The Four R's: Reading, Riting, Rithmetic, and Relevance

 

Courtesy of Indeed, here is a supposedly ideal answer to the standard interview question for teachers, “What is your teaching philosophy?” In other words, this is what your teaching philosophy is supposed to be. And it is utterly wrong:

“My teaching philosophy is to make my lesson plans relatable. In many cases, when a student can’t identify with the material, it’s harder for them to gather meaning. As a literature teacher, my goal is to help students empathize with characters, places and concepts, especially when those things are different from their own life experiences. As a student, I found stories more memorable when my teachers helped me draw parallels. As a student teacher, I like to make comparisons between older texts, like Shakespeare and modern events. For example, comparing events in the plays to events in pop culture. This not only helps students understand the stories but also helps them draw their own conclusions.”

First, the need for students to “identify with the material.” They are supposed to see “their own life experiences” reflected in the material.

This is the opposite of the point of reading a book in the first place. One reads a novel to get away from one’s own everyday life, to experience the world from another’s perspective. Accordingly, the books that sell the best, that people most enjoy, are set in exotic locales and based on improbable situations: Harry Potter, James Bond, superhero comics and movies, the Da Vinci Code, Treasure Island, Peter Pan, Star Wars. The surest way to bore students, and turn them off reading altogether, is to select readings that most closely reflect their own life experience. 

Moreover, this is deliberately preventing them from learning, subverting the entire point of going to school. One already knows about one’s own life situation. 

For the same reason, it is perverse to suggest that minority voices have traditionally been underrepresented in our literature or in the bookstores. Being exotic has always been an advantage. Pauline Johnson used to perform in buckskin. Grey Owl faked his Indian identity. 

As for comparing events in the classical texts to pop culture: always done these days. For years, every text I used had a chapter on the movie “Titanic”; and I could see the students roll their eyes and hear them audibly groan. Not “Titanic” again!

The problems with this approach are many. 

First, the students already know pop culture. They are not learning anything; you’re just wasting their time. 

Second, they probably know it better than the teacher. It is insulting to presume the teacher knows more than they do about such things. Why? What makes them the authority on Taylor Swift? Just because they’re older? Must the students merely knuckle under to established authority? Is this the lesson being taught? 

Third, nothing is so dated and uncool as yesterday’s biggest pop phenomenon. It is impossible to stay current. Especially in textbooks, which take at least a year from composition to publication, and then remain in circulation for years. Pop culture references will always be dated, and wincingly uncool. 

Fourth, everyone will fix on the same obvious pop culture references, going for the biggest bang, the biggest connection with the youngsters, and the thing, like Titanic, so big that even they, uncool old people as they are, are aware of it. Students will encounter the same cultural reference again and again, boring them beyond comprehension. When they could be out learning something.

A similar problem adheres when you try to connect your classic material with “current events.” Nothing is as dead, old, and dull as yesterday’s news. Text can’t possibly keep up, not being reissued daily. To compensate, “current events” in the classroom inevitably means a handful of generic topics: ecology, the environment, or “the environmental crisis”; the issues raised by new technology, considered generically; globalization; peace versus war, and such. There is an obvious problem of ideological bias; but without ideological bias, such topics are desperately repetitious and boring. Yes, pollution is bad. Yes, there are bad things on the Internet. Yes, the world is becoming smaller. Yes, peace is better than war. Snore.

Back in the old days, to avoid these problems, modern history was not taught; only classical history. Modern history, current events? Set that up as formal debates among the students. For the same reason, current novels and recent writing were not taught. Leave those for reading clubs in the common rooms.

Our ancestors had it right.

Peterson on the Ed Schools

 

You want the truth? Resentful radical leftists took over the Faculties of Education in the 1960s.

Now they control the entire K-12 system and half (half!) of all state budgets.

The Ed schools are among the worst faculties in the increasingly demented universities. Every bit of the "research" they have conducted in the last sixty years was a lie: whole word reading, multiple intelligences, self-esteem. Nothing but destructive.

Their students are by and large lazy, unintelligent, uninterested and ideologically captured.

The worst of them become administrators.

These are the people to whom we give our children, and much of our tax money. And we've done it for four generations, with no end in sight.

The Faculties of Education should be eliminated. They have done a worse than terrible job, and they are destroying our culture. Intentionally. Starting with your kids.

