The Appalling State of "Education" In America (Cultural Marxism Indoctrination)

Source: Signs of the Times

University of Washington Ed. Program: Leftist Indoctrination, Not Teacher Education

by Nick Wilson | Quillette | Fri, 05 Apr 2019

 Having decided to become a high school teacher, I was excited to be accepted to the University of Washington's Secondary Teacher Education Program (STEP), which awards a masters degree in teaching and bills itself as a 12-month combination of theory and practice. Cognizant that in just over a year I would be responsible for teaching students on my own, and because of the university's laudable reputation, I expected the program to be grounded in challenging practical work and research, both in terms of how to develop academic skills in young people, and also in the crucial role public education has in overcoming some of the most grave and intransigent problems in society.

I am not interested in politics or controversy, and I derive no pleasure in creating difficulties for the UW out of personal resentment. But whenever family and friends ask me about graduate school, I have to explain that rather than an academic program centered around pedagogy and public policy, STEP is a 12-month immersion in doctrinaire social justice activism. This program is a bizarre political experiment, light on academic rigor, in which the faculty quite consciously whips up emotions in order to punch home its ideological message. As a consequence, the key components of teaching as a vocation-pedagogy and how best to disseminate knowledge-are fundamentally neglected. With little practical training or preparation, graduates of the program begin their teaching careers woefully unprepared. Even for the most ardent social justice activist, STEP's lack of practical content is a serious shortcoming. I found the program so troubling that I have decided to write this first-hand account with specific examples of the daily experience to illustrate how social justice activism in the academy has a high opportunity cost.

To put this in context, STEP's approach to education deserves some explanation. Public schools haven't done a great job of bridging ugly chasms in American life, such as the racial academic achievement gap between black and white populations, which has hardly narrowed since the Civil Rights Act. Discrimination based on gender and sexuality remain impediments to equality of opportunity and the way children are currently treated in public schools is clearly a part of that. The statistics on these matters are appalling, and slow progress is no excuse for complacency. Additionally, teachers should work to cultivate catholic tastes, and in light of demographic changes, white Americans shouldn't expect the literature and old-fashioned narrative history of Europe and the United States to be considered the normal curriculum, with a few token "diverse" authors alongside Shakespeare and Hemingway. Nonetheless, while these challenges exist, and although public education is a vital mechanism in the struggle to resolve inequality and to further the development of an open cosmopolitan culture, the program's attempts to address these issues are deeply disturbing.

Organized according to the standard tenets of social justice theory, anyone in the graduate school class who does not identify as a straight white male is encouraged from the outset to present themselves as a victim of oppression in the social hierarchy of the United States. And so a culture emerges rapidly in the 60-student cohort in which words and phrases fall under constant scrutiny, and ideas thought to be inimical to social justice are pounced on as oppressive. Moreover, instead of imparting knowledge about the rudiments of pedagogy or how to develop curriculum content and plan for high school classes, the faculty and leadership declare that their essential mission is to combat the colonialism, misogyny and homophobia that is endemic in American society. The logic here is that if teachers are immersed in social justice ideology they will then impart these ideas to young people at all levels of K-12 and post-secondary education. This lofty aim explains why the program focuses so heavily on training students in the discourse of far-left identity politics and why it demands total intellectual acquiescence. When you consider that STEP's ostensible purpose is to prepare graduates to become novice high school teachers, this approach in a public university is difficult to justify.

Comment: University of Kansas chastised for offering course on the 'Angry White Male"

The first three of STEP's four quarters address social constructivism, postmodernism, and identity politics through flimsy and subjective content. With a few notable exceptions, the content one might expect to study at graduate school is absent. Although the classes have names like "Teaching for Learning," "Creating Classrooms for All," "Teaching in Schools," and "Adolescent Psychology," the vast majority of their content is essentially political. These classes are difficult to distinguish from one another, each experienced as a variation on the theme of imploring students to interpret every organization and social structure through the paradigms of power and oppression via gender, race, and sexuality. Students are expected to demonstrate that the attributes of their personal identity (always reduced to race, sexuality and gender, and sometimes disability status) will shape their assumptions when they work as classroom teachers. Practically speaking, the purpose is to have teachers acknowledge and embrace a broad variety of behavioral norms and activities in the classroom and to explore a wider range of academic content than has traditionally been the case in American public schools. Above all, the program emphasizes that diversity and inclusion are the most important considerations in education, and that equity-equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity-ought to be the primary goal of public policy.

