the police, however, there’s another institution that deserves to be defunded: the American universities. I’m not merely suggesting that states defund their public universities. I’m recommending that all funding for universities, both private and public, be withdrawn. Even private colleges benefit from, and depend on, a whole array of government subsidies from grants and loans to students, research money, Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and other military provisions, and so on. It’s time to end all of it.

Naturally, this raises the fear that the complete removal of government money would cause the university system to collapse. This is not something to be feared; it’s something to be eagerly anticipated. Why? Because the university system is rotten to the core. It deserves to collapse. It’s not even important to ask, “What will replace it?” We’ll figure that out later. My claim is that universities today are so poisonous to the society that simply getting rid of the poison is the first step to a restoration of true education.

Funding our universities today is like giving money to our foreign enemies. Just as our foreign enemies work assiduously to destroy our society and our culture, so too, the universities are doing the same, but domestically, internally. They’re the enemy within. And the tragedy is that we have been giving them money to do it. Thus, we, no less than they, are to blame for the harm they’re doing. Their future is in our hands, and by cutting them off, we save ourselves and our children.

If you’re wondering what universities have done to deserve this strong action—I would call it strong medicine—I’d like to focus on a single story that provides a stark illustration of how badly things have gone wrong in American higher education. What makes this story so compelling, and horrifying, is that it occurred at Columbia University—an Ivy League school, and thus one of America’s top institutions—but it could easily have occurred at any major college or university. All of them are rotted enough to deserve the axe.

Yeonmi Park, now 27, grew up in North Korea. She and her mother fled that totalitarian regime in 2007, when she was 13. After braving the frozen Yalu River, they entered China where they were captured by human traffickers who sold them as slaves. Yeonmi’s mother went for $100; Yeonmi fetched a somewhat higher price of $300.

Fortunately, some Christian missionaries intervened and helped Yeomni and her mother to flee to Mongolia by walking across the Gobi Desert, and they eventually found protection in South Korea. Yeonmi’s story is told in her memoir “In Order to Live,” where she describes life under one of the world’s most brutal tyrannies and her providential escape to freedom.

In 2016, Yeonmi transferred from a South Korean university to Columbia, where she was instantly shocked by what she encountered. “I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think,” she told Fox News in a recent interview. “But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think. … I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different, but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea.”

During her orientation, Yeonmi told a Columbia administrator she enjoyed reading Jane Austen. Yeonmi recalls the woman replied, “Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots … and are subconsciously brainwashing you.” Yeonmi says the bullying, the intimidation, the ideological propaganda only got worse from there.

In North Korea, she said, she was propagandized with anti-Western themes, the idea of the collective guilt of the white man, and a rigid political correctness drawn from Marxist ideology. To her astonishment, she found that Columbia was pushing the same anti-Western agenda on its students.

“It felt like a regression in civilization,” she said. “Even North Korea is not this nuts. North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy.” Yeonmi realized that there was nothing she could do to fight back. She “learned how to just shut up” in order to keep up her grades and graduate.

“Because I’ve seen oppression, I know what it looks like,” she said. These kids “keep saying how they’re oppressed, how much injustice they’ve experienced. … North Koreans, we don’t have internet, we don’t have access to Shakespeare or any of these great thinkers, we don’t know. But here, while having everything, people choose to be brainwashed. And they deny it.”

As a result of the kind of indoctrination pushed by professors and administrators in American universities, students in this country “have lost common sense to a degree that I as a North Korean cannot even comprehend.”

“Where are we going from here?” she said. “There’s no rule of law, no morality, nothing is good or bad anymore, it’s complete chaos.”

One can almost feel the frustration, bordering on despair, in her words. I remember this same tone in the voice and writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the famous Soviet dissident. He was protesting the indoctrination and censorship of Soviet Russia. Yeonmi Park is protesting the indoctrination and censorship of the American elite university. In both cases, they’re exposing the closing of the human mind.

Enough! Why are we putting up with this in our own country? Why are we subsidizing the brainwashing of our own sons and daughters? Why are we giving money to institutions committed to the destruction of our values? We need to close these places down, put the professors and administrators out to pasture, and build new institutions where genuine learning takes place. Defund them all!

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New Jersey School District Eliminates Holidays’ Names to be ‘Inclusive’

A New Jersey school district has voted to eliminate “the names of all religious and secular holidays from the school calendar … opting for the more generic description ‘Day Off,'” reports the Washington Times. You can guess the reason. They used those increasingly popular words — “inclusive” and “equitable.”

No more Christmas, Hanukkah, Memorial Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, or even Indigenous Peoples Day (formerly known as Columbus Day). Maybe they should keep April Fools’ Day because that accurately reflects their decision. Or, since they have chosen “Day Off,” they could name them after the film character Ferris Bueller.

New Jersey State Senator Anthony M. Bucco tells me: “We’re getting to a point where it’s becoming acceptable to sanitize American history and our shared, diverse culture to please a small politically correct minority. Americans should stand up to this nonsense when it comes to their communities and fight back.”

In Fairfax County, Virginia, the country’s 10th largest school district, school board member Abrar Omeish was invited to deliver the commencement address to Justice High School, formerly known as J.E.B. Stuart High School. The name was changed as part of the continuing effort to eradicate anything related to slavery and the Confederacy. J.E.B. Stuart was an officer in the Confederate Army.

Omeish was a co-chair of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in Virginia. She is also a spokeswoman for the group “No Muslim Ban Ever.”

Before her speech, RedState.com reports, a student recited the Pledge of Allegiance, but not the one we are used to: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. And to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under Allah, indivisible, and with liberty and justice for all.”

Under Allah?

Omeish said the U.S. was guilty of stealing land from Native Americans. She also denounced “extreme capitalism, individualism and white supremacy.” She has previously made remarks The Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington has said “target and marginalize Jewish students and their families.”

These and other incidents and decisions made by school boards across the country have raised the ire of many parents. Some have shown up at public board meetings, denouncing members. Others are engaged in recall efforts. The question is whether any of their replacements will be better than the current ones and would they also give in to pressure from various groups that want to “fundamentally transform America,” as former president Obama pledged to do?

This summer offers a unique opportunity for parents and their children. After more than a year of distance learning that has left some students behind, especially those in marginalized communities, now is an excellent time to rethink our entire education system. Public education, established three centuries ago with values that are in sharp contrast to what is taught today, has long exceeded its expiration date.

Parents should take advantage of school choice in states that allow them to choose the schools — public, private, religious, or home school — which best teach subjects that matter and at a minimum do not undermine the country, its history (good and bad), their faith and societal values.

The pandemic has allowed many parents to see the contrast between what many public schools have become — missionaries” for a far-left and secular agenda — and what they were taught as students in an altogether different country.

Whatever school board changes might occur, parents have it in their hands to make a lasting difference by depriving the system of raw material — their children — who in many cases are being indoctrinated with secular progressive ideas. President Joe Biden wants to begin molding young minds even earlier. He has proposed free pre-K classes.

An admonition by the late first lady Barbara Bush seems even more important today: “Your success as a family … our success as a nation … depends not on what happens inside the White House, but on what happens inside your house.”

And in schools.

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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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