Jordan Peterson on X (Twitter)

All true; I agree 100% and have been saying the same thing for some years. We must abolish the Ed Schools. Having graduated from one should be a disqualification, not a qualification, as a teacher. They deliberately teach how to teach badly, so that any homeschooler can actually produce better results than their "professionals." And this is measurable. 

The Need for Smaller Class Sizes

 

A new study suggests that classroom size does not affect student results: smaller classrooms are not better. But this has been known for years. Many previous studies have shown the same. It is an eternal surprise only because teachers’ unions eternally assert the opposite.

They do so, I imagine, because a larger class demands the lecture format, whereas a small enough class can be run as a seminar, a group discussion.

The currently fashionable education philosophy, “constructivism,” holds that truth is not a constant, there is no objective truth. Knowledge is “constructed” in groups, making the seminar approach mandatory. If the group decides that China is in Europe, then it is in Europe. If they decide the sun goes around the Earth, then the sun goes around the Earth.

Constructivism does not account for what happens if groups in contact with one another arrive at different conclusions. Might makes right seems the inevitable, necessary approach: you pass a law or fight a war and force submission.

This is how fascism works. And this is how our schools currently work. Increasingly, under the influence of the schools and constructivism, this is how our society works.

The attraction for the teaching tribe, however, is that running a seminar takes no effort on their part. There is no need for them to either actually know anything about the subject, or know how to explain it. They just get to sit in judgement over the conclusions the students come up with in their seminar. And on what basis can they judge, given that there is no truth? The only possibility is to object if any group comes to an opinion that differs from that of the teacher. Meaning the teacher has no responsibilities, but gets to be the absolute dictator in the classroom.

It's a good life, as long as the money keeps pouring in.

Father Knows Best

 

A reading in a current textbook laments that fewer Britons than forty years ago want to become secondary school teachers. By a lot: college grads entertaining the thought of teaching has dropped from over 60% to 17%. I keep seeing ads in my feed urging qualified Canadian teachers to come teach in London or in Scotland. 

\The piece goes on to say that one common reason given is the impossibility of maintaining discipline in classes, compared to forty years ago. And I hear this same lament from my friends in the US. And in China.

So the next question has to be, what has changed, and changed in all these countries? Why are students more rebellious, less disciplined, than in the past? Or, how have these systems of education changed so that they can no longer effectively discipline?

My Chinese student, not bound by North American shibboleths, has an immediate insight: one reason is that so many teachers are now women.

“In the old days,” he explains, “students saw the teacher as a second father.”

And then I got it. There is an obvious and immediate difference in tone between calling someone a “second father” and a “second mother.” Seeing a teacher as a “second mother” is not going to help with discipline.

We must accept what we have been perversely denying for generations: the role of father and mother is different. The mother sees to your physical needs, that you are scrubbed and fed. The father sees to your spiritual needs, to your education, especially your education in values. To discipline.

This is not a role arbitrarily assigned by society. It is built in to the male and female soul, just as we plainly see females are physically designed to nurture the young. As little Maryanne once remarked, “Men are not mammals. They can’t feed their young with milk.”

Why would it not be? How could it not be? Maternal instinct is real. So is paternal instinct. And so are filial instincts.

Here’s an interesting example of the difference between the male and female mind: men are far better at reading maps and giving directions. This is the paternal and the teacherly role: reading the map and giving directions. Women, left to their own devices, get lost. They must ask directions of others.

I used to do this experiment with my classes; and the result was the same whatever culture or country I was in, or wherever the students came from. I would first ask all of the women in class to point north. They invariably had no idea. It was random. Then I would ask the men. Most of them could. 

QED. It is the same in spiritual matters. Men have a better sense of direction, and so are better guides.

So we are abandoning our children, denying them an education, if we give them female teachers in high school. We are letting them down with female teachers in grade school, for that matter. It stands to reason that, not getting any guidance at school, they become disenchanted with the enterprise. It also stands to reason that, not having any natural talent for the task, schools dominated by women go off the rails.

Come to think of it, this is a more serious problem than the schools. We have denied the value of fathers in the family as well, undercut their authority, encouraged family breakups, and left children rudderless. We have denied the value of men in society generally, and tried to dismantle “the patriarchy.” Not going to end well. We have, in recent decades, put women in leadership roles in all parts of society. Note the recent congressional hearing, in which the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and UPenn all spoke. And they were all women. And they had all so lost their way that they did not consider a call for genocide of a student’s entire race a case of bullying.

