UK: Labour’s ‘lessons for boys’ plan is a sinister sideshow

What are schools for? The answer used to be obvious: school was where children went to learn how to read, write and count, while the lucky ones picked up some history, algebra, chemistry and literature along the way. But not any more. Nowadays, academic subjects have become a sideshow to the main event: changing children’s attitudes and values.

Whether it is relationships and sex education classes that teach children there are 73 genders, citizenship lessons that preach the importance of fair trade, or personal, social and health education workshops on white privilege, today’s schools seem more concerned with coercing children into accepting a particular set of beliefs than they are with teaching subject knowledge. The bad news for Britain’s children is that if Labour wins the next election, this programme of radical indoctrination will be put on speed.

The Labour party’s latest plan is for part of the school day to be set aside to make boys hear from women who have been victims of male violence and abuse. Speaking at an event in south London this week, Keir Starmer announced that he wants to see the national curriculum expanded to include compulsory lessons on the importance of respecting women. His hope is that this will help to ‘bring about cultural change’ and embolden boys to ‘call out’ friends who act in a misogynistic way. Labour hopes that rooting out inappropriate behaviour in young boys will help halve incidents of violence against women and girls within a decade.

That Labour has a ‘woman problem’ is clear for all to see. Recently, Starmer rushed to condemn Dominic Raab for bullying but he has had little to say about the vile abuse directed at his colleague Rosie Duffield. And although his ability to define ‘women’ has improved, he still thinks one-in-a-thousand females have a penis. In this context, popping up at an event alongside high-profile women who have been victims of sexual assault feels opportunistic.

But back to education. If Starmer is really determined to stamp out sexual assault in schools, he could announce plans to enforce single-sex toilets, changing rooms and dormitories on school trips. The Labour party could warn teachers that girls have a right to insist on single-sex spaces and sports. None of this will happen, of course.

In singling out boys, Starmer has taken the political path of least resistance. Boys have long been seen as a problem, with white, working class boys the biggest problem of all. A narrative of toxic masculinity portrays men as a danger to women, society and themselves. As boys grow up to be men, and therefore potential perpetrators of abuse, schools are expected to provide a moral prophylactic. According to Starmer, this should involve subjecting them to first-hand accounts of victims of sexual harassment and assault. As a boy, you must have your original sin firmly stamped out.

Perhaps some of this would be justified if it did actually work in preventing domestic violence. But just as it is not possible to draw a straight line between sexist school boy banter and adult misogyny, neither can we prove that school workshops prevent sexual assault. The only thing new in Starmer’s announcement about respect lessons was his recourse to the national curriculum. More general programmes to educate boys about the wrongs of domestic violence and abuse have been around for at least a quarter of a century. Yet throughout this time the number of women being murdered by a current or former partner has remained stubbornly persistent.

Common sense tells us that poverty makes it more difficult for people to leave relationships that are under enormous strain. It tells us that gaining a few qualifications while at school makes employment more likely. We know that, at present, white working class boys are most likely to leave school without any qualifications at all and least likely to go to university.

Subjecting underperforming boys to yet more lessons on why they are inherently bad is unlikely to turn them on to school.

The flipside of all this is the message such lessons send to girls – the ostensible winners of the feminisation of education. There is the hypocrisy of schools proffering lessons in the importance of respecting girls – just not the girls who don’t want to see a penis when they get changed after PE. But we should also be concerned about continually telling girls that being a woman is to be a victim of harassment and abuse. This is hardly an enticing prospect for adulthood and perhaps offers one explanation as to why increasing numbers of girls are choosing to opt out of womanhood altogether.

Under a Conservative government, schools have come perilously close to morphing into cultural re-education centres. Starmer’s talk of lessons in respect shows that under a Labour administration this process will not just continue but be intensified. This is bad for children, bad for society and terrible for education.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/labours-lessons-for-boys-plan-is-a-sinister-sideshow/

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Handful of Colleges Hold Out, Push Back on Cultural Marxism on Campus

Former University of Kentucky championship swimmer Riley Gaines was recently assaulted by demonstrators at San Francisco State University for her support of keeping biological men out of women’s sports.

Federal Appeals Court Judge Kyle Duncan was shouted down at Stanford Law School.

Cornell University’s student government recently passed a resolution calling for automatic trigger warnings from faculty—though, thankfully, the administration rejected it.

College campuses have long been the front line for America’s culture wars. Columbia University, Princeton, Brandeis, and the University of California at San Diego gave jobs to Marxists, such as Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm in the 1940s.

Harvard University filled a stadium with students for the newly victorious Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro in 1959. It was Students for a Democratic Society who led the way for the New Left and primed American cities for violence and riots in the 1960s.

It was also students who became Marxist terrorists as members of the Weather Underground, and it was other students, radicals in the 1960s, who became faculty members and helped disseminate their extreme ideas throughout higher education.

Today, many college campuses have embraced cultural Marxism, a poisonous mix of identity politics, intolerance of dissent, and a vision of the world locked in structural conflict.

The new brigades of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” administrators serve as thought police, enforcing the new orthodoxy. A recent study by Jay Greene of The Heritage Foundation and James Paul of the Educational Freedom Institute found that DEI staff now make up an average of 3.4 positions for every 100 tenured faculty, and that “these programs are bloated, relative to academic pursuits and do not contribute to reported student well-being on campus.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

The progressive elite running our universities today have not only rejected the canon of Western civilization, but they are also dismantling such bedrock principles as equal treatment under the law, the dignity of every individual, even the very notion of truth itself.

