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The ugly reality of American education

The ugly reality of American education

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If you’ve been following the news since the barbarous attack Hamas launched against innocent Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, you’ve seen the ugly reality of American education laid bare. One has to wonder what kind of education these kids are getting that they can openly support the butchering, burning, raping, and kidnapping of defenseless infants, children, women, and men. This goes well beyond one’s political views, which of course allow for policy disagreements over the seemingly endless and intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and goes to a profound darkness implanted in their young minds and souls.

Things we thought were laid to rest decades ago, such as Anti-Semitism — hatred of Jews for being Jews — have been on full display on college campuses and on public streets in cities across the nation. These same young mush brains — joined by some not so young — who cringe at mis-pronouning someone and demand safe spaces from so-called “micro-aggressions,” apparently have no problem with beheading babies, burning children alive, or raping, kidnapping, and murdering women, all in the name of the cause célèbre they have been brainwashed to believe is the One Twue Answer.

As awful and terrifying as it has been to observe this display of hatred, it is indicative of an even more dangerous tendency that begins not just at the university level, but long prior, in elementary and high schools across the nation. As we’re seeing in not just so-called blue states, but in red and purple ones as well, increasingly the emphasis by those who purport to be educators is on social issues and not the basics of education, actually teaching the skills needed to function effectively in society and (heaven forbid!) reasoning and analytical skills. I’ve been bitching about the latter ever since I was in high school some six decades ago, so that is not new, though I think it has reached new levels of mindless conformity. The other part, however, is relatively new, just a few decades old, and also is now reaching ever higher levels of incompetence.

Does anyone wonder why it is so easy to indoctrinate a generation among which many can’t read or write in cursive, if at all, can name the most obscure celebrity but can’t name their congressperson, senator, or even the vice president, have absolutely zero knowledge of history or American constitutional values, and get what passes for news (again, if at all) from social media?

Roots of the Problem

See those two tearing down posters with photos of kidnapped children and women and laughing as they do it? They’re students (along with a third not shown in the photo) at New York University, one of the nation’s preeminent institutions of “higher education.” The one on the left is Yazmeen Deyhimi, a junior and — frighteningly — pre-law student. She once worked for the Anti-Defamation League but now apparently has lost her way. This is her feeble excuse for doing what she did:

“I have found it increasingly difficult to know my place as a biracial brown woman, especially during these highly volatile times,” she wrote. “I have felt more and more frustrated about the time we currently find ourselves in, and that misplaced anger into actions that are not an accurate representation of who I am as a person.”

“In this age of social media and digital footprint,” she babbled on, “these moments of anger are selfish and self-absorbed, and not reflective of who I am as a person or who my family had raised me to be.”

Buried in the verbiage are all one needs to know about how these students’ minds and spirits have been hijacked:

“as a biracial brown woman” — read racial and sexual politics foisted on students from before kindergarten.

“highly volatile times” — read a lack of knowledge of world history and events.

“I have felt more and more frustrated . . . and that misplaced anger . . . these moments of anger are selfish and self-absorbed” — read as an unhealthy focus on the self, leading to free-form anger and rage, and the kind of mindless behavior she was caught engaging in.

“In this age of social media and digital footprint” — read where much of the biased and misguided “information” Gen Z gets originates.

“not reflective of who I am as a person or who my family raised me to be” — read as a failure to accept responsibility and acknowledgment of who she really is, who she has become. Her family may or may not have had anything to do with that, but it’s on her now and she need not deny that reality.

Blatant Hatred and Anti-Semitism

See the girl holding the racist pink sign that reads “Please Keep the World Clean” with a garbage can holding a Star of David and into which the Jews are to be placed? She is Fahima Karim, a 19-year-old high school student at the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women in Brooklyn. She was not alone in carrying that sign, and unlike Deyhimi, she makes no attempt at concealing her blatant racism.