If women lack, at least in comparison to men, an internal compass and sense of direction and proportion, this is a sure prescription for causing all structures to begin to swerve unpredictably and wander off in odd directions.

And is that not what we have been seeing?

It is the wisdom of the ages. In the New Testament, Jesus’s ancestry is traced back through many generations to David. But this ancestry is traced back on both sides, through Mary and Joseph; even though Joseph is not Jesus’s biological father.

This is because the true inheritance on the father’s side is spiritual, not physical. The important line on the male side is the teachings and the values handed down from David; compare the apostolic succession.

Have you ever noticed, as I have, that when there is a mixed marriage, the children identify primarily with the father’s faith, and the father’s ethnicity? This is the actual distinction, in Canada, between Indian and Metis, and was enshrined in the Indian Act: father Indian, mother European, child Indian. Father European, mother Indian, child European. Or, only on the Prairies, because the father is ethnically and religiously distinct from the European majority, Metis. Metis culture is simply French-Canadian culture.

In mixed marriages when the father defers to the mother’s religion or ethnicity in the education of the children, as is often required in Catholic-Protestant marriages—the children simply grow up without a sound grounding in values or sense of their identity. 

We have been ignoring these male-female differences at our peril—or rather, to the peril of our children.

Reflections at the Beginning of a New School Year

 

When I was young, I trusted and respected teachers. I always went along with the rules. An old diary reminds me I was diligent about never being late; one year I won a prize for best behaved.I was a good kid and a good student.

I now realize this was a mistake.

Not just that the troublemakers and the slackers and the guys ho just hung out did at least as well in the rough and tumble of real life as I. The problem was more that most of what the teachers taught us were lies.

We were taught science as a series of established truths about the physical universe. In later years, many, perhaps most, of these unquestionable truths have turned out not to be true, and I too often look like a fool when I propound them. Science, as they say, marches on. It is not a set of known truths, but an attitude of universal scepticism, that tests everything rather than accept anything on authority. It never makes any claim to truth, only to working hypotheses, and only disproves falsehoods. The false cosmology we were taught as science, in other words, was the opposite of science. It was worse than a waste of our time; it was misinformation.

In English, the later and usually best works of most great poets were not on the curriculum. This was so even through college. We were left with the false and depressing impression that poets always burned out in romantic youth. Yeats was the notable exception—even his latest poems appeared on the curriculum. Because, I suspect, he stayed pagan to the end.  The problem with all the others is that, as they matured, they all became devoutly Christian. And this was suppressed.

Worse, it is impossible to understand even their early works, English literature generally, except in the context of Judeo-Christian cosmology. Most art is religious art; it almost has to be, to be true art, for true art requires profundity. Yet this Judeo-Christian background was never taught, or even referred to. Instead, everything was read through the lens of Freudianism, or feminism, or Marxism, or structuralism, or Jungianism, or queer theory, or postcolonialism, or whatever intellectual fad was on offer. None of them coming near the point; all of them treating the writer himself as some kind of idiot who had no idea what he was actually saying.

English composition was also mistaught: I had to unlearn many of the supposed rules of grammar and composition learned in high school to become a professional editor and writer. Because they produce bad writing. Indeed, the fact that most people are taught how to write badly gave me my careers as an editor and writing coach. Some of the most egregious examples of classroom malpractice in writing have been collected in a book famous among editors, titled “Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins.” Most teachers have no idea how to write; and can only be trusted to apply rigid rules, which are invented purely for this purpose.

Fraudulent history was probably less common in my day than now. But the worst was the lie about Social Darwinism. We were taught, without explanation, that Social Darwinism was a misapplication of Darwin’s theory to human society. And I am embarrassed to remember that I bought this.

Darwin himself was a raging social Darwinist. And it is hard to see how his theory does apply to human society.

Darwin is the father of Nazi race theory. They were, they said, aiding the evolutionary struggle. War was the evolutionary struggle; the superior races would win, and evolve into a new, more powerful species.

The real atrocities of European colonialism in the latter half of the 19th century, the days of Heart of Darkness, were also due to Darwinian science. Nobody told us. Instead, longstanding and intrinsic Western cultural chauvinism, or even Christianity, were blamed.

