It’s a special kind of poison, the sudden primacy and popularity of CRT – critical race theory – now hanging in the air like a particularly malignant smog in our workplaces, schools, and universities. It wouldn’t be so malignant, damaging, and counter-productive if it was truly the anti-racism awareness training that it pretends to be, or if it were completely even-handed in being critical of racism across all the spectrum of human colors and backgrounds. But it’s not: as CRT is practiced currently and apparently profitably by race-hustlers of all colors on the rest of us has one focus and one focus only – to blame those whose’ ancestors originated in Northern Europe for the woes and considerable shortcomings of everyone else, without the barest hint of acknowledgement that many of those woes and shortcomings in the African-American communities are self-inflicted. (It would be nice if this would be acknowledged by the CRT warriors, but there will be hundreds of pigs flying in tight combat-box formation overhead before that ever happens.)
CRT mandatory training in workplaces – we’re adults, we can endure, I suppose. I’ve been there, done that, although I will say that those mandatory command briefings weren’t quite so awful and pointless when I was last bidden to participate. Sit stone-faced in the mandatory reeducation/struggle sessions, ask embarrassing questions if we feel reckless and are near enough retirement age, sufficiently verbally and rhetorically combative, or have a skill which makes us readily re-employable. Even consult with a lawyer and bring suit claiming that such mandatory struggle sessions create a bitterly hostile workspace environment is not totally out of the question for adults.
As for colleges engaging in CRT malignancy – well, college. Higher miseducation is where all of this was spawned anyway.
But when it comes to willfully and deliberately mangling the self-image of our kids, down to kindergarten-level … now, as the country song used to have it, you’re getting on the fighting side of me. And that is the point where many otherwise passive parents and state legislatures ( like this one) are getting on their hind-legs and connecting with their inner parental wolf, snarling “You do not get to do this to my kid!”
Which is reassuring, on a certain level. Nice to know there are limits to progressive idiocy. The parents at a couple of insanely expensive private academies have led the charge, as related in these stories. This is understandable, in a way. They are very comfortably situated in the higher rungs of the middle class and paying a bomb to have their spawn educated – not to be abused by the latest educational fad. Which is what CRT in the junior public schools is – not a shred of a doubt in my formerly-military-mind. Systematically set about as authority-figures, to destroy the self-confidence, the self-image of a small child? Slander that child in a public forum with a guilt-trip for something that they had no possible part in, condemn them for the color of their skin, accuse them of having benefited from the so-called privilege marked by the color of their skin … basically accuse them of crimes they had never done, merely on account of the color of their skin…
There’s a couple of terms for that when parents and authority-figures do that individually and in private. Like emotional abuse. Or child molestation. Yes, I’ll say that one right out: the teachers, administrators and assorted race hustlers who are pushing CRT on school children are child molesters. They are shamelessly inflicting emotional molestation on the kids of Anglo/North European pallor in their classrooms and doing even worse damage to those kids of color, essentially telling them that nothing they can ever do will lead to success because malignant “whiteness” will sabotage them at every turn. (And don’t even get me started for now on the fraud that is the 1619 project, and the educrats who are pushing it.)
It’s child molestation, straight up – all at the hands of addled teachers and academics leaping onto a malignant fad. No wonder that parents and state legislatures are fighting back, at long last. Comment as you see fit.
I think your point is not at all overstated; child molestation is less evil because of the physical activity itself (I know, I’m not very strong on the Haidt value of the sacred and so saying that may affront – and probably rightly – some readers) than the theft of a child’s innocence, the breaking of the barrier that separates and protects a child’s growing sense of self, of independence, of integrity, of a circle in which they can exercise their will to define themselves.
And I can’t imagine anything worse than an early indoctrination in a remarkably unhealthy tribalism, as well as the implicit sense that it is not individual responsibility that is being nurtured and growing into a person with integrity but rather a willful vision that the responsibility for one’s own problems lies in another’s hands. These are the same idiots that (tribalism) think that a child responds to characteristics it quickly associates with loving caregivers has been infected with racism. To some extent tribalism is going to be inherent and to some extent it is a not unhealthy sense of identity with family, group. This takes the worst and wants to destroy the best of that human tendency. I appreciate your clear description; I really hate these people and want them nowhere near anyone I love, anyone I want to grow up, anyone I want to have a sense of identity, of responsibility, of integrity, of, well, maturity.