“I really don’t give a fuck about white lives,” she said in a previous street interview. “I don’t like white people . . . I just don’t . . . for no reason.”

In response, her school put out a mealy-mouthed statement about how it had always supported “the voice and power of our young women.”

“Unfortunately today,” the statement said, “one of our community members made a serious error in judgment. She exercised that voice and power to spread hate and anti-semetism” — misspelling anti-Semitism. It went on to promise “a thorough investigation” (as if the visual and Karim’s former statements weren’t sufficient evidence of where her sentiments lie, and the “error in judgment” apparently was in allowing herself to be photographed displaying them) “and using our restorative justice tools to heal the harm in our community and outside our school.”

And there you see the other element of the problem. School administrators and teachers who tolerate and condone certain kinds of behavior, for which there are no real consequences, but have no tolerance for speech or behavior that is contrary to their own views. Call for racial cleansing of Jews — “investigate and use restorative justice (whatever that is) tools.” Mis-pronoun someone or say biological males shouldn’t be allowed to compete in sports against women or use school rest rooms of their choosing — grounds for the most serious sanctions.

The bigger problem

It’s not just a truism to say that the future of the nation lies with its young people and their education. Prejudice, hatred, repression of free speech and ideas don’t just exist on college campuses or within the walls of schools. Those same students graduate, get jobs, enter into professions, and their misguided notions spread throughout society. We see the evidence and results of that in virtually every walk of life: In the legal profession, among judges, among academics, in politics, in Big Tech, in journalism, in the military, in sports, in entertainment, and in the further propagation to new teachers.

If you have any doubt about where the sentiments of many school administrators lie, just ask Riley Gaines, whose photo is above. Riley Gaines was denied the honors she had earned on the University of Kentucky swim team, for which she had worked all her life, when being forced to compete against a transgender biological male, Lia Thomas, in intercollegiate competition. Gaines has taken it upon herself to speak out against allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports, in an effort to preserve their integrity. But after working for decades to further and protect the rights of women, the current generation on many college campuses — with the support of their schools’ administrators, the Biden administration, and many sports and other organizations — are now more than willing to gut those rights.

Gaines was physically attacked, maligned, and forced to barricade herself in a campus room for hours until police arrived to escort her out after giving a speech at San Francisco State University in April of this year. She was accused of transphobia — which she explicitly denies — and instead of listening to her position a group of student bigots chose to assault her. Bad enough, but the reaction of university administrators was far worse. Instead of condemning the violence and attempt at shutting down free speech, they came out in support of those things.

“Last Thursday, Turning Point USA hosted an event on campus that advocated for the exclusion of trans people and athletics. The event was deeply traumatic for many in our trans and LGBTQ+ communities, and the speaker’s message outraged many members of the SF State community,” SFSU President Lynn Mahoney wrote to the campus community. She called the attack on Gaines an “unfortunate disturbance . . . that delayed the speaker’s departure.” Nowhere was there any apology to Gaines for the attack nor any recognition of her position on preserving women’s sports. For their part, the police made no arrests.

Further doubts? Ask federal judge Kyle Duncan, who was heckled during a speech to — I’m not making this up — law students at Stanford University, supposedly one of the country’s preeminent schools of “higher learning.” His crime? Refusing to use an accused sex offender’s preferred pronouns during a 2020 opinion. And when Duncan turned to the dean officiating the event to bring order to the room, instead she sided with the hecklers, saying Duncan causes “harm” through his work as a federal judge and she was “uncomfortable” with the anger that Duncan’s presence on campus led to.

Perhaps no surprise, this was Tierien Steinbach, the law school’s Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. One might well interpret those words, which are spreading like a plague across the landscape, as Conformity, Selective Inequality, and Exclusion. In this case, unlike in the SFSU one, at least Stanford’s administration took some action and Stanford Law Dean Jenny Martinez and Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne eventually apologized to Duncan. Steinbach was reported to be “on leave.”