And we were taught that the Christian opponents of Darwin were upset because his theory contravened a simple-minded literal reading of the Book of Genesis, the “seven days of creation.” His Christian opponents, such as William Jennings Bryan, were opposed to his theory primarily because they saw it militating against ethics, altruism, and human equality, and logically leading to racism and a war of all against all.

All this was swept under the carpet. 

As was the fact that the progressive movement, the political left during the first half of the Twentieth Century, embraced eugenics, racial segregation, government control of the economy, social regimentation, and to varying degrees, Mussolini and Hitler. We were taught instead that the Fascists and Nazis were “far right.” 

We were of course indoctrinated into the anti-Catholic “Black Legend.” We were taught of the Inquisition and the Crusades as though the former was a witchhunt, the latter a pogrom or a holocaust. Everyone was somehow given the impression that Galileo was burned at the stake, for asserting heliocentrism.

Most grievously, once I left Catholic grade school, once in high school and above, they gave us all to understand that belief in God was marginal, optional, a matter of faith and of personal opinion. This is grossly wrong: most great philosophers since Aristotle and Plato have asserted and offered proofs of His existence. His existence is the one bit of knowledge about which we can be most certain; more certain than of the existence of the material world, or of our own memories. This is also the most important thing to know, without which nothing else matters. This alone makes the malpractice of the public schools criminal and civilization-destroying. 

Solution: school vouchers, bust the ed schools, and let parents set up religious schools.

Abortion Unwound

 

The young adult novel Unwind is being used to teach our children. Resolutely woke, it argues the case for abortion. This hinges, apparently, on when a human being gets a soul. It gives four positions, presumably spanning the field:

• At conception
• At quickening—"when the baby kicks”
• At birth
• When someone loves it.

And then the novel gives its own conclusion: that we really do not know. 

Therefore, no one has a right to impose their own views on the next person.

“If more people could admit they really don’t know, maybe there never would have been a Heartland War.”

Therefore, unrestricted abortion.

It is indeed true that we do not know whether a child at any given age has a soul. We also do not know whether Jews have souls. We do not know whether blacks have souls. Or women. We actually do not know whether anyone other than ourself has a soul, is conscious and self-conscious. We cannot see or hear the soul, or consciousness, or thoughts, other than our own. Everyone else might be imagined, or simulations, or alien lizard people.

Accordingly, this argument for unrestricted abortion is just as serviceable as an argument for unrestricted murder, or genocide. 

“Hey, nobody likes the Jews. That mean they don’t have souls. Let’s kill them and take their stuff.”

Why is it morally necessary to assume all other humans have souls? Because of the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If you are not prepared to accept that these lizard people or simulations have the right to kill you on a whim, you must not claim for yourself the same right over them. You cannot honourably take to yourself a right you would not want everyone else to have.

The question, therefore, is when the foetus is alive, and when it becomes human. 

It is identifiably human at conception, and it is identifiably alive.

Any other position ends in holocaust.

Coming of Age in Canada

 

Last week, I helped a student edit a poem for his high school English class. It was required to be on the theme of “coming of age.” He thought of the metaphor of a ship casting off the lines and leaving the pier for the open sea. I thought it was quite beautiful.

But the teacher was unhappy with it, and without revision threatened a low mark. To begin with, she took the word “tack,” referring to directing a ship, for an error. She was sure enough of herself not to look it up in the dictionary. So he lost marks.

Perhaps to her dictionaries are oppressive, lest they contradict her “lived experience.”

But the bigger problem was that the poem gave no “cause” for “coming of age.” At last we puzzled out that she was expecting some rebellion against parents and society. It was not permissible to see growing up just as striking off on your own. It had to involve rejecting whatever your parents had taught you.

This was a special problem for my student, because he is Chinese. Not Chinese-Canadian. Chinese, attending a Canadian high school. To him, the thought was shocking. Filial piety and respect for your ancestors is among the deepest of Confucian values.

I found it admirable that, on figuring out this is what his teacher wanted, he declared that, rather than accede he would take a lower mark.

But it illustrates how harmful our schools may have become. The agenda of this teacher at least—and she is not alone—is not to educate, but to de-educate, to dismantle anything the student might already know.

Deligion in the Schools

 

Due to the Canadian government’s current inability to perform such simple tasks as issuing citizenship certificates and passports, I have been forced for years to homeschool my kids by distance.

I have considered this an extreme hardship; and have been horrified at the thought of how much they are missing in their education. 

But perhaps not. 

