I remember how it was -- JR
A Chance for Real Educational Change
When the history books look back on 2023, the biggest American news story may be something that’s getting little attention right now: the school choice revolution.
This year, Iowa, Utah, and Arkansas have passed massive school choice bills, giving parents access to state education funding for their children and letting them decide if they want to use it at public or private schools.
In Iowa, starting this fall, many families will be eligible to receive $7,598 per child to use toward the private school of their choice, as well as for other education expenses such as tutoring, textbooks, curricular materials, online courses, and special-needs therapy. In fall of 2025, this will be available to all parents of school-age children.
In Utah, legislators passed a bill funding about $8,000 per student (assuming around 5,000 students enroll) toward private education, including private school tuition and homeschool expenses.
In Arkansas, parents will be able to get 90% of the money the state is spending per pupil in public schools and use it toward the education of their choice. Like Iowa, the program will be gradually rolled out, but by the 2025-2026 school year, all school-aged children will be eligible.
These three states follow Arizona and West Virginia, where thousands of children are already receiving funds to be used toward the education of their parents’ choice. (Sadly, Arizona’s new Democrat governor, Katie Hobbs, is threatening the education savings account program, despite having attended a private school herself.)
Meanwhile, as state legislatures around the country meet, eight more states—Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, New Hampshire, and Texas—are considering introducing or expanding access to education savings accounts.
We could potentially soon be in an America where students in about a quarter of states are liberated from the leftist propaganda of public schools.
Imagine.
Furthermore, there’s broad, bipartisan support for school choice. While the corporate media might sneer at Americans concerned about what their children are learning in public schools, it turns out interest in school choice unites Democrats and Republicans. Asked about giving “parents the right to use the tax dollars designated for their child’s education to send their child to the public or private school which best serves their needs,” 68% of Democrats and 82% of Republicans said they supported it, according to an American Federation for Children 2022 survey conducted by Real Clear Opinion Research.
The poll also found agreement among different races: 70% of blacks, 77% of Hispanics, 72% of whites, and 66% of Asians supported school choice.
No doubt Americans are motivated by a variety of reasons to seek out private schools. Some may want better academics. Others may want safer schools. Some may think that it shouldn’t just be in Florida where kids don’t have to hear about sex and gender issues in kindergarten.
Regardless, right now it is absolutely crucial that conservatives empower parents with school choice. Thanks to conservative journalists and activist parents, we’ve learned a lot about the indoctrination going on in some public schools on topics like critical race theory, American history, and LGBT issues.
But students today aren’t just facing indoctrination. They’re being given the ability to permanently change their lives—without their parents’ knowledge.
Earlier this month, Parents Defending Education identified over 6,000 schools where staff can choose to hide a child’s gender transition from his or her parents. About 3.3 million students attend those schools.
Nor are those schools just in deep blue states. My colleague Tony Kinnett has extensively reported on an Indiana school district’s policy that did not require staff to notify parents if a child was changing genders or names. The school counselor who confirmed the policy has been fired.
Consider the tragic story of Abby Martinez’s daughter Yaeli.
My colleague Virginia Allen reported last year that “Yeli attended an LGBTQ club at school that affirmed her questioning of her own gender. Her counselor at school also affirmed her decision to begin socially transitioning from female to male.”
“I don’t know if the schools, [if[ they [are] supposed to let us know what’s going on or not, but they never send me any note about telling me, ‘We need to talk about your daughter,’” Martinez told The Daily Signal. Instead, she found out from one of her other children who attended the same school as Yaeli.
Martinez tried to talk to her daughter about her gender identity. But Yaeli moved out at 16, and Martinez lost custody. “Because Martinez expressed concerns over her daughter’s ‘transitioning’ to a boy, Yaeli’s school psychologist recommended that she would be better off living away from home,” Allen wrote.
Ultimately, despite changing her name to a man’s name and taking cross-sex hormones, Yaeli, who had struggled with depression before her interest in gender transition, died by suicide at age 19.
Don’t all parents deserve the option to only place their children in schools where parents, not school bureaucrats, make the decisions about their child’s health care and gender identity?
When it comes to so many issues, from serving special needs students, to protecting students, to educating students, many, many public schools are failing today. Yet they still often have a monopoly on state education funds, no matter how dismal their records. That doesn’t make any sense—and it’s exciting to see how many states are waking up and changing that.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/03/16/a-chance-for-real-change/
*****************************************************The Murder of the Humanities
For nearly 50 years the “humanities,” those courses in higher education that focus on the liberal arts, have been in crisis. This important front in the culture wars recently saw a brief skirmish touched off by a New Yorker article about the last days of the English major. But such analyses are in fact obituaries. The “woke” purveyors of “boots are better than Shakespeare” philistinism have finished their march through the institutions and now occupy our universities. Liberal education, the passing on of the “best that is known and thought,” survives only in a few scattered outposts.
