1. Robby Soave writes about a math curriculum proposal in Seattle,
This is verbatim from the proposal: Students will be able to “identify the inherent inequities of the standardized testing system used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color,” “explain how math has been used to exploit natural resources,” and “explain how math dictates economic oppression.” Each of these statements are debatable, but they are not being presented as such. It would be one thing to hold a class discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of standardized testing, but what’s happening here is that students are being trained to reject standardized testing due to its “inherent inequity,” which is asserted as some kind of proven fact.
2. Philip Carl Salzman writes,
no one was quicker to adopt grievance “social justice” than university administrators, who have hired thousands of “diversity and inclusion officers,” including at the highest levels of administration for salaries up to half a million dollars a year, to police thoughts and speech among students and faculty. A sideline is enforcing Obama administration Title IX demands that they persecute male students that any female complains about. With their “social justice” police force in place, administrators have gone on to establish racial segregation in housing, eating facilities, and university salaries, and well as to admit, fund, hire and promote on the basis of sex, gender, race, and ethnicity. Every American criterion of merit, universal values, democracy, and due process has been thrown out by just about every university administration.
If you are in the mood for a rant, read Salzman’s entire essay.
3. And if you are in a mood for another rant, there is Victor Davis Hanson.
A typical college-admission application is loaded with questions to the high-school applicant about gender, equality, and bias rather than about math, language, or science achievements. How have you suffered rather than what you know and wish to learn seems more important for admission. The therapeutic mindset preps the student to consider himself a victim of cosmic forces, past and present, despite belonging to the richest, most leisured, and most technologically advanced generation in history. Without a shred of gratitude, the young student learns to blame his ancestors for what he is told is wrong in his life, without noticing how the dead made sure that almost everything around him would be an improvement over 2,500 years of Western history.
He just takes off from there.
I never meant for the oppressor-oppressed axis to define progressivism. Eliminating consideration of all other causal factors in the world might be termed reductionist progressivism.
As a non US citizen, I think that the US is going to be financially crushed, most obviously by China, by virtue of turning out a generation that is functionally useless, having no abilities other that complaining.
When I was a kid, there was a lot of writing about the US vs. Europe, and the difference is, I guess, personality and “spirit”. In particular, the US was associated with the pros and cons of “youth”, energetic, dynamic, mobile, and adventurous, but also impetuous and rash and foolish and crude in tastes. Europe was “mature” / “old”, sclerotic, “spent”, enervated, entrenched, but also refined and sophisticated and “wise”.
Over the course of my lifetime, with the exception of very few places and industries, I’ve seen the US become an “old” country, but just the downsides, with none of the upsides. Meanwhile, China – while demographically old – now strikes me as the economically “young” country in spirit. See, e.g..
Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the current California fires and blackouts (“What did they use for light in California before candles? Electricity!”), and the apathetic resignation everyone seems to have about a situation that everyone tolerates out of a kind of feeling of being at a loss of what, if anything, anyone could do about anything anymore.
It’s one thing to stop being a serious country that can “get things done”. It’s another thing when that becomes part of common knowledge as public consciousness, when everyone knows that we’re the kind of people and place and system that just can’t solve our own basic problems anymore, and corrupt fiascos and disasters are just the new normal, and the “this is why we can’t have nice things” way we must live now. Sad.
Really, your analysis of the wild-fire/power-grid issues in California is based on social psychology? Are the lessons from the Fukushima nuclear accident all social psychology related as well?
Oh boy, you really misread that. The cause of the California fiasco is ‘overdetermined’, to say the least. Indeed, part of why the problem strikes many people as so intractable and impossible is precisely how many independently difficult political problems would have to be solved all at once to have any hope whatsoever at improving the situation, and so it seems inevitable that these things will just happening over and over again. It’s going to be tragic-comic when that high speed electric train boondoggle sits idle because it can’t get any juice from the mains.
Instead, the “social psychology” I was writing about was merely an observation of a shift in sentiment.
Kling wrote earlier about the early Soviet Union, when they were seen by American and other progressives as the “Silicon Valley of its time”, full of energy, drive, willingness to experiment, to “move fast and break things”. After a generation, what they really broke was the spirit of the peoples of all the captive nations.
The “American Spirit” used be one that, at least in the self-regard and mental association of many Americans, stood for hopeful optimism, “can do”, “get things done” and “energetic and creative problem solving” and “roll up our sleeves”, etc. All I mean is that my impression is instead of that “American Spirit”, now the feel is of a beaten down “Broken Spirit”
I was going to apologize for misreading your position, Handle, but your response is pretty much inline with my original interpretation. I could have been more specific but it was really your perception of a shift towards apathetic resignation that I disagree with.