After all, if government cannot manage simple paperwork, how well are they going to do education?

It recently occurred to me that I ought to be teaching my two geography and science. 

I went online to look for a geography and a science text.

I could find nothing suitable. All available texts seem not to be about geography or science at all. They are about global warming, environmentalism, and the depletion of natural resources. With a lot of pointless make-work projects assigned. They are teaching nothing, and in the most inefficient way imaginable. 

Or rather, worse than nothing. In the first place, students will have a misconception of what science and geography are about. In the second, they will have been indoctrinated into a bizarre cult with no scientific or empirical basis, nor philosophical foundation. They will think these dubious assertions are established truth. In the third, this nature cult seems tailored to replace religion and conventional morality. It is paganism.

I am not claiming that the teaching of science was any good when I went to high school.

But this is much worse. And at least geography used to make sense.

The Joy of Learning

 

Further remarks from the Beaches-East York All-Candidates Meeting on May 12:

I have spent my life in and around education. You’d think by now I would have learned something.

More than that, I’m a father. Education matters to me deeply. 

Simply spending more money on schools is not much help.

As of 2022, Ontario spends $14,821 per pupil. That’s in line with other provinces, more than the US, more than Finland or Korea or Singapore, all of which do better on the OECD’s measures of student success. 

Yet the schools are in crisis.

Why do the rich send their children to private schools? Why do private schools consistently get better results with less money? Why do homeschoolers get better results?

The most urgent matter is to get Critical Theory out of the schools, and keep it out. 

New Blue has been the leader in alerting us to this issue. Every other party endorsed Bill 67 on second reading, and Bill 67 would actually mandate Critical Theory in our schools and colleges at every level.

Aside from destroying civil society, Critical Theory makes education itself meaningless. If you believe there is no objective truth, there is nothing to teach, and nothing to learn. Everyone just makes up whatever they want to believe, and tries to impose it on others. 

Or their students.

This is the emergency. But over the longer term, the way to improve education is to introduce competition.

New Blue wants tax credits to allow more parents to choose their children’s education. 

Since at least the early 20th century, our public schools have not been designed to produce excellence. They have been designed to produce workers for industry. The rich can sent their kids to private schools that teach leadership, and this perpetuates class divisions.

Most of the work of my own online academy is teaching students the skills the public schools will not teach.

We need to level this playing field. 

Could we not fix the public system? To some extent, no doubt; but this will take more time, tears, and sweat. The forces against this are entrenched and powerful. In the meantime, too many young minds will be wasted. 

And even if we can, school choice is needed in a pluralistic society. 

Our founders and our constitution understood this. Diversity is our strength. So we have the separate school system, originally one system for Catholics, and another for Protestants. 

But two systems are hardly adequate any longer. They are laughably inadequate. We need to extend equal rights to other faiths and life philosophies. Values are the core of education, and parents must be able to pass their values on to the next generation. This is what parenting is about.

Let’s bring the joy of true learning to the schools.

Rex Murphy and Jordan Peterson on Ontario's Bill 67

 

More on Bill 67 from Jordan Peterson

 

Shocking

 Jordan Peterson blows the whistle.

Woke Ballet

 

Officials deny that Critical Race Theory is taught in the Ontario schools. On the other hand, one of my students had to cancel a writing class because her school required attendance at a special seminar on “racialization in ballet.” On a Friday evening. 

Her brother informed me that only “non-white” students had to attend.

You Can't Teach What You Don't Know

 

This simple, almost self-evident truth seems to be beyond Ontario judges and the ed schools. 

According to them, all that matters is the right skin colour.

The Way We Weren't

 

Marguerite de Bourgeouys sculpture, downtown Montreal

I am currently forced to homeschool my daughter. It is just as well. We’ve been going through the prescribed text for Canadian history together. It’s alarmingly bad.

Most recently, it includes a chapter of detail about everyday life in New France. This is, to begin with, not a proper subject for history. We have apparently forgotten why we study history in the first place: to learn the lessons of the past. People’s everyday lives do not, on the whole, provide such lessons, for they had little chance to make choices that might alter the course of history. History properly has to do with matters of government policy, for the most part. Life lessons are important too, no doubt, but these we get from tales of saints and heroes and villains; not the lives of average persons in aggregate.