Please go to Signs of the Times to red the entire article.
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Source: Confessions of a College Professor

Another College Dies, Stranding Students And Enriching Admin

April 6, 2019

By Professor Doom

Before the days of the student loan scam, universities were renowned for their endurance. The oldest university in the world is over a thousand years old, and even "abandoned" universities like in Timbuktu still endure, because they were collections of scholars…not institutions devoted to siphoning off student loan money.

Despite the money pouring into higher ed, we're starting to see school closings, either due to fraud, or horrific plundering and "mismanagement" by a caste of looters far more interested in personal gains than building an institution to withstand the test of time.

At some point, we need to ask questions, and a recent article comes close:

A College Chain Crumbles, and Millions in Student Loan Cash Disappears

--yeah, it's the New York Times…just because they print much fake news, doesn’t mean it's all fake, though I'll be dissecting this piece.

It's funny that the title says the student loan cash "disappears," as we all know that's impossible. Every dollar is tracked, when I was reimbursed for a tank of gas at the community college, I assure the gentle reader the forms were filed and signed off in quintuplicate. So there's a question here in the title, but does the NYT bother to answer it?

So what happened at this school?

When the Education Department approved a proposal by Dream Center, a Christian nonprofit with no experience in higher education, to buy a troubled chain of for-profit colleges, skeptics warned that the charity was unlikely to pull off the turnaround it promised.

…Barely a year after the takeover, dozens of Dream Center campuses are nearly out of money and may close as soon as Friday. More than a dozen others have been sold in the hope they can survive.

Great, more questions. So, the sleazy for-profit sold out to the non-profit. Was there really no expertise left at the school? One of the reasons "old" universities survived is because the leadership and the faculty were the same people—the only way to kill the school was to eliminate all the scholars (hi Chairman Mao!), but past that it was basically impossible. That's not the case at many schools, especially the for-profits, where the people running the schools have no education or interest in such, and so all the faculty are just temp workers. You get rid of the "leadership" at these types of schools and you indeed do have nothing.

So when Dream Center bought this school, they had nothing but a name (besmirched by being for-profit), and no expertise. They couldn’t really hire anyone, either, because all they could get would be more plunderers.

Please go to Confessions of a College Professor to read the entire article.
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Source: Russian Insider

Neurotic and Dishonest Pseudo-Intellectuals Have Infested Academia, the Media, and the Medical Profession

by James Howard Kunstler | April 10, 2019

How might we account for the strange melding of neuroticism and dishonesty that has gripped America's thinking class since the ascent of Donald Trump as an epically reviled figurehead on our ship of state? It all seems to come down to shame and failure.

There is, for instance, the failure of America's leading economic viziers to arrest the collapse of the middle class — and with it, the disintegration of families — that more than anything produced the 2016 election result. What is a bigger emergency: the destruction of all those towns, cities, and lives in flyover-land, or the S & P stock index going down twenty points?

The choice made by the "experts" the past ten years is obvious: pump the financial markets at all costs by using dishonest policy interventions which they are smart enough to know will eventually blow up the banking system. They did it to preserve their reputations long enough to retire out of their jobs. The trouble is that the damage is now so extreme that when the time comes for them to apologize it will not be enough. They will lose their freedom and perhaps their heads.

The neuroticism and dishonesty is exactly what turned two of this country's most sacred and noble endeavors, higher education and medicine, into disgraceful rackets. Sunday night, CBS 60 Minutes covered both bases in their lead story about how the NYU medical school recently declared its program tuition-free. This great triumph was due to an enormous cash gift from one of the founders of the Home Depot company, billionaire Ken Langone. Nowhere in the broadcast did CBS raise the question as to how the cost of a degree became so outrageous in the first place. Or how Mr. Langone made his fortune by putting every local hardware store in America out of business, which enabled him to capture the annual incomes of ten thousand small business owners and their employees. NYU's grand gesture is just a way to paper over the shame of the University executives' role in the college loan racket that may destroy countless lives.

The best and brightest

Please go to Russian Insider to read the entire article.
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Related:

Why Is 'Cultural Marxism' So Offensive?