Both sorts of child molestation are equally evil, Ginny – and that is, I think why parents are getting so furious about it all. That awful Weingarten woman … well, words fail. CRT is another one of those educational fads, as I see it – only a thousand more times damaging to children than whole-word reading, new math and commie (oops, sorry!) common core. It’s educational sickies on a power trip, enthusiastically setting about destroying children, emotionally and perhaps intellectually, and enjoying a self-righteous thrill as they do so. No wonder that parents are enraged, especially when it appears that teachers doing this are colluding in trying to hide it from parents. I’m not surprised that at least three state legislatures are considering banning it – the representatives must have had their phone lines melt down, once parents got a load of what the CRT fanatics were doing to their children.
only a thousand more times damaging to children than whole-word reading, new math..
I would agree that the whole-word method of teaching reading is damaging. Connecting words and sounds by phonics is much more efficient, and contrary to Ed School honchos, children like the drills to learn the word-sound combinations. “Drill and kill” doesn’t mean the same thing to a 6 year old as it does to an adult. A 6 year old would say, “You mean I can chant ‘drill and kill’ for several minutes? Great!”
However, “new math” is a mixed bag. I learned high school math by UICSM (University of Illinois Committee on Secondary Math), a.k.a. Illinois math, a.k.a. new math. From what I have read, UICSM was the pioneer in new math.
I very much liked the UICSM new math approach. From the beginning, we learned proofs, which made math much more interesting for me. Decades later, when I took a Linear Algebra course that emphasized proofs- most of the class got below a C- my UICSM practice came in handy.
While I liked it, I also knew that UICSM new math was not for everyone. It was for the top 5-10% or so, but for the rest, the proofs were too much. Max Beberman developed UICSM while teaching at the University of Illinois lab school. UICSM worked very well there, but faculty brats hardly constitute a representative sample of the population. My junior class President, a solid B student back when grades actually meant something, wrote “No more math misery” in my yearbook.
Your stating that the CRT nonsense pushed on schoolchildren can be very damaging is a point very well taken. I wonder how many parents are actually going to take up the gauntlet and fight back against the CRT folk.
Early on I knew that CRT was a scam. I refer to a doctoral dissertation about applying CRT to black female middle school principals. The dissertation’s author was a black female middle school principal.
Her school district did not renew her initial contract because there was ample proof she was not a competent administrator. As proof of that: within three months of her becoming principal at that middle school, nearly half the teaching staff signed a grievance petition against her.
As she had previously been an assistant principal at the school, one couldn’t claim that the grievance came from her not being familiar with the school.
While some might consider the grievance petition an example of racism against her, many black teachers signed the petition against her- including a teacher who had won a commendation from the school board for writing science curriculum. In addition, the previous principal, promoted to a supervisory role at district HQ, was several shades darker and also had the support of her staff.
A black female middle school administrator who had a track record as an incompetent administrator wrote a dissertation to claim that CRT explained the problems of black female middle school administrators. It’s not incompetence, it’s racism!
Ironically this failed school administrator has focused her university career on training school administrators. Which reminds me of the old crack, “those who can’t, teach.” Those who can’t administer, train administrators.
There is no better example of the left’s conviction that blacks have inadequate IQ to prosper than CRT.
CRT is not a movement of or for black Americans. It is completely and totally a project of very liberal white women, to attempt to silence and humiliate other whites who they view as their inferiors, and who must be put in their place. Blacks are just a tool to them in that mission.
I agree with Brian. Remember the Symbionese Liberation Army was begun by leftist white women teaching black prisoners to read. The same theme.
I wonder how much the embrace of bad (even pornographic) literature in high school lit classes, the 1619 project, and CRT comes from a defensiveness by many teachers – they know their education is pretty much a scam, their degrees are, and their jobs are. (If they don’t, they should.)
Most of the academy is corrupt beyond recovery. They have allowed scholarship and actual “work of value” to be inundated under a flood of “publish or perish” and grade inflation.
Time was, you actually had to demonstrate some merit and some scholarly skills in order to attain a degree in much of anything. These days? It’s all credential-milling, grinding out finer and finer grades of dreck.
Used to be, you could count on being able to hold a conversation with a college graduate, and expect them to have enough of a basis in Western Civ in order to grasp allusions like Sisyphus and the like. Today? LOL… Dude, you’re talking to a generation of vipers, raised up in our own bosoms by Frankfurt School parasites who escaped death under the Nazis by coming to America, and who then did their best to corrupt and destroy the intellectual soil they fell into.
