On Education

He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.  - Adolf Hitler

The Big Hoax By Thomas Sowell

But the biggest hoax of the past two generations is still going strong -- namely, the hoax that statistical differences in outcomes for different groups are due to the way other people treat those groups.
The latest example of this hoax is the joint crusade of the Department of Education and the Department of Justice against schools that discipline black males more often than other students. According to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, this disparity in punishment violates the "promise" of "equity."
Among the many serious problems of ghetto schools is the legal difficulty of getting rid of disruptive hoodlums, a mere handful of whom can be enough to destroy the education of a far larger number of other black students -- and with it destroy their chances for a better life.

The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions at state expense. - Karl Marx

Those pesky things called laws George Will

What authors Eitel, Talbert and Evers call the Education Department’s “incremental march down the road to a national curriculum” begins with the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSS). It is an initiative not of any state legislature but of a governors association, state school officials and private foundations. This push advanced when the Race to the Top Fund (RTTT, part of the 2009 stimulus) said that peer reviewers of applications for money should favor those states that join a majority of states in developing and adopting common standards. The 11 states and the District of Columbia that won Race to the Top funding had adopted or indicated an intention to adopt the CCSS, which will require changes in curricula.
An Education Department synopsis of discussions with members of the public about priorities in competition for RTTT money says “the goal of common K-12 standards is to replace the existing patchwork of state standards.” Progressives celebrate diversity in everything but thought.
The Obama administration is granting conditional waivers to states chafing under No Child Left Behind’s unrealistic accountability requirements. The waivers are contingent on each state adopting certain standards “that are common to a significant number of states,” or the state may adopt standards endorsed by its institutions of higher education — if those standards are consistent with the Education Department’s guidelines.
We have been warned. Joseph Califano, secretary of health, education and welfare in the Carter administration, noted that “in its most extreme form, national control of curriculum is a form of national control of ideas.”

Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed. - Joseph Stalin

KevinD. Williamson reports in National Review Online:

 “Jada Williams, a 13-year-old eighth grader who voluntarily took on some difficult extra work: reading Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life and writing an essay on the subject. Frederick Douglass is dangerous reading, truly radical stuff. Miss Williams, like most of the students in her dysfunctional school, is black. Most of the people being paid to go through the motions of teaching them are white. Coming across the famous passage in which Douglass quotes the slavemaster Auld, Miss Williams was startled by the words: “If you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there will be no keeping him. It will forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master.” The situation seemed to her familiar, and her essay was a blistering indictment of the failures of the largely white faculty of her school: “When I find myself sitting in a crowded classroom where no real instruction is taking place I can say history does repeat itself.”
“Her teacher was so offended by the essay that she circulated copies of it to the rest of the faculty and to the principal. Miss Williams, an A student, suddenly began to receive Ds. According to accounts, her mother received harassing telephone calls from teachers who suggested that she was in some way disturbed rather than merely observant. She was forced eventually to withdraw from the school and enroll in an even worse one.”

Academic Freedom is a One-Way Street

While surfing Facebook today, my attention was drawn to a CSPAN interview of Dr. Thomas Sowell, noted economist and professor who is currently a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. The segment focused on a discussion of the late Prof. Derrick Bell. Bell has recently returned to the headlines thanks to a video of Barrack Obama speaking at a protest during his time as a student at Harvard Law School. Prof. Bell was a teacher and apparently somewhat of a mentor to Obama.

Sowell has a low opinion of Bell and his tactics: "what he is really saying is he wants ideological conformity in the people that are hired to fill this position [at Harvard Law School]"


Later in the interview, Dr. Sowell mentions another Black professor of Law at Harvard, Randall Kennedy: "He has launched a despicable attack on a young black professor at the law school who doesn't go along with this. A young man named Randall Kennedy, who has written a very thoughtful, intelligent article last June in the Harvard Law Review, questioning some of the assumptions that people are making, people like Derrick Bell and doing it in a very gentlemanly as well as very logical way, empirical way, and that's not what they want. They want the conclusion to be that -- they want him to march in lock step and he won't do it, and they're doing their best to make life impossible for him."


Pretty strong accusations. But thanks to the miracle of the Internet, bequeathed to us by that demi-god of Green, Al Gore, I was able to see what it is that Bell said about Kennedy. And, unsurprisingly, Sowell was accurate.


Bell: " I saw in Kennedy a comrade and an eventual successor in my racial battles with Harvard. In keeping with this expectation, I declined the dean's offer to again teach Race, Racism, and American Law, the civil rights course I had created when I joined the faculty years earlier. Kennedy had been teaching it in my absence. ... It was a decision I came to regret. Kennedy retained the course name, but dropped its advocacy orientation. Disgruntled students complained that Kennedy spent more time challenging and even denigrating civil rights positions than he did analyzing the continuing practices and policies of discrimination that made those policies, whatever their shortcomings, necessary.
[Oh dear! a class at the most prestigious Law school in the country being taught impartially rather than as indoctrination to racial advocacy! That is regrettable. lol]

"Over the years, Professor Kennedy has become the impartial, black intellectual, commenting on our still benighted condition and as ready to criticize as commend. As self-appointed monitor of civil rights positions, he stands ever ready to balance even the most heinous racial abuse with criticism of blacks when, in his view, our accusations condemning racism in the criminal justice system go too far and are counter-productive. He interrupts attacks on racist practices by pointing out that blacks, too, sometimes abuse the criminal justice system. When advocates condemn a system that is filling the nation's jails and prisons with legions of young, black men, he responds with the non sequitur that these men are guilty of many of the crimes that lead to their imprisonment." [A reasonable person might read this paragraph as laudatory. Prof Kennedy discusses topics fairly, recognizing the sins of the oppressed even as he condemns the sins of the oppressor. But, Bell and his Critical Race Theory cannot admit that Blacks could be sinners. Bell calls it a non sequitur that men guilty of crimes are sent to prison. It doesn't matter to him, to his theory or to those who accept his theory (Obama, Holder, etc.) whether they are guilty, only that they are somehow oppressed.]

While the Leftstream Media has tried to ignore, denigrate and downplay the import of the previously suppressed video of Obama cheering Bell and his racist Critical Race Theory, it does matter that Obama was taught Critical Race Theory by its creator, that he publicly praised the theory and its creator, that he participated in the sorts of demonstrations for racial and ideological preference that the theory advocates, that he spent 20 years at a church that taught Black Liberation Theology - which is to religion as Critical Race Theory is to Law - and that he has conducted his administration as an extension of those expressions of racist, Marxist ideologies.