Education
In his column this week at The Root, MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson made his latest launch into hyperbole as he claimed that the Trump administration "wants to return America" to the days of "white grievance, violence and discrimination" against blacks, referring to the Philadelphia transit strike of 1944 in which white workers opposed the promotion of blacks to better jobs. Johnson also coined the term "White Pride Week" to mock recent decisions by the administration on race-based college admissions and immigration policy changes.
On Wednesday, NPR’s Illinois affiliate WGLT promoted a claim without pushback by a McLean County, IL superintendent named Mark Daniel that, if the state passed a school vouchers program, the Land of Lincoln would plunge back half a century into “segregation.” Illinois is in a heated battle led by Republican Governor Bruce Rauner to enact a voucher program to allow students to succeed, individuals like Daniel and the public sector unions have resorted to such scare tactics.
August is the month when parents bid farewell to not only their college-bound youngsters but also a sizable chunk of cash for tuition. More than 18 million students attend our more than 4,300 degree-granting institutions. A question parents, their college-bound youngsters and taxpayers should ask: Is college worth it?
NPR aired a completely one-sided segment on Wednesday's Morning Edition that targeted the Attorney General Jeff Sessions's leadership of the Justice Department. Carrie Johnson played up that a possible Justice Department initiative targeting colleges' affirmative action policies on admissions was " just part of a broader rollback of Obama-era priorities in civil rights, from protecting LGBT people to drug policy to policing." The program exclusively turned to a former Obama-era official at DOJ, who bashed the attorney general for supposedly having a "decidedly anti-civil rights agenda."
The New York Times ran an astonishingly ignorant op-ed on Monday by writer Katherine Stewart, using historical fallacies to smear today’s critics of public schools as rooted in racism: “What ‘Government School’ Means.” The text box got to the point: “A phrase rooted not in libertarian economics but in Confederate rage.”
Journalist Lisa Miller has a hostile 5,500-word profile of "bully" Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos in the July 24 edition of New York magazine, complete with cloying, cutesy “portraits” of DeVos (none particularly gentle-looking) “commissioned” from schoolchildren. The headline selection serves as a reliable CliffsNotes summary of the text: “Who Is Betsy DeVos? And how did she get to be head of our schools?” The cover tag: “Betsy DeVos, Underperformer – The social promotion of an education zealot.”
What is a social justice warrior to do when confronted with racism between minorities? According to HBO's Insecure, just ignore it. In the July 30th episode, "Hella Questions," Issa (Issa Rae) and Frieda (Lisa Joyce) are faced with this question during their work at an after-school program.
One of the core ideological issues that determines a person’s political philosophy is the degree to which one believes that unfavorable external circumstances can be overcome via persistence and hard work. If an individual believes that America is a place so racist, so intractably bigoted that few, if any, minorities will escape from its systemically corrupt clutches, it naturally follows that one would advocate for governmental redistribution of wealth from the benefactors of Rawlsian chance to those with an almost Calvinist predestination for serfdom.
I have recently been reminded of one of my earliest conclusions about the American left. I arrived at that conclusion when it was relatively civilized. In those days, we called it American liberalism, but even then it was fla fla. My conclusion was that when any entity falls under the dominance of liberalism, it loses all sense of its fundamental purpose. A city loses all sense of its purpose, which is governance. A university loses all sense of its purpose, which is education.
Timothy B. Lee is the Lead Writer for the "New Money" section of the reflexively leftist Vox.com. He has looked at what has happened to the city of St. Louis during the past 60 or so years, and thinks that Ronald Reagan is largely to blame. Too bad for him that most of the reasons for St. Louis's decline have absolutely nothing to do with the Gipper.
The latest season of Netflix’s Canadian teen drama, Degrassi: Next Class, perfectly captures the left’s social agenda for 2017. The show’s 4th season, which was released July 7, features a character to represent every social issue liberals obsess over. More than half of the characters on the show are queer and/or non-monogamous, and the liberal propaganda in the show ranges from Syrian refugees (one of whom is a lesbian), to a gender non-conforming girl, to lesbian prom queens, to three students participating in a polyamorous relationship.
Is there no limit to the level of disgusting behavior on college campuses that parents, taxpayers, donors and legislators will accept? Colleges have become islands of intolerance, and as with fish, the rot begins at the head. Let's examine some recent episodes representative of a general trend and ask ourselves why we should tolerate it plus pay for it.