Most of the assaults have come from the political and cultural Left and its more recent guise in the “woke” tribunes who have rebranded the old multicultural, identity victim-politics founded on the Leninist principle, “who whom”–– who is the oppressor, who is the oppressed. We all know the answer: Western civilization and all its works, including its fine arts and “great books,” which are mere “epiphenomena,” as the Marxiste village explainers put it, of the hegemonic ideologies, values, “truths,” “facts,” and “narratives,” all the “hidden persuaders” who exploit the “false consciousness” of the masses.
Onto this dubious and question-begging explanation for the success of capitalism and liberal democracies, Cultural Marxism grafted “identity politics,” the reduction of people’s complex, undetermined humanity, to the superficial characteristics of color and “race,” and to “culture,” one that, particularly in the case of Americans, is fabricated from fake history or crude stereotypes. As French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut writes,
“Like the racists before them, contemporary fanatics of cultural identity confine individuals to their group of origin. Like them, they carry differences to the absolute extreme, and in the name of the multiplicity of specific causes destroy any possibility of a natural or cultural community among peoples.”
It follows, then, that the cultural artifacts of one ethnicity are incompatible with those of another. Standards of excellence are inherently racist and oppressive, for they invidiously exclude those of the marginalized “other,” whose history of racist, sexist, and xenophobic oppression and exclusion is thus erased.
A particularly silly, but illuminating, expression of this belief appears in Martha Nussbaum’s 1997 book Cultivating Humanity: “For a black student being asked to study the great books” in the days before multiculturalism broke the canon of great books, “was not like being asked to do so for a white student. For the former, it was like going to a debutante party in whiteface and knowing that one wasn’t on the invitation list.”
So much for black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois, who called reading the great books of Western Civilization “cross[ing] the color line.” So much for poor whites or immigrants for whom the great books are an undiscovered county they are the first in their families to explore. Now the liberal arts, the body of achievement in literature and the fine arts, comprises mere tribal badges of hegemony, just as the slavocrats and segregationists believed. Everyone, rich or poor, has to wear the same uniform despite their individual hearts and minds.
So much, too, for our country’s foundational principle of unalienable rights inherent in all human beings, which now is discarded because of the failure of earlier peoples to honor that principle. And that stain is passed on to their descendants, just as anti-Semites justified their bigotry by calling Jews “deicides” or “Christ-killers.”
The historical malfeasance of this Balkanization of culture is particularly egregious, given that over a century ago the case for the liberating power of the liberal arts was made by Matthew Arnold, and more recently strengthened by Allan Bloom. The value of studying literature and the arts is their power to inculcate critical consciousness, the awareness of a larger world of meaning and greater possibilities, one accessible to all of us, regardless of our tribe, sex, or sect, through great works of the imagination.
This faculty Arnold called “the free play of the mind on all subjects,” which fosters the “instinct prompting [the mind] to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespective of practice, politics, and everything of the kind; and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without the intrusion of any other consideration whatever.” The goal is the ability to turn “a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically.”
What we see today, with our universities functioning as an incubator of illiberal “woke” identity politics, is exactly the opposite: the triumph of “stock notions and habits” that our self-proclaimed intelligentsia “follow stanchly but mechanically,” and the adherence to which is enforced through censorship and collective shaming. The result is the diminishment of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.
A more recent expression of the irreplaceable value of the humanities is Alan Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind. What Bloom emphasizes is the importance of the “free play of the mind” to our Constitutional order: “By liberal education I mean education for freedom, which consists primarily in the awareness of the most important alternatives.” This does not mean a slavish subjection to tradition, but rather training students to seek the answers to the perennial questions of human value and human identity, and to resist the dominant “notions and habits” of one’s own society and culture: “A liberal education means precisely helping students to pose this question [what is a human] to themselves, to become aware that the answer is neither obvious nor simply unavailable, and that there is no serious life in which this question is not available.”
Moreover, students should be trained “to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.” This discredits the caricature of blinkered conservatives frightened of new or strange ideas, or too xenophobic and ethnocentric to accept foreign literature or arts. This view is historically false. No civilization has been as curious about the “other,” or been influenced by his culture as much as the West has.
True to that spirit, Bloom writes, “The true canon aggregates around the most urgent questions we face. That is the only ground for the study of books. Idle cultural reports, Eastern or Western, cannot truly concern us except as a hobby.” Good, carefully argued or imaginatively presented ideas are valuable no matter where they come from, and stand and fall on their worth alone. Thus our canon of “great books” are important because they transcend their time and explore questions about human nature and behavior necessary for “ordered liberty,” something quite different from the freedom to do as one pleases.
As for the West’s toxic ethnocentrism, Bloom points out, historically most of the world’s cultures have been, and many remain ethnocentric and intolerant of the stranger. So too with our “woke” tribes today. Where do we see the hatred of the “other,” if not among the “woke” cadres and commissars demonizing all “whites” with “systemic racism”? ? And what’s more illiberal and divisive than the category “people of color,” a broad, elastic term that deems Caucasians like Arabs and many Latinos as some sort of racial minority “of color”? And how come Asians, an ethnicity that has known prejudice and bigotry in America, are now treated like the enemy because they succeed and achieve on their own merits instead of the patronage of the state?