As to government policy, the book asserts, several times, that the French government saw their North American colony as something to exploit “to make the home country rich.” They did this through the mercantile system, forcing the colony to trade with the motherland. This seems a distortion of history. It should go without saying that a colony needed to pay for itself—that the cost of defending and administering it must not be higher than it returned in taxes. But there is every evidence that the French government saw themselves as also being in North America for the benefit of the natives: in order to convert them to Catholic Christianity and teach them how to improve their lives. And the mercantile system equally committed the mother country to trade with the colonies; trade is not exploitation.

As to the lives of ordinary people, the book goes on at some length over just how exploitative the seigneurial system was, whether there was class mobility, and how large was the pre-conquest middle class. Such class analysis tends to presuppose Marxism; otherwise it is of little interest. In any case, the written records are not sufficient to draw any conclusions. It is all conjecture tainted by political agendas. And such an excursus kills any narrative flow; it is the narrative flow that makes history interesting.

The text also diverts from any narrative continuity to point out that torture was used in the Quebec courts—30 times over a century. It goes into the methods in some detail. This may entertain adolescent boys, but it is not relevant to history. It seems little more than an opportunity to gossip unfavourably about our ancestors.

As is the two pages spent on slavery in New France. This seems disproportionate for a practice that was more common almost everywhere else except continental Europe, and which had no economic impact in New France. It seems mostly, again, a chance to find fault with our ancestors.

The book is openly hostile to Catholicism. It suggests that the average habitant was really more pagan than Christian, because “Canadian children heard tales of flying canoes, werewolves, and encounters with the devil.” Even though the same could be said of Canadian children today, or children at any time or place. 

Most disturbing to me is that the book spends only a half a page on women in New France, under the segregated subhead “Women in the Workplace.” It is not just that this ignores the work of women in the home, despite the concentration on ordinary people and ordinary lives. It also omits much of the history I read and heard as a student in Quebec half a century ago. Then, we knew of Madeleine de Vercheres, who defended almost single-handed against an Iroquois attack; of Marie de l’Incarnation, who founded the first school on the continent; Margeurite de Bourgeouys, who co-founded Montreal, built the first church, and started the first school; Jeanne Mance, who started the first hospital, which grew to a string of hospitals across Eastern Canada; Marie-Marguerite d'Youville, who built the first orphanage and hospice, the origins of the Canadian social security system; and St. Kateri Tekakwitha. 

Now all we get is brief sentences about some woman running a mill, or continuing their husband’s business after his death.

Why this radical devaluation of women? In part, I imagine, because it is now politically incorrect to say anything that sounds good about Catholics or the religious; and most of these women were nuns. In part, I imagine, because it is politically incorrect to admit that women had important roles before Betty Friedan. They were supposed, after all, to be oppressed.

It would all have been a terrible miseducation for my daughter.

Shut Up and Think for Yourself

 

Christina Wyman has written a piece for NBC decrying parents who want to interfere with their children’s education. She laments that “parents think they have the right to control teaching and learning because their children are the ones being educated.” “It’s sort of like entering a surgical unit thinking you can interfere with an operation simply because the patient is your child.” After all, “Teaching, too, is a science. Unless they’re licensed and certified, parents aren’t qualified to make decisions about curricula.”

This is eleven different kinds of wrong. It is wrong on every point. And not list a little wrong on them. 

To begin with, overseeing their children’s education is the primary duty of parents.

"The role of parents in education is of such importance that it is almost impossible to provide an adequate substitute." The right and the duty of parents to educate their children are primordial and inalienable. – Catechism of the Catholic Church

Wyman cites the analogy of medicine. Fine. Here the patient has the right to choose their own doctor, and then to refuse any given treatment—for themselves and for their child. Let it be so in education. Let parents choose the school and curriculum.

And make the teachers liable to be sued for malpractice, as doctors can be.

I’m good with that.

But unlike medicine, teaching is not a science. It is not evidence-based. There is no empirical—which is to say, scientific—evidence that certified teachers teach better than a random person off the street. In fact, the evidence shows the opposite. Those who are homeschooled do better than those who come up through the public schools on standardized tests and in university—literally, then, a random member of the public can do better. Those who attend private schools, where teachers do not have to hold professional qualifications, also do better. Sending your child to a “qualified teacher” is the worst available option.