The cultural Marxists have instead embraced the collectivist ideology of equity—that dystopian myth that all individuals can be forced to achieve the same outcome. They embrace the power required to enforce that myth and jealously guard their exclusive right to decide who constitutes the privileged group and who must be punished or silenced.

But a handful of colleges and universities are notably pushing back.

Hillsdale College is perhaps the best known, thanks to the publication of its anti-woke monthly Imprimis, which reaches more than 6 million readers, and to its outspoken president, Larry Arnn.

Others include Christendom College, Liberty University, Grove City College, Wyoming Catholic College, and Patrick Henry College.

A key part of their ability to reject the woke culture is their rejection of federal funding. For a longer list of colleges that don’t accept federal funding, look here.

Other colleges worth mentioning include Colorado Christian University, the College of the Ozarks, Palm Beach Atlantic University, and the New College of Florida, whose seven new board members appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis recently fired the president and then closed down its DEI office.

Now, there’s a new entrant that has stepped up to the front line of the campus wars: Southern Wesleyan University, based in Central, South Carolina.

William Barker, the university’s new president, said in his inaugural speech on Oct. 28, that he wanted the university to serve as a stronghold and a refuge: “We have the capacity here at SWU to build a ‘Helm’s Deep,’” referring to the stronghold of the Rohirrim in J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy “The Lord of the Rings,” and a scene of a major battle between the forces of good and evil.

Barker continued, “This stronghold is not a hiding place. This is not a call to retreat from the world. Rather, let our stronghold be the place where people take shelter from the storm, long enough to strategize anew, to train, and then go forth to reengage with greater strength and purpose in the long conflict with evil in whatever its new forms may be.”

For Barker, it’s an important distinction that Southern Wesleyan University is a Christian university, a holy university, and as such, the education it offers is different from the education of a secular university.

“The secular university teaches knowledge and innovation, but because of its foundations, the holy university adds to these the pursuit of ultimate truth, wisdom, and virtue,” Barker said, adding:

Our secular counterparts often offer a pale imitation of higher education, because by eliminating the Christian faith, they have thereby eliminated the God of wisdom from the university.

But unfortunately, simply being a Christian university is not sufficient inoculation against the disease of radical progressive ideology that has swept through so many universities of late.

In a recent interview, Barker said, “There are a number of colleges that go by the label of ‘Christian,’ and they will say to their donors, and to their trustees, and to the prospective parents, everything is well, ‘We are following biblical norms.’ But internally, they are endorsing, teaching, and setting into policy—and dangerously—personnel, those with a progressive agenda on matters of human sexuality, gender, and race.”

He had made a similar point in his inaugural speech:

I have already seen the sickening emails between senior administrators at other institutions encouraging one another not to take a stand on any controversial issue for fear of alienating any constituencies and thereby, in their minds, jeopardizing the college’s future.

It’s encouraging to know that at least Southern Wesleyan University has joined the ranks of those that will not give in to the allure of progressive approbation, but will stand strong, even if the battle seems a daunting one right now.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/04/18/front-line-campus-wars

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Academic Fakery Equals Made-Up Racism

When the “experts” in the academic class use their positions of power to promote a particular political worldview, disaster ensues.

As this author has canvased before, professors have huge incentives to lie about data. In the case of Professor Eric Stewart of Florida State University, it got him a six-figure salary, job security, and a position of power from which he could spread the lies he fostered. In his 17 years on the job, the criminology professor was subject to several complaints about data fabrication and inaccuracies in his scholarly works.

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, commented: “Stewart’s case looks like an instance of someone who knowingly and deliberately made stuff up. Why? And how did he get away with it for so long? We may never know the full answer, but he does fall into the general category of race hustler: someone who sought personal benefit by attempting to aggravate racial tensions.”

At the University of Minnesota, there is a whole cadre of academics who use their DEI positions to publish pseudo-academic papers to forward the cultural Marxism of the Left’s political views.

These biased professors work in places at the university called the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity, School of Public Health, and the Antiracism Research center. The University of Minnesota is deeply invested in making a connection between health inequities and racism. However, many of the researchers are ill-qualified for the research, as they do not hold medical degrees. This specific type of credentialism is actually important for the types of claims these professors are making, especially regarding issues like abortion and crime rates among races and the health outcomes associated therein.

For example, one professor, Rachel Hardeman, was paid $800,000 to study “racialized violence” and the corresponding health inequities along racial lines. This person is a public health professor without a medical degree but is familiar with critical race theory and uses it routinely to try to link and politicize her work. (Though if you actually read some of her papers, she admits there is no real link between racism and health inequities.)

Perhaps the biggest scandal is the forced retraction of three other professors at the University of Minnesota for similar infractions. Janette Dill, Stuart Grande, and Tongtan Chantarat published a paper entitled “Transactional and transformative diversity, equity, and inclusion activities in health services research departments” on January 8. This paper has been retracted by the authors because “their characterisation [sic] of specific data (personal narratives and experiences) was either inaccurate, misleading, or false.”

Ultimately, these academics are harming victims of actual hate crimes and racism; they aren’t bringing about social justice. These “scholars” are also undermining what little credibility the “expert class” has left in American society. The fact that dishonest teachers like these are given authority over the next generation of college students is the real crime. It robs them of truth.

Perhaps that is the ultimate ideological point. After all, the leftists’ first premise is that there is no God, and if there is no God, then morality is a social construct. If morality is a social construct, then there is no incentive to tell the truth. Truth, according to them, is subjective. Who’s to say their “truth” is anymore true than that which can be proven by data, common sense, reason, and science?

It is a recipe for ignorance and chaos, and these professors should be held to account for their dishonesty.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/96753-academic-fakery-equals-made-up-racism-2023-04-25

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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

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