Don’t know where it is going to end, but I can see the long Western experiment with the University and the academy coming to an end within my lifetime. Society will inevitably route around the institutions that want to destroy it from within, and you can see it happening now.
What is interesting to watch is all these rabid educationists commit suicide in public, entirely bereft of any sign of self-awareness or understanding what they’re doing. It’s like the idiots working for defunding the police, who fail to understand the effect of that, the next time they need to call 911 for an emergency. None of these idiots are signing up for basic self-defense courses, arming themselves, or showing any sign whatsoever of an understanding of what “defunding the police” will actually mean, in their own lives.
Same with the academy. The geniuses who are trying to teach that English grammer is racist and unnecessary are entirely oblivious to the fact that if they’re correct, then there’s really no point to an English department, now is there? Why do they even have jobs, if they have the courage of their convictions?
Ginny
I wonder how much the embrace of bad (even pornographic) literature in high school lit classes, the 1619 project, and CRT comes from a defensiveness by many teachers – they know their education is pretty much a scam, their degrees are, and their jobs are. (If they don’t, they should.)
As a former teacher, I’d say that teachers’ consensus is that most of what they “learned” in Ed School was nonsense that had no relevance to what they saw every day in their classrooms. It’s not difficult to view Ed School as a scam. (In addition, Ed School has been that way for generations, judging from the comments from older relatives who were in the teaching profession.The nonsense just gets updated, though it has gotten worse in recent years.)
Given the hours that teachers put in, they don’t view their jobs as a scam- it’s too exhausting to be a scam. Also given the exhausting nature of their jobs, they don’t take kindly to administrations not backing them up on student discipline. Consider what happened when a woke school superintendent in St. Paul put the school in a “social justice” mode for discipline. All hell broke loose. While St. Paul is the exception, nonetheless trends in the last generation[s] make it more difficult for teachers to maintain order in the classroom. DuckDuckGo: Valeria Silva Saint Paul school superintendent fired.
Regarding CRT/1619 Project etc., these are examples of the higher-ups informing teachers once again, “You better get with the program.” Every year there is some new inservice stuff that teachers are told they MUST incorporate into their teaching. CRT or 1619 Project would be just one more example. Here we go again.
CRT will also make it more difficult to discipline students. Which means that teachers will see it as something imposed on them that will make their jobs more difficult. No, they won’t have to be rocket scientists to realize that.
I suspect that many teachers lack the knowledge to see through the 1619 Project’s many bloopers.
The California state college system was created as a teachers’ college system. Then they wanted to grant graduate degrees and it became a parallel but lesser UC system. Some had great faculty. VD Hansen taught the classics and classical Greek and Latin to Hispanic kids at Fresno State.
The Ed Departments were always the weak link. Teaching people how to teach has always been boring. Phonics was a boring system to teach so they came up with more interesting (to Ed school faculty) concepts like “Whole Language” and times tables were boring so we got “New Math.”
The nuns taught me sentence diagramming so I learned grammar. Does any school still teach diagramming sentences ? Someone the other day asked about adjective rank order. Yes, we learned that.
On school discipline, maybe that is why teachers are reluctant to come back to school. And, yes, CRT will make it impossible. That is why vouchers have to come soon. One big reason Ron DeSantis was elected FL Governor was his support for school vouchers and charter schools. He got a lot black votes for that.
“One big reason Ron DeSantis was elected FL Governor was his support for school vouchers and charter schools. He got a lot black votes for that.”
Republicans should be doing targeted direct mail, focusing specifically on the education issue, in heavily-black areas with known bad schools. Radio & possibly TV ads, too
But this assumes some minimal level of marketing competence in Republican organizations, which I have rarely observed.
But this assumes some minimal level of marketing competence in Republican organizations, which I have rarely observed.
This is what we have instead.
The Republican Party, of which I have been a registered voter forever, has gone where no party should ever go: into the abyss of personality cult.
Last week, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy dropped the hammer on arch-conservative Rep. Liz Cheney, bouncing her from the third most powerful position in House GOP leadership, because she has the audacity to insist the sun rises in the east, that two plus two equals four and the 2020 presidential election was not stolen from Donald J. Trump.