Wyman goes on to assert that “An educator’s primary goal is to teach students to think.” This is an odd thing to say to justify refusing parents the right to think about their children’s schooling. The public schools deliberately repress this, and were designed to do so in the early 20th century. One of the great attractions to private schools is that they, unlike the public schools, do teach students how to think. That means teaching them philosophy, logic, rhetoric, formal debating. Subjects definitive of the private schools, and rarely seen in public schools. It would mean teaching using the Socratic Method. What public school does?

The question: is Wyman that stupid, or that corrupt?

And how stupid or corrupt are our politicians if they accept this?

Beloved

 

The NYT has been trying to make censorship a left-wing issue by pointing out that Glenn Youngkin's campaign ran an approving ad in which a mother wanted Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved, removed from her child's classroom because of some lurid scenes.

I think anyone who has actually read the novel would see her point. I certainly would not want my child reading it. Censorship over sexual content, in books intended for minors, is entirely proper and, indeed, necessary.

Terry MacAuliffe vetoed the attempt to remove the novel from the classroom.

Root and STEM

 

When I taught in China back in the early 90s, I was appalled to learn that the university had no Department of Humanities. Purely a mechanistic view of the cosmos and of human life, it seemed. When the Berlin Wall fell, the countries of Eastern Europe understood the problem: their scholars rushed to the West to get a grounding in the Humanities. Unfortunately, they were disappointed.

I am alarmed to see that Humanities is now also no longer taught in high schools in Tennessee. A list of subject areas ESL students must be prepared for gives Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Science. 

A disease is spreading, and it is deadly. It is deadly not just to democracy, but to civilization itself.

If our culture were sane, Humanities would be the entire high school curriculum.

After the basic skills of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, taught to mastery in elementary school, the Humanities is the one thing everyone needs to study. It is the reason and grounding for everything else. If you do not pass it on, individuals despair and civilization dies.

Today, we waste our students’ time for four to six years, years when they are full of energy and desperate to learn. Many turn off at just this point. 

Math? It is a common observation, a truism, that we never use our high school algebra, trigonometry, or calculus again. So what is the justification for teaching it? Geometry would be useful—to teach logic. But it is never presented in those terms; just as a set of axioms that obviously do not relate to the real world.

Science as taught in the schools is the antithesis of science. It is taught as a body of knowledge; stuff to memorize. This specific knowledge, taught as certain in high school, is probably false and will probably be shown by science to be false in time. Much of it is already known to be false while the textbook is still in circulation. The essence of science is to doubt you know anything, and to test everything; it is the scientific method. That is not taught. If experiments are done, the result is always predetermined. Anyone genuinely likely to excel in science is only likely to be turned off it in high school.

Language Arts? The grammar of English should have already been learned in elementary school. As to other languages, if it is a matter of learning to speak them—our current emphasis—the classroom is the worst place to do so. The place to learn a language is by speaking it regularly, something the classroom is designed to prevent. Language, when taught as a Humanity, is an exercise in logic: the old grammar-translation method. It is no longer taught in such terms.

Social Science? A mathematician back in the fifties made the observation that anything that has ever been discovered by the Social Sciences is either trivial, or it is wrong. This is still true, and will forever be true. Rather than adding to our knowledge, the social sciences have subtracted from it, by introducing serious errors to the popular mind. Human beings are not objects, and cannot be studied as objects. Even if this were possible, it would be morally offensive. And teaching Social Science is therefore teaching immorality.

The wealthy and the upper classes pay huge sums to educate their own children at private schools that do concentrate on the Humanities: on logic, philosophy, rhetoric, debate, history, classical literature. They know what they are doing. The British Empire was built on the quality of its private schools. The modern public school systems of North America were intentionally designed, in the early twentieth century, to produce cogs for the industrial machine. What they teach is submission and acceptance. The Humanities teach leadership; for they teach how to think. As Confucius said, “a superior man is not a tool.” Without the Humanities, the schools are turning out workers, meant as a means, not an end.

The world may need more STEM. But the problem with STEM is that whatever is taught today is obsolete tomorrow. To teach it at the high school level is a waste of time. Even to teach it later, at university, when specialization is possible, is probably too soon. It needs to be taught continually, over one’s professional career. Something now entirely possible, with distance education.

But what is needed even more than STEM, and all the more so in times of rapid change,  is minds that are adaptable, have initiative, and know the ultimate goal.

Math Is Hard

 

From Small Dead Animals: clear proof not only that critical race theory is being taught in the Ontario public schools, but that it has even infiltrated the teaching of math.