Finally, what force is there in the university to stand against the imprisoning of people in their ethnic cages, to speak up for the true diversity of individual minds and imaginations, and the enrichment of life and thought that follows the liberation from identity-politics straitjackets–– the freedom to learn and know the great variety that is the wonder of humanity?
The champions of unalienable rights and the value of every individual heart and mind are few in higher education. For all the “woke” commissars’ hectoring us about “diversity,” a dreary, antihuman orthodoxy now prevails, and reeducation for servitude has replaced liberal education for freedom.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-murder-of-the-humanities/
********************************************50 shell-shocked teachers, staff flee chaotic Florida school district
Florida’s Brevard County School District, the state’s 10th-largest, held a heated meeting on Thursday that offered an unvarnished and often disturbing glimpse into the state of its classrooms, the New York Post reports.
“On an everyday basis I am deflecting being attacked, scratched, headbutted, pushed, hit,” teacher Alicia Kelderhouse said as her voice choked with emotion.
“I’ve had my hair pulled, and pulled down to the ground. I’ve had my throat gone for on multiple occasions. It’s on an everyday basis right now.”
Ms Kelderhouse said staffers often commiserate in the morning to muster the courage to face the day — and that frightened kids are grappling with the same fears.
“I have students who are afraid every day in the classroom,” she said.
“It’s just not fair to them. That’s what hurts my heart the most.”
The head of the district’s beleaguered teachers union, Anthony Collucci, recounted recent incidents reported by staffers to school administrators.
One student began masturbating inside a classroom, an act that was recorded by a classmate and posted to a group chat.
Another teacher was hit in the face with a tape dispenser, while a colleague suffered a bite mark the “size of an orange” after a student munched on her arm.
Another educator frequently had to remove all furniture from her class because kids were routinely chucking it around the room or at each other.
One district teacher said behaviours have markedly worsened since the pandemic — but the classroom behaviour was already plunging before Covid-19.
“The pandemic was an accelerant to a fire that was already raging,” he said.
The same staffer asserted that sexual misconduct, drug use, theft, violence, targeted spitting and property destruction had become the demoralising hallmarks of his profession.
Several speakers pointed to the ubiquity of mobile phones as a driver of classroom disorder, casting many students as screen addicts no longer capable of sustained attention.
Asserting that a culture of “unbelievable disrespect” has taken hold, one teacher said her kids look at their devices “hundreds” of times each day and keep their earbuds in while lessons are in progress.
“Our students cannot look away from their phones,” she said. “They cannot stop texting.”
Students often tell teachers that they have to wrap up a text message before they acknowledge being called on or addressed in class.
Educators routinely ask colleagues to watch their classrooms for a few moments so they can have a “mini-breakdown” inside a school bathroom, a speaker noted.
Veteran teacher Gene Trent said his colleagues used to call a student’s parent or guardian to address problems — but those efforts have been largely abandoned due to futility.
Mr Trent said previously, a parent would thank a teacher for reaching out and promise to address the situation at home. But in recent years, they often blame the educator for causing poor behaviour.
Other parents, staffers said at the meeting, threaten lawsuits for matters as minor as detention.
Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey recorded a video last month vowing to crack down on unruly behaviour inside schools, filming the spot in front of a jail.
Mr Ivey said classrooms have descended into chaos because kids no longer fear consequences.
“As a result, we are losing teachers en masse,” he said, calling disruptive students “clowns” who are impeding the education of their classmates.
Several speakers criticised Mr Ivey at Thursday’s meeting, and highlighted that suspensions are meted out in disproportionately high numbers to black students.
“Our children are not clowns,” said a local NAACP member. “They are not snot-nosed.”
He accused Mr Ivey of using “scare tactics” and “bullying” in pushing for disciplinary clampdowns.
Another speaker said the district should emphasise diversity, equity and inclusion in any new behaviour code.
“I would feel more comfortable about the discipline policy if I knew diversity was appreciated in this area,” another district parent said.
“And I don’t feel it. My fear is that the practices are inconsistent when I hear about the disparities.”
One parent argued that disruptive students — regardless of race — should be removed from classrooms.
“If you are throwing a chair in a classroom, you do not belong there,” she said. “I’m sorry. If you can’t behave, that’s not my child’s fault. My child’s education should not be hindered because that child doesn’t know how to behave. And by that child I don’t mean black, white, Hispanic or any other thing. I mean the child who wasn’t taught how to behave.”
The Brevard board is developing a new disciplinary framework, and will hold future public meetings on the issue.
***********************************
My other blogs: Main ones below
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://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
*******************************
No comments:
Post a Comment