If anything, we are seeing an example of Kling’s Recalculation rather than Keynes’ Animal Spirits applied to California’s power/wildfire policy. It is a hard problem but a problem I’d much rather have than Japan’s nuclear/earthquake/tsunami problem and I think both situations will improve after some painful adjustments to each crisis.
I agree that faith in the concept of American Exceptionalism has declined but I’d suggest that this shift is a reality based recalculation rather than a malignant malaise.
Is there a plan to solve the California-wildfires problem? The only one I have heard about is to turn off the power when it’s windy, which doesn’t seem like an acceptable solution to me.
MikeW, I’d suggest the following: 1. A network of sensors to detect downed power lines, 2. Public engagement to report down power lines and other fire hazards, 3. Adopt wildfire policies implemented in NSW, Australia.
The intractable problem, in my mind, is the legal one that lead to the California power utilities being liable for wildfire damage.
I don’t have any specific knowledge of the situation beyond a quick glance at the two related Wikipedia articles.
RAD — Those seem like reasonable suggestions. Do you know if the powers that be in California are pursuing anything like that, or have they pretty much given up? (Which I think was more or less what Handle was suggesting.)
MikeW, as I understand it the wildfire/blackout crisis is still ongoing.
Giving-Up on the California electricity system is not only premature but implausible, in my opinion. Has TEPCO given up after the 2011 Fukushima accident? Has Germany and France’s truly given up on nuclear post Fukushima? Timescales are important here and the uncertainty of nuclear energy more than 8-years after Fukushima should be a useful yard-stick when considering California.
I don’t know who the powers-that-be are, if they exist, but I’m pretty sure that you and I (or any reasonably competent/dedicated people) could make a dent with a grass-roots app/service/education effort to collectively monitor wildfires and power lines. There are some very talented people in California so I’d bet against dystopia.
RAD — I guess I expect that they will come up with some sort of solution. But it’s disheartening that they even seriously considered turning off the power when it’s windy as a solution. As for nuclear power, from what I know Japan and Germany have given up on it, which is also disheartening. It’s all so irrational. I am especially perplexed by the people who think that global warming is an existential crisis, and yet apparently think that nuclear power is even worse.
“Meanwhile, China – while demographically old – now strikes me as the economically “young” country in spirit. See, e.g..”
Excellent article.
I am dubious China is ‘Young’ here. I tend to think China is what happened in our 1950s decade when 80%+ of the population had improving economic situation which makes population compliance is easier. Once this drops to 60% we might see some differences in the society.
China’s birth rate is lower and I still think they are going to face an issue when manufacturing based economy stops growing. Will firms be able to lay tons people off? Can they switch away from manufacturing? Will the government allow factories closings. Both the US (1970 -1982, along with 1990 -92) and Japan (1990s) struggled with the decline in manufacturing employment. (Only Germany has contained these issues.)
I remember graduating college in 1992 and people were saying the same thing about terrible Gen X slackers were and:
How Japan was going to financially crush our country!
I think there is a lot of issues in nation but I bet China has a whole host of problems to deal with the next several decades.
“and people were saying the same thing about terrible Gen X slackers”
Fortunately, children tend to grow up. I think every generation fears that the next generation will be the first to fail to do so.
Lots of students at universities are doing serious, stressful work, lots of adults in careers, actually do their jobs. The perception you get from reading political blogs + social media is a distorted one. As for predicting the future, a lot of future possibilities seem plausible, but ultimately I have no idea. But I wouldn’t trust your casual impressions from reading political blogs to mean much.
The Robby Soave piece seems relatively objective while the Philip Carl Salzman and Victor Davis Hanson pieces feel like bandwagon alarmism (very un-Canadian in the Salzman case). I think Kling’s TLP model is a useful complement to C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures model but what has changed recently is that activist tactics have chronically morphed over time into an acute problem. We should be worried about conservative anthropologists, historians, and journalists brandishing the same alarmist tactics as the social justice progressives.
Yeah those bothersome conservative pundits need to be watched closely – we all know how much of Congress, the universities, the civil state, and the media they control.
I’m not worried about conservative pundits, I’m worried about non-STEM irrational alarmists of all political tribes. I should have put more emphasis on the “anthropologists, historians, and journalists” aspect but I thought it was implied with my reference to C.P. Snow.
The answer to soccer hooligans is not a new group of men that behave similarly to soccer hooligans.
My theory: humans simply cannot function under massive (and transparent) inequality. These are the sorts of things that happen. Not saying it’s rational…but it’s reality.
Humans living in agricultural societies functioned under massive and transparent inequality for nearly all of the past several thousand years.