The Day My Mama Socked It to the Loudon County PTA

 

There was a dustup a day or so ago at a school board meeting in Loudon Country, Virginia—a large number of parents came out to protest critical race theory, and were shut down by the board. It seems that the general public was unaware of just what was going on in the schools—perhaps until the pandemic let them listen in on their children’s classes—and now that they know, there is a backlash. With luck, it will carry the day.

But critical race theory is just one tentacle of an academic octopus called critical theory. It has really been around for a long time, and has spread far beyond the public schools, in one form or another. It was around already when I was in grad school back in the 1970s, although it did not have the name “critical theory” yet. I think it has been around, in essence, at least since Nietzsche.

A recent journal article gives an overview of the state of the field. It is no doubt not unimpeachable, but it is at least from the Trojan horse’s mouth: a declared critical theorist.

Our author, a professor at the University of British Columbia, identifies three intellectual strands making up “critical teory”: postmodernism, Marxism, and postcolonialism. He does not include feminism. Feminism and critical theory used to be conjoined, but there has been a recent falling out. The goals of feminism clash with the goals of transgenderism, and transgenderism has won the intersectionality sweeps. Feminism requires the assumption that there are such things as women. Postmodernism will not allow the premise.

Postmodernism holds that nothing is real. We just make things up as convenient. In the words of the present author, “meanings are neither fixed nor singular, but rather multiple and ever-shifting.”

Marxism insists that everything is at the group or social level, and everything is about power. In the words of our author, Marxism “thinks in binary terms between the oppressor and the oppressed,” and everyone must be one or the other.

Traditionally, Marxism sees this in economic terms, with the bourgeoisie as the oppressors, and the proletariat as the oppressed. Postcolonialism switches this to race instead of class. If anything is less than desirable in the world, as determined by whomever wields the arbitrary power to determine it (for nothing, according to postmodernism, can ever be good or bad in itself)  it is the fault of “Whites” or “Europeans.” For they are uniquely “colonizers.”

Put together and examined in this way, it is the very same ideology as Nazism, with “Whites” replacing “Jews” as racial scapegoats.

It is, of course, aside from being malicious, malicious nonsense.  

Postmodernism is immediately self-contradictory. The present author, for example, ponders the question, “What does criticality really mean?”--without realizing the question is now nonsensical. There are no meanings, and is no “really,“ according to criticality.

Marxism, rather than being immediately self-contradictory, is merely disproven. Marx’s plan was to put the study and management of society on a “scientific” basis: Marxism was “scientific socialism.” 

The proof of any scientific contention is in its ability to predict: this is what experiment is about. But every prediction made by Marx about the subsequent course of human history has been false. He expected a growing proletariat, and a shrinking bourgeoisie. The opposite has happened. He postulated growing wealth inequality. The opposite has happened. He anticipated a worldwide revolution led by the proletariat, happening first in the most developed countries. Nowhere has this happened, including in Russia or China. By scientific standards, he was simply wrong.

Postcolonialism maintains that colonization and empire are a uniquely European creation. This is easily disproven by a study of history. Most parts of the world have been empires and colonies throughout recorded time. The peculiarly European innovation was the nation state—in a word, postcolonialism is what Europe brought to the world. Leaving “postcolonialism” arguing against itself.

Where has such obvious nonsense come from? 

I suggest it is from the secularization of our education system. Until perhaps a hundred years ago, or roughly until Darwinism became popular, the universities and the schools were founded on religious principles. This sense of cosmic direction is necessary for education to work: if you do not know where you are going, you cannot know how to get there. Theology was Queen of the sciences, and the most advanced academic degree was “doctor of philosophy.”

But somewhere about the turn of the 20th century, that place was taken by physical science. Physical science is inadequate to the task. It is simply a tool, and offers no goal or meaning or reasons. 

Since then, we have seen the emergence of a series of “scientific” pseudo-religions to fill the vacuum: Freudian psychology, fascism-Nazism, Marxism, and so forth. Each has, after a few decades, failed in turn. Critical theory is basically the current synthesis. Marxism, disproven by science, has been put on life support by asserting, through postmodernism, that science itself is of no value. Postmodernism is nonsense, but postmodernism refuses to acknowledge sense. Postcolonialism allows all standards failed by either postmodern theory or Marxist theory to be dismissed as a racist white cultural imposition.

It actually smells very much like desperation. I would be surprised not to see it all collapse within the next few years.