For his part, Judge Duncan was criticized for being argumentative and calling the students “appalling idiots.” Watching their behavior, I’m inclined to agree with that description, and given how conservative speakers have been treated on college campuses in recent years one might better understand why speakers like Duncan have their guard up.

“They are forcing you to think the way they want you to think”

That’s Yeonmi Park, who at age 13 escaped North Korea with her mother, in the photo. After being held by traffickers in China the pair made it to South Korea and then, finally, to the U.S., where Park is now a citizen. She came here expecting the country to be the beacon of freedom that had attracted her. And then she went to Columbia University.

“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” Park told Fox News in a 2021 interview. “I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”

The warning signs came during orientation. Park had the temerity, thinking it was a good thing, to tell a university staff member that she loved classical literature, such as novels by Jane Austen.

“Then she [the staff member] said, ‘Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.’”

Things only got worse from there, and in every class students were asked to express their preferred pronouns.

“English is my third language,” she said. “I learned it as an adult. I sometimes still say ‘he’ or ‘she’ by mistake and now they are going to ask me to call them ‘they’? How the heck do I incorporate that into my sentences?”

“It was chaos,” she told the interviewer. “It felt like the regression in civilization . . . Even North Korea is not this nuts. North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy.”

Park’s experience at Columbia led to her second book, While Time Remains, published earlier this year. Her first book, published in 2016, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom, detailed her escape from North Korea and the journey that led her to America.

Watching the outpouring of support for the barbarity of Hamas coming from 31 student groups at Harvard, one need not wonder why what is supposed to be America’s preeminent university ranked dead last — 248th out of 248 schools — in FIRE’s annual rating of free speech on campus. The school, whose ironic motto is “Veritas” (“Truth”), officially scored zero, but FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — said Harvard’s actual score was -10.69, “…more than six standard deviations below the average and more than two standard deviations below the second-to-last school in the rankings, its Ivy League counterpart, the University of Pennsylvania. (Penn obtained an overall score of 11.13.)”

Michigan Technological University, with a score of 78.01, ranked first.

There is a huge amount more than can be said about all of this, including comparisons with my own experiences in college and grad school in earlier decades that illustrate the stark differences then — even in times of major student protest and upheaval — with now, but I think this initial installment sets the scene and provides the background for an overview of the issue. I’m sure more will follow, and this problem is one that is going to be with us for a very long time.

Featured Image: Anti-Israel students protest at Columbia University, Jeenah Moon, Reuters, via Aljazeera. Used under Fair Use.

NYU students tear down hostage posters, New York Post. Used under Fair Use.

Hate on Display, Daily Mail. Used under Fair Use.

Riley Gaines, Outkick. Used under Fair Use.

Yeonmi Park, Fox News, via Insider.com. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.

You'll Get It Eventually - Nigel Tadyanehondo - Unsplash
Going Off the Rails With No Way Back

Going Off the Rails With No Way Back

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At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon once again, there are some things that need to be said. If I’m a curmudgeon — I don’t think I am — so be it.

What brought this sudden bout of curmudeonness on, you ask? It began Saturday morning with telephone conversations with two different bankers in Maryland. I’d written two checks to a friend of mine visiting from Albania, repayment of an old debt. She took the checks to a local branch of Wells Fargo Bank (I’m naming names this time), the bank on which the checks were drawn, and someone from the branch called me to verify the checks’ legitimacy. Okay, I can see the point of that, though I wonder if they would have done the same if my friend was American or had, say, a British or Canadian passport and not an Albanian one. I also have questions about the need for a call given that Wells Fargo seems to have policies in place that deliberately make it as difficult as possible for customers to access their own funds. But that is a whole other story.