Then, two hours later, after leaving a White House meeting with President Biden, McCarthy told waiting reporters, “I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election. I think that is all over with.”
This is what Vichy Republicans are obsessed with. I voted for Nixon in 1960. I think my “forever” is longer than his. No concern that Trump was reaching out to new voters.
So, it’s no longer my party. It’s no longer Ronald Reagan’s party, or Dwight Eisenhower’s party, or Theodore Roosevelt’s and especially Honest Abe’s. The Republican Party is the Trump party, period. It stands for whatever he says it stands for.
What does it stand for ? This person, with a radio show in CA has no idea. Teddy Roosevelt was a “Progressive” and his ego gave us Wilson the segregationist and fascist.
Back in the day, a High School degree, albeit, one that meant something, was considered completely sufficient preparation to teach primary school. I had a couple of elderly relatives that did just that. Further, it was farmed out mostly to young women who were probably predisposed to put up with young children and repetition of the same drills and exercises year after year. It was the children that changed, not the material.
It worked fairly well. At the end the children could read, write, do arithmetic and had a basic understanding of society that let them go on to more demanding studies or into the workplace as it was then. All it really took was a sympathetic adult, a room and few simple materials.
“A” will always come before “B”, two and two will always be four and George Washington will always be the first President. What, outside of actual history, justifies any change in the syllabus through the eighth grade in the last 150 years? Pluto? Whatever personal fulfillment there is from elementary teaching will never be from novelty of the material unless reasons are constantly manufactured to make it change.
I agree that CRT may be the tipping point that will end the idea that a public education is a meaningful accomplishment. Public education will become, like public housing, something that only those with no alternative will use.
Expect the education mafia to push even harder to make any private alternatives more expensive and difficult. Especially home schooling.
Home schooling is where real innovation is occurring.
During the school shutdown, some families began “pod schooling” in which parents would take turns doing the teaching. Now,
A typical setup is that kids attend physical schools, with desks, teachers, uniforms, and so on two to three days per week and are homeschooled the other days. One might think of hybrid homeschools as more formalized versions of homeschool co-ops. The schools handle most of the mechanics—lesson plans, grading, transcripts—but parents are meant to be the main influences on their own kids and to teach, facilitate, and support lessons at home.
American society is increasingly interested in personalized, bespoke solutions—for music, dining, everything. Hybrid homeschools, as small institutions with strong identities and highly responsive to parents, are an example of the desire for more personalization coming together with the desire for more small, local-community interaction.
When my grandson was struggling with Common Core math in 4th grade his teach told his mother than she could not do the problems using Common Core, either. She suggested his mother teach him at home using traditional math. Fortunately, his parents found a good charter school for him and his siblings.
Charter schools are even higher on the education mafia’s hit list because they both soak up money that would otherwise go down the rat hole and show how pathetically incompetent the mafia is in actually educating students.
If Script’s had survived, do you think the spelling bees would still be televised when every finalist was home schooled. A college diploma no longer does anything except raise the odds that the holder is literate.
Mike K
When my grandson was struggling with Common Core math in 4th grade his teach told his mother than she could not do the problems using Common Core, either.
That illustrates several problems with curriculum “reform” -especially math curriculum “reform.” First, curriculum “reforms”, a.k.a. Ed School fads,that the Ed Schools foist upon us are usually adopted en masse before they have been adequately tested. It’s a safe assumption that your grandson’s teacher was more a typical teacher than she was an incompetent idiot. Before rolling out Common Core math problem solving for everyone, the Ed School honchos should have thoroughly tested it. Had they done so, they would have realized that ordinary teachers had problems with understanding and thus teaching the Common Core approach to solving math problems.
Ed School fads didn’t start yesterday. From what teachers in the family tree said, I conclude that Ed School fads have been with us for generations- though due to increased centralization their effects are worse today.
An Ed School fad is foisted upon the public. Its proponents believe that it will overturn the experience of 2,000 years of formal classroom instruction- the new theory that will explain everything.The Ed School fad is adopted en masse. Only after its being adopted en masse is it thoroughly researched. After five years or so of research results, the newest Ed School fad is shown to not produce the results is proponents claimed. No problem. A new Ed School fad is on the way. The old Ed School fad is dead, Long live the new Ed School fad.
A further problem with curriculum “reform” is that while it may have worked in some select settings, there are inevitably going to be problems when it is adopted en masse.