“The great leveller” by Walter Scheidel is a sobering read. Inequality has always crept up inexorably until it is brought crashing down by one form of disaster or another (natural or man made). It then levels the playing field by reducing everyone to abject poverty. His closing words are “All of us who prize greater economic equality would do well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions, it was only ever brought forth in sorrow. Be careful what you wish for”
I don’t think inequality has much to do with it: these radical activists aren’t mostly pauper revolutionaries. It seems they’re mostly middle and upper class, not people sorely afflicted by inequality. Socialism these days is mainly a bourgeois ideology, not a proletarian one. In fact among progressives, the beneficiaries of increasing economic inequality may be more concerned about it than everyone else.
At UT Austin, the STEM classroom experience itself, the textbooks/lectures/assignments/exams are strictly and beautifully non-political. They are all “rigorous” as Kling advocates. I imagine there is lots of serious research that isn’t at all political. However, the University Administration, the Engineering Dean and the Dean’s Office, and some of the advising staff is the opposite; they are openly political and radical evangelists. Student events, student emails, and other mass/public communication often has controversial political messaging, like that ranted about here. I imagine that this trend isn’t unique to UT Austin.
What’s the justification for labeling Salzman’s article a “rant”? I mean, other than an impulse to distance oneself from, and condescend to, any perspective that could be characterized as “conservative”? Soave signals in his article that his not part of the nasty “right” (of which he offers as an example the mostly politically correct, Trump-hating Rod Dreher) and so avoids such labeling.
All the education trends described in these articles have metastasized into my profession (law), emphatically including its corporate sector. I gather the same is true, in varying degrees, in every profession. We will eventually pay a heavy price for this.
Meanwhile, polite society rants over Trump’s self-defeating clowning (which it inflates into absolute evil), the powerless, disrespected people who show up at his rallies, a handful of Fox prime-time talking heads, $100,000 worth of Russian Facebook ads, the internal politics of a faraway country in which the US has no national interest, and other irrelevancies.
Salzman’s closing sentence is very rant-like:
I think that’s a fair characterization of what the groups he’s referring to are arguing for. Clearly, they want to turn, or “transform,” the country into something other than what it has been. “Destroy” here does not mean “wipe the country out with nukes.”
Come on. “Transform” is in no sense a synonym for “destroy” in any ordinary usage. “Trump is destroying America” is not an accurate way to summarize someone’s belief that “Trump is transforming America.”
If the proposed “transformation” is to eliminate characteristics that have been regarded as defining of the society’s identity, “destruction” is a legitimate synonym.
BTW, Trump did not promise to “transform” the country (not that his promises mean anything). Obama, on the other hand, did. And the Left and its marketing representatives in the Democratic Party freely use aggressive, warlike language, to a much greater extent than most Republican politicians (granted, other than Trump and a few others, like Cruz).
These anti-university rants are nothing new and I wish conservatives would actually do something about it instead just bashing young generation. A lot young people are living the Friends theme song for their entire 20s now. (And remember US teenagers are better behaved than anytime since the WW2! So I think some of this is teens did what they suppose to do in High School and later college and the careers are slow to start.)
1) I bet 90% of college students are at college to develop a career. And conservative should focus more on basic state schools not the top 10 universities. Pointing issue with Harvard is all well and good but frankly you effecting a few students here.
2) Why don’t private firms hire more High School graduates and train more? There is nothing stopping them for doing this more.
3) How should we improve vocational schools and training? Some are very good but a lot of them are a little too close to Trump U.
4) And I do think this is the time Universities need to make changes as market forces are going to decline applications long term. (Foreign applications have dropped since 2015, job market in better shape and birth rates dropped 11 years ago.)
People have been complaining about various ills of higher ed for a long time but have not impacted the general trajectory of higher ed.
I sense a growing appetite for major reforms to higher ed, but there is nothing close to a consensus on what to do. This includes Kling who sees big problems, has his own pet reform ideas, but isn’t close to making any big changes.
1) I’d take this even further, and focus on better mechanisms/institutions to provide job training and skill growth and certification to the masses.
I’d briefly nominate one reasonable but major reform: separate grading from teaching.
It’s my understanding that this is done at a few places, for example at Western Governor’s University.
It is the Greek alphabet whitey uses in math.
> Each of these statements are debatable, but they are not being presented as such. It would be one thing to hold a class discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of standardized testing, but what’s happening here is that students are being trained to reject standardized testing due to its “inherent inequity,” which is asserted as some kind of proven fact.
Ironically, if there’s one thing that the anti-standardized-tes should agree on, it’s that students aren’t really learning the material they’re being tested on anyway — and here the same idea applies (teaching students to recite that standardized tests have ‘inherent quality’ to their teachers is a far cry from getting them to believe/understand it) :).
Please excuse my typos:
* anti-standardized-tes -> anti-standardized-test crowd
* inherent quality -> ‘inherent inequity’
I wouldn’t worry a cold second about the Seattle math thing. High school teachers will almost certainly ignore it.