In any case, one of the checks was for $2,000.00, and the other one was for $9,000.06. I put the numerical amount as I always do, $2,000.00/100 for the first check, and $9,000.06/100 for the second one. And then I wrote out the amount in the proper format, the one I’ve been using for some 50 years virtually without incident: Two Thousand and No Hundreths Dollars, and Nine Thousand and Six Hundreths Dollars. Okay, granted, the proper spelling is hundredths, but close enough for government work since the words spell out what the numerals already show, and in my haste I dropped the “d.” But that wasn’t the issue.

Now, I don’t know, but I think anyone from about the age of 5 should know that a hundredth of a dollar is a cent. A penny. One hundredth of a dollar is one cent, six hundredths of a dollar is six cents. Even misspelled, I’d bet most 5 year olds can figure that out. But apparently this fine point is lost on Wells Fargo bankers, and I had to explain to two different genius bankers that Nine Thousand and Six Hundreths (sic) Dollars was not $9,600, but $9,000.06. The first banker said their branch policy was not to accept checks with the cents expressed that way. That made no sense to me, but finally he conceded and said they’d cash the checks. All good, right?

Not quite. A few minutes later another banker, the first one’s manager, called me, and after a few unnecessary and unwanted pleasantries, she repeated that the branch didn’t normally accept checks where the cents were expressed as they were on my check. She had me read off the amount of the check, and confirm the intended amount. I was rapidly losing my patience with this whole thing, and I told her I’d been writing checks like this for 50 years, it was the proper way to write a check, and what exactly didn’t she understand? She then feigned a brief reconsideration of the matter, and finally confirmed that they would accept the check. Hurrah. I got to tell a banker what should have been obvious to her by reading the check as it had been written. Duh.

Now I have better ways of spending my Saturday mornings than explaining the obvious to bankers, but this whole affair served to remind me the extent to which this country is going to hell in a hand basket. The signs are increasingly everywhere, how far off the rails we’re going, this just being the most recent one. It seems people, and the country as a whole, just get stupider and stupider by the day.

I’ve railed against the madness in the direction we’re headed before, but it’s time to do it again, drilling down a bit this time.

In the course of a typical day, I get messages – obviously written on a phone with a run-away spell corrector – that are virtually incomprehensible. I’m asked questions that I already answered, sometimes multiple times. And I get abbreviated messages that fail to respond to issues I raised. In short, I can almost always tell when someone is writing me from a phone, and the communication is seriously impaired as a result. This is a significant matter, since communication should be primary, not to mention I don’t understand how people don’t go crazy typing and reading on a small screen. Well, maybe they do, and we just don’t have a name yet for this mental illness.

If you’re a parent in this country, it probably doesn’t come as a surprise to you that your little darlings are no longer expected to learn cursive writing. At one point, some 45 states and the District of Columbia had dropped the requirement to teach cursive writing, and the dreaded Common Core was at least in large part responsible for that since Common Core doesn’t require cursive as part of the curriculum. Now blaming Common Cause for stupidity is a bit like blaming phones for errors. It’s the people behind Common Core who are exhibiting their ignorance, and the curriculum is just the symptomatic outcome of that.

There has been some retrenchment in a handful of states that realized the folly of dropping cursive writing from the curriculum, but overall this country is on the verge of entering a new Dark Ages where kids can’t even sign their own names. The idea is that they can do everything on a keyboard, but somehow that seems equivalent to saying they don’t need to learn to walk since they can get driven around everywhere by their parents.

Additionally, as studies confirm, the ability to write, and not just type, promotes some cognitive and motor skills that typing does not. Writing is not the same as typing, and while both skills might be worthwhile, school districts and states don’t want to spend the money teaching both. So out goes cursive writing, and with it one of the traits of an educated person. And people wonder why I’d never put any child of mine in a public, and probably most private, schools.

