Academia

With Dread and Foreboding

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So, how do I regard Election Day, looming up in two weeks? With dread and foreboding, to be absolutely frank – no matter who is declared victorious. It’s absolutely guaranteed that all flaming hell will break out in either case; either within hours/minutes, or in days/weeks.

If the Trump/Vance ticket sweeps to an unmistakable, unarguable landslide well beyond any means of the Democrat Party to fraud – the anti-Trumpists will be insane with baffled fury. The national media establishment will look like Wily Coyote after one of his Acme gadgets explodes – and the entrenched bureaucracy crusted like layers and barnacles all over the various federal government departments … they will see the end of their comfortable gravy train. Ruin, disgrace, impoverishment, possibly criminal charges. The Deity knoweth and the various conservative-sympathetic bloggers and commenters, to include many fellow Chicagoboyz essayists and frequent commenters, remember very well how blatantly they played dirty pool the last time around. What would they venture this time against the Great Orange One, the avatar of their doom … Political assassination? Of him, or any of his allies? At the height of what some commenters have termed a second civil war? Like Lincoln, at the hands of an angry partisan of the losing side? Sadly. I wouldn’t put it beyond the realm of possibility. This will be bad. Very bad.

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Dedicated Followers of Fashion

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It’s kind of depressing, reading the various stories linked here and there by various blogs and social media about pro-Palestinian/pro-terrorist orgies of protest on the grounds of various colleges and universities, and in the streets of certain big cities. This reminds me of the anti-war demos of the Vietnam War era. Massive turnout, lots of signs, lots of free-floating rhetoric … which turned out to mean absolutely nothing at all, in the long run. Much of the ruckus wasn’t motivated by sincere conviction about the welfare of the South Vietnamese, or the lives of our military troops. It was all just the followers of fashion, making a show of their fashionable conviction.

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Random Thoughts (2) : Education Edition

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1) Richard Fernandez:

“The actual purpose of much that is called education is not to teach a trade, or take you stumbling to the limits of the undiscovered but to put you in a position to laugh at people.”

2) From Thomas Sowell’s Ever Wonder Why?

Anyone who is serious about wanting to help minority young people must know that the place to start is at precisely the other end of the educational process. That means beginning in the earliest grades teaching reading, math and other mental skills on which their future depends. But that would mean clashing with the teachers’ unions and their own busybody agenda of propaganda and psychological manipulation in the classrooms.

“The path of least resistance is to give minority youngsters a lousy education and then admit them to college by quotas. With a decent education, they wouldn’t need the quotas.”

3) From the Brookings Institution’s SAT Math Scores Mirror and Maintain Racial Inequity

“Relying on a three-digit number to assess a student’s math ability clouds their drive, their resilience, and may impact their confidence in pursuing postsecondary education…

…..In 2019, the SAT developed an adversity score to contextualize students’ scores to their school and neighborhood. Under pressure, the College Board then abandoned the single statistic in favor of an Environmental Context Dashboard, which provides information like the portion of students at a high school receiving free and reduced lunch, median family income, and advanced-placement enrollment.

Colleges are starting to consider socioeconomic status in a more systematic way, and the College Board is too. This is vitally important, given how far achievement has already splintered along racial and class lines by the time students are about to graduate high school.”

I will add that at the end of the Brookings article the authors do detail ways of boosting disadvantaged students’ actual pre-college performance. That’s what is called in the trade as CYA, but ask yourself which is more likely to happen in the post-Fair Admissions v. Presidents and Fellows of Harvard world? Hiding affirmative action programs under some version of an “Environmental Context Dashboard” or actually breaking the rice bowls of the K-12 establishment?

More vouchers please.

Why Johnny Doesn’t Want to Read

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The other day Instapundit linked an article on the role of public school reading assignments in discouraging boys from taking up reading for pleasure. The subject is familiar to anyone to anyone who read Christina Hoff Sommers’ book on the subject.  In short, K-12 reading assignments don’t match up with boys’ interests. Boys prefer activity-oriented plot-based stories, schools gravitate toward girls’ interests – quoting Sommers, “[p]ersonal narratives full of emotion and self-disclosure.” I’ll have more to say on that later.

This has me waxing (mostly unpleasantly) nostalgic about my own school-age reading assignments. The earliest one I can recall is of A Tale of Two Cities. I remember scarcely anything about London and a few highlights about Paris. Shakespeare is something I could take only in small doses due to the language barrier. I liked the plot synopses and some of the more memorable passages such as Polonius’ advice to Laertes (someone should CGI W. C. Fields into the role of Polonius). One junior high class assigned two entertaining movie scripts – Colossus: The Forbin Project and Escape from the Planet of the Apes. At home my literary gateway to the world was World Book Encyclopedia; I especially loved the maps and the articles on foreign locales and peoples and exotic animals. I did not grow up reading novels or even comic books. In my late teens I tried reading my mom’s Agatha Christie novels, but for some reason I couldn’t quite get into them. 

High school offered (ahem) textbook examples of what’s wrong with school reading assignments. I have finally gotten around to posting Amazon reviews for the three high school reading assignments that turned me off to reading.

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Best Eaten Cold

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Revenge, as the old saying has it, is a dish best served cold. And revenge may not be the only – or the most dangerous – platter best dished up chilled. That would be the dish of anger – that ice-cold, sullen reservoir of fury in the hearts of every right-of-center, non-elite, law-abiding flyover-country middle American with Tea Partyish inclinations … a dish of anger ready to serve up in the wake of a just-barely unsuccessful political assassination attempt this last weekend.

You see, there is a considerable difference between hot fury and cold. Hot fury is impulsive, immediately violent, reactive and more often misplaced. It’s the unthinking destructive fury of the mob, lashing out indiscriminately. Cold fury, on the other hand, does not manifest itself in such spectacular fashion. Cold fury is focused, calculated, unspectacular; it takes its time, waiting for the optimum moment. Cold fury usually can’t be appeased, once unleashed. As I wrote some time ago, regarding the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance –

“The image of a “vigilante” most usually implies a disorganized mob; lawless, mindlessly violent, easily steered but ultimately uncontrollable. The Vigilance Committee was something much, much worse than that. They were organized, they were in earnest, they would not compromise – and they would not back down.”

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