A not very funny joke that made the rounds after the 2008 elections made the point that the Democrats won, in part, because they motivated their most uninformed voters better than the Republicans motived their least uninformed voters, to get to the polls. Democracy is ill served when the least informed have the greatest impact on the elections and one of the great failures of our partisan press has been it disinclination to do its job when the reportage might damage the prospects of their "side." One of the great failures of our educational system has been its disinclination to teach its subjects how to evaluate information and understand multiple views on a subject. David Thompson has done yeoman work in documenting some of the worst excesses of PC thought disorders in education:
Dissident Academic Feels the Warmth of “Social Justice”
Longtime readers of this blog will be familiar with KC Johnson, a Brooklyn College history professor who’s written at length about leftist groupthink in academia, its various pathologies and its imperviousness to correction. Johnson is the co-author of Until Proven Innocent, which documents the infamous Duke “rape” case and its participants’ extraordinary improprieties and political prejudice.
In May 2005, writing for Inside Higher Ed, Johnson drew attention to the emergence of “dispositions theory” and attempts to impose overt political filtering in dozens of teacher-training programmes:
The faculty’s ideological imbalance has allowed three factors - a new accreditation policy, changes in how students are evaluated and curricular orientation around a theme of “social justice” - to impose a de facto political litmus test on the next cohort of public school teachers.
Looking through various teacher-training outlines, the familiar leftist buzzwords appear repeatedly. “Diversity” and identity politics feature prominently and teachers-to-be are referred to as “critical thinking change agents.” These “agents” will use the classroom “to transcend the negative effects of the dominant culture” and will “speak on behalf of identified constituent groups,” becoming “advocates for those on the margins of society.” (Evidently, “critical thinking” should be taken to mean leftist thinking – critical of capitalism, individualism and bourgeois values - not thinking that might also be critical of the left, its methods and its assorted conceits.)
Read the whole thing; you will especially appreciate the video he includes.
The various derivatives of PC thought that have been in vogue in our educational system through the years have all been designed to explain away the persistent achievement gap between certain designated victim groups and the white middle class. The classifications of victims are entirely dependent on outcomes, since recent immigrants who are Chinese or Japanese do not fail at high enough rates to qualify yet many third and fourth generation Hispanics, white Americans in all but ancestor's surnames, do qualify. Much of the resultant distortion of language and thinking emerged as a reaction to longstanding historic (biological/Darwinian) racism, but it persists even in the absence of significant institutional, or pervasive cultural, racism.
The problem for the PC thought police is that if the outcome differential is not due to inherent biological group differences, there are few other options. There must either be some heretofore unquantifiable effects of hidden racism, or the problems must be related to culture.
The PC edifice is under assault from a surprising place.
‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback
For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named.
The reticence was a legacy of the ugly battles that erupted after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a “culture of poverty” to the public in a startling 1965 report. Although Moynihan didn’t coin the phrase (that distinction belongs to the anthropologist Oscar Lewis), his description of the urban black family as caught in an inescapable “tangle of pathology” of unmarried mothers and welfare dependency was seen as attributing self-perpetuating moral deficiencies to black people, as if blaming them for their own misfortune.
Moynihan’s analysis never lost its appeal to conservative thinkers, whose arguments ultimately succeeded when President Bill Clinton signed a bill in 1996 “ending welfare as we know it.” But in the overwhelmingly liberal ranks of academic sociology and anthropology the word “culture” became a live grenade, and the idea that attitudes and behavior patterns kept people poor was shunned.
Now, after decades of silence, these scholars are speaking openly about you-know-what, conceding that culture and persistent poverty are enmeshed.
As with most things, the outcome differentials are undoubtedly multiply determined, however, as long as the PC thought police control what is acceptable thinking among our educators, any hope of actually addressing the real problems that make so many Americans so poorly informed will be impossible to address. It is good to see that the New York Times is beginning to report on work which questions PC orthodoxy. It is even possible that at this rate it will be safe to send your children to government schools within the next 20 or 30 years.
Recent Comments