While this has been going on in more recent years, another long term trend – grade inflation in the nation’s colleges and universities – has been underway for more than half a century. It’s true that a degree of grade inflation began during the Vietnam War years, Recent GPA Trendswhen I was in college. Some attribute this to the desire on the part of many professors to keep students out of the draft, which worked for awhile, but based on my own experience it also probably had to do with the proliferation of pass-fail grading during the turmoil of years of sit-ins, walk-outs, and student strikes that closed some institutions, including the one I attended, for nearly entire semesters. But the grade inflation of that period pales to what has been going on since the 1980s, when grade-point averages have been rising an average of 0.1 points a decade, and the percentage of A grades given has gone up 5 to 6 percentage points a decade.

Since the 1990s, the A grade is the most common grade given in four-year colleges, and As are now three times more common than they were in 1960. At that time Cs were most common, and in my own era, Bs were most common. Now if they don’t get an A, students are at the professor’s throat as if the failing rests with the prof and not with their own performance. If you believe that is because college students have gotten that much smarter since 1960, I have a nice athletic building on a fine campus I’d like to sell you. Very good price. Just sign right here. Oh, wait, you can’t sign, because you never learned cursive. Okay, put your “X” on the line there.

Having been a college professor, I can tell you there is a strong tendency toward treating what are supposed to be young (and sometimes not so young) adults as 50 Years Rise of A Gradechildren. There is a stress on not offending the students, sandwiching any critical remarks in between praise, not being unduly harsh in comments even in the face of abject and repeated refusal on the part of the student to follow guidance. This is called the Student as Consumer Era, and it is indicative of schools that need to cultivate their students to stay enrolled and to pay the exorbitant tuitions and fees charged them and their parents. And instead of challenging their minds and belief systems, these educational institutions allow students to retreat to so-called “safe spaces” and to drive speakers with views divergent from their own off campus, allowing a new form of Fascism and sheltered closed-mindedness to run rampant on college campuses.

Moving from the swamp of so-called education, we have cars that stop themselves or keep themselves in their own lanes, ostensibly so their owners (“drivers” is too strong a word for them) can text and talk on the phone. Things seem increasingly geared toward the lazy and the ignorant. My own car turns its own lights on and off, doesn’t have a key, and tells me how many miles I can go before I run out of fuel. Thank goodness it doesn’t stop itself or do that lane thing, which would be way beyond what I would tolerate of my car. It does open its own trunk, though, for unknown reasons and at very inconvenient times, sometimes multiple times in a row. I guess taunting its owner is part of the deal. I can almost hear it laugh when it does this.

In the course of all these trends, we continue to lose human contact at an almost alarming rate. My most recent two forays into paying entry fees – one at a movie theater, the other at a major conference I attended – were done at terminals. Gone were the friendly ticket girl and the helpful conference gatekeeper, replaced by screens and credit card readers and keyboards. That may all be more efficient, but it’s a bit disconcerting, too. My local Walmart has installed all sorts of self-check-out equipment, but I have never found self-check-out to be faster or more efficient than dealing with a human cashier, and it’s also a tad insulting, I think. If the store wants my money, it should at least have a sufficient number of humans on hand to take it. So, unless I have just one or two items and am in a major hurry, I won’t use the self-check-out.

Meanwhile, the medical profession – one area that might benefit from more, rather than less, technology in enabling improved communication between physicians and patients – remains mired back a century or two. If anyone is able to email their doctor, or even their doctor’s office, I’d love to hear about it. And our prescription drug system seems designed to breed frustration and inefficiency, and we wonder why healthcare costs continue to escalate. I’ve written on these things before, and on the inherent inequities and inefficiencies of the medical system, and the most I’ve gotten in response from doctors is a smile and a laugh, as if I were proposing absurdities.

Call me a curmudgeon if you like, but somehow this all feels like we’re headed off the rails with no way back. Maybe, as the illustration says, you’ll get it eventually, but by then it might be — probably will be — too late. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am. Am I the only one who feels this way? I’d love to hear your thoughts on all this, regardless which side of things you come down on.

Charts from http://www.gradeinflation.com