Consider one problem with new math. There are multiple reports that that the teaching of multiplication and division skills went by the wayside when new math was put into thousands of elementary school classrooms. A math professor of mine had met Max Beberman, the inventor of UICSM-Illinois Math, the new math program I had in high school. My professor informed me that Max Beberman told him that he never intended that multiplication and division skills be abandoned.
Maybe so, Max, but that’s precisely what happened. Brilliant Max teaching brilliant Illini faculty brats had no problem juggling teaching new math along with teaching multiplication and division skills. Unfortunately, less-than-brilliant elementary school teachers couldn’t do the same juggling that Max Beberman could.
(I was perhaps fortunate to not be exposed to new math until 9th grade, by which time I had a good knowledge of multiplication and division skills. BTW, I believe that the Associative and Commutative theorems I learned in new math helped me to become a good estimator.)
I especially noted the New Math debacle, as I caught it in the neck when it was instituted in my school around third, maybe fourth grade. One semester we were happily memorizing the multiplication tables and “gozintas” (goes-into-so-many-times) and working out word problems and then … whammo, in the next semester, New Math landed like a bomb, and I wound up hating and avoiding mathematics for the next decade or so, save for a single semester of HS algebra and scoring high enough on the SAT that I didn’t have to take any college remedial courses in it.
My sister caught the ‘whole word’ reading craze in her classes, and never did really take to reading as omnivorously as my next-younger brother and I did, as we had been taught the good old-fashioned phonics.
A family giggle is the fact that my ex-wife, mother of my three oldest children, was taught to read by the “See-Say” method, also called “whole language.” As a result, when she became a college freshman, she flunked the English screening test and had to take “English 100y” also called “Dumbbell English” befroe she could take 100a and b. She angrily denies the “dumbbell English” slur but I remember. Her major? Elementary Education.
Actually, she is quite intelligent but the “Whole Language” fad did her in in spelling. She should have had nuns. Every week we would have a class spelling bee. Each kid that missed a word had to sit down until only one was left. No microaggressions there.
scoring high enough on the SAT that I didn’t have to take any college remedial courses in
I’m sure you will be relieved to know that UC has dropped the SAT for admission. No more “Remedial” courses. Nobody knows nuffin.
Too old for new math and had kids too late for it. But I’ve a friend a few years younger who laughed when I equated the stupid whole word with new math – she said she’d loved new math. I said she was the first person I’d met who did – she said it worked on the same principle as the computer languages she learned later and that was just the way she thought. We became friends because she was the person who taught us how to put our courses up for distance learning – we both talked a lot and she had great stories, but we also became friends because I pretty much moved into the back of her classroom so she could help me – without her I would never have been able to teach that way, since she explained (sometimes of course multiple times) so much about how the program worked that I eventually got up something that actually worked for me and my students. She is really really sharp and her mind does work in a different way from most of my other, more liberal artsy friends.
In 1963 for the second time (the first was when her first two were born in the forties) my mother went back to school to renew her teaching certificate. She drove to Kearney to the Teacher’s College there and would come home every night complaining about the teaching courses – the absurdities, etc. She took some others to get up her credits – in rural schools you taught several subjects – but the teaching courses she kept seeing as insulting. My first year in the dorm, the girl next door was memorizing the pay scales of teachers in the U.S. instead of anything related to children or subject matter. In my sophomore year a girl sitting next to me in a lit class who’d been in my honors freshmen class said she wasn’t going to take any 200 level classes because for teaching she only needed 100 and she also dropped that course – an expository writing that required 16 papers and 16 rewrites a semester. At that point, I swore I’d never take an education course, even though it meant others were getting somewhat low-paying but professional jobs as teachers when we graduated and I got a job at the library which paid 10 cents more per hour because I had a B.A. Of course, I’ve mixed feelings on which was the wise course, but I have always felt lucky not to have sat through one of those. I’m sure my experience was partial and my tendency toward too quick conclusions are the things that prejudice is made of, still . . . I don’t see in these comments much that makes me think differently.
Ginny
Too old for new math and had kids too late for it. But I’ve a friend a few years younger who laughed when I equated the stupid whole word with new math – she said she’d loved new math. I said she was the first person I’d met who did – she said it worked on the same principle as the computer languages she learned later and that was just the way she thought.
My new math experience also, though not in precisely those words. New math was good for future STEM majors, but not for more ordinary students. Which is why Max Beberman’s UICSM-new math worked fine for Ilini faculty brats at the lab school but not as well for more ordinary students. And best that students learned multiplication and division before taking on new math.
She drove to Kearney to the Teacher’s College there and would come home every night complaining about the teaching courses – the absurdities, etc.
Some things never change. Though in defense of Education courses, a well-run pedagogy (nuts and bolts) course can be helpful for prospective teachers. It is not necessarily intuitively obvious how to teach a given material to a given population. First graders like mass recitation. Twelfth graders do not. As there has been formal classroom instruction for 2,000 years, there is a track record for what works and what doesn’t work.
When I was student teaching, a teacher gave me a rough outline for a lesson that was quite similar to the Toastmaster’s outline for a speech. Say what you’re going to do. Do it. Then at the end sum up what you’ve done.
In 1963 for the second time (the first was when her first two were born in the forties) my mother went back to school to renew her teaching certificate.
My ex-wife had a lifetime teaching credential. About 1995, Pete Wilson made a big effort to reduce class size (the dejour issue) and hired a bunch of new teachers. Those with a credential, like she had, were only required to take a test called “CBEST.” She told me it was 8th grade material. Of course there was an outcry about it being “racist.”
She had been laid off a bank VP job in a bank merger and decided to do a temp teaching gig until she found another job. She had always been a big public school advocate. I put the kids in private school after we divorced. She took a job in the San Gabriel Valley in a school with a mixed blue collar/white collar parent population. She had not taught in 30 years, since our first was born. She was appalled at what she found. The teachers were dumb, not concerned with the kids. Some would ridicule kids in the teachers’ room. No encouragement from the principal. She complimented a second grade teacher on her work and the woman burst into tears. No one had ever complimented her. She stayed 6 months and told me if she were to do it again she would home school our kids.
The principal lived near her and she would see him in the market. He would come over and try to convince her to return. He told her she was his best teacher. And she had not taught in 30 years.
Back in the Jurassic, our High School Latin teacher (no kidding! — they used to teach Latin in High School) talked one time about the challenge of introducing new teaching methods in Latin. The problem, he said, was that every experiment worked.
The reason the experiment worked was because it generally involved the most motivated teachers, it was new, it was exciting. The pupils (remember that word?) got caught up in the teacher’s enthusiasm, and the new method of teaching was demonstrated to give improved results.
But when it was rolled out to the general population, it quickly became old hat. Teachers lost their enthusiasm, and pupils performance declined.
The subsequent failure of so many fads in education seems to support his perspective.
@ Gavin,
What you’re outlining is the Hawthorne Effect, a thing that has long bedeviled any sort of research involving human beings, rather than inert objects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
The insidious thing about this effect is that it can make nearly anything look like a Really Good Idea(tm), and it’s nearly impossible to design out of your “validate the new idea” experimentation. If you go looking for the actual research studies and experimentation behind a lot of our oh-so-up-to-date social research, what you’re going to find is a lot of this going on. It’s why, I would further speculate, that there’s such a massive disconnect going on between what the bright lights are saying and what actually works out in the real world. My guess is that a lot of the current “reproducibility crisis” we’re experiencing stems from this exact factor.
Most of the work-product of the modern academic is utterly useless tripe. The fact that they never discuss things like this in the course of their erudite discussions speaks volumes as to why. It’s a quantum observer effect, quite real, and never really acknowledged.
It’s also why most of these “social experiments” just don’t work the way they’re advertised. Young enthusiastic researchers caught up in the throes of a “good idea” will not ever get the same results as a jaded middle-aged seen-it-all going-through-the-motions-until-retirement type will, using the same exact procedures and methodologies.
Euclid said it most succinctly: There is no royal road to learning, and anyone who tries for one is usually an idiot. Trying to short-circuit all the drill-and-kill stuff left kids totally unable to see the patterns and connections between mathematical concepts, and when you try to do the same thing with reading, you get the same failure syndromes. There are a few kids whose minds work in the ways imagined by the theorists, but they’re not the majority, and that’s not the way to pattern your entire educational systems, in order to satisfy them.
It wouldn’t be so malignant, damaging, and counter-productive if it was truly the anti-racism awareness training that it pretends to be
‘So’ being the weighty word; it would still be malignant.
Society will inevitably route around the institutions that want to destroy it from within, and you can see it happening now.
But whose society will it be? Not this one.