I say this with all the love and patience I have left....

AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM!

YOU CAN BITE ME!!!

George Washington University Drops U.S. History Requirement — for History Majors!

//n 2016, GW implemented a new funding formula, allocating money to the various departments based on the number of students enrolled in that major's classes. Each school receives $301 for every student in a class, incentivizing majors like history to offer classes that will be popular.

Indeed, enrollment in history has dropped since 2011, when there were 153 history majors. Only 72 undergraduate students majored in history in 2015, while 83 did so in 2016, the Hatchet reported.

Some of the updates make sense — while it is good to require students to study a foreign language, it might not be necessary for history. The electronic capstone might be less rigorous than a traditional thesis, but it would make sense to allow students to build a website focused on their concentration of history, for instance.

Dropping the U.S. or European history requirement is different in kind, and much less excusable. The new requirements still mandate at least one introductory course, of which American history, world history, and European civilization are options — as well as "Approaches to Women's History." Nevertheless, this introductory requirement may be fulfilled by scoring a 4 or a 5 on the Advanced Placement exams for U.S., European, or world history.

In addition to this one required introductory course (which may be satisfied by women's studies), the major requires an introductory seminar, eight to ten upper-level history courses, and a thesis or capstone project. Before the changes, students had to take two courses focused on Europe and North America. Now, they can avoid them altogether.

"I think an important change in the history major has been to make our major actually reflect the field of history the way that historians study it now," Denver Brunsman, an associate professor of history and director of undergraduate services for the department, told the Hatchet. "In the past — and I think our old standards reflected this — it was very common to have students take a class in American history, in European history and maybe, just maybe, something else, another part of the world."

While a focus on other countries is laudable, it is important for students to understand their historical and intellectual heritage. If the history department were to become stiflingly closed to studying other regions of the world, that would indeed be a problem. But requiring a general knowledge of America's roots (and those include Europe's history) is natural and should be expected, especially of history majors.

Rather, this move seems to fit with the trend of rejecting the study of Western heritage as somehow oppressive and close-minded. Indeed, students at Yale University recently petitioned for the removal of a class because studying "Major English Poets" would create "a culture that is especially hostile to students of color." Stanford University students rejected a petition for a Western heritage course in April. The University of Wisconsin-Stout even removed historical paintings because they might traumatize students.

In July, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) issued a report showing that less than one-third of highly ranked colleges and universities in America actually require students pursuing a degree in history to take a single course in American history. Only 23 undergraduate history programs at 75 colleges and universities in the study required a U.S. history course.//

We are liquidating the American identity...

...through public education.

//The new framework is organized around such abstractions as “identity,”“peopling,” “work, exchange, and technology,” and “human geography” while downplaying essential subjects, such as the sources, meaning, and development of America’s ideals and political institutions, notably the Constitution. Elections,
wars, diplomacy, inventions, discoveries—all these formerly central subjects tend to dissolve into the vagaries of identity-group conflict. The new framework scrubs away all traces of what used to be the chief glory of historical writing—vivid and compelling narrative—and reduces history to an bloodless interplay of abstract and impersonal forces. Gone is the idea that history should provide a fund of compelling stories about exemplary people and events. No longer will students hear about America as a dynamic and exemplary nation, flawed in many respects,
but whose citizens have striven through the years toward the more perfect realization of its professed ideals. The new version of the test will effectively marginalize important ways of teaching about the American past, and force American high schools to teach U.S. history from a perspective that self consciously
seeks to de-center American history and subordinate it to a global and heavily social-scientific perspective.

There are notable political or ideological biases inherent in the 2014 framework,and certain structural innovations that will inevitably result in imbalance in the test,and bias in the course. Chief among these is the treatment of American national
identity. The 2010 framework treated national identity, including “views of the American national character and ideas about American exceptionalism” as a central theme. But the 2014 framework makes a dramatic shift away from that emphasis, choosing instead to grant far more extensive attention to “how various identities, cultures, and values have been preserved or changed in different contexts of U.S. history with special attention given to the formation of gender, class, racial and ethnic identities.” The new framework makes a shift from “identity” to “identities.” Indeed, the new framework is so populated with
examples of American history as the conflict between social groups, and so inattentive to the sources of national unity and cohesion, that it is hard to see how  3 students will gain any coherent idea of what those sources might be. This does
them, and us, an immense disservice. //

We are liquidating the American identity through our public school system.

But, then, why would we expect that hiring more Affirmative Action Coordinators and other consultants increase student performance?

This chart graphically confirms what I've been whining about for years, viz, why is it that (a) schools are failing their basic job and (b) schools are providing less services for students and (c) my taxes don't seem to be going down.

The chart is defended here.

Trigger Warnings and Literature.

Isn't there something weird - something that speaks to cognitive dissonance - that restrictions on what can be shown on television, which is accessible to children, have been removed, while college students are seeking to censor the literature that generations of students have read?

Are we creating a generation who are out of touch with reality and can't distinguish between fiction and their own life?

Or is it just another tool in the Fascist-Left's toolkit of repression?

The term “trigger warning” has its genesis on the Internet. Feminist blogs and forums have used the term for more than a decade to signal that readers, particularly victims of sexual abuse, might want to avoid certain articles or pictures online.

On college campuses, proponents say similar language should be used in class syllabuses or before lectures. The issue arose at Wellesley College this year after the school installed a lifelike statue of a man in his underwear, and hundreds of students signed a petition to have it removed. Writing in The Huffington Post, one Wellesley student called it a “potentially triggering sculpture,” and petition signers cited “concerns that it has triggered memories of sexual assault amongst some students.”

Here at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in March there was a confrontation when a group of anti-abortion protesters held up graphic pictures of aborted fetuses and a pregnant professor of feminist studies tried to destroy the posters, saying they triggered a sense of fear in her. After she was arrested on vandalism, battery and robbery charges, more than 1,000 students signed a petition of support for her, saying the university should impose greater restrictions on potentially trigger-inducing content. (So far, the faculty senate has promised to address the concerns raised by the petition and the student government but has not made any policy changes.)

At Oberlin College in Ohio, a draft guide was circulated that would have asked professors to put trigger warnings in their syllabuses. The guide said they should flag anything that might “disrupt a student’s learning” and “cause trauma,” including anything that would suggest the inferiority of anyone who is transgender (a form of discrimination known as cissexism) or who uses a wheelchair (or ableism).

“Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression,” the guide said. “Realize that all forms of violence are traumatic, and that your students have lives before and outside your classroom, experiences you may not expect or understand.” For example, it said, while “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe — a novel set in colonial-era Nigeria — is a “triumph of literature that everyone in the world should read,” it could “trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more.”//

For years, we've been spending more and more on education, we have lotteries that pay more to education, we don't dare touch the education budget because that would harm children...

...so (a) how come education is so awful and (b) where does all the money go?

Apart from teacher's retirement and benefits, it goes to "diversitycrats" according to Michael Barone:

College and university administrators have been happy to scoop up all the money by rapidly raising tuitions and fees. Higher-ed expenses have been rising much more rapidly than inflation for three decades.

And what has the money been spent on? Some of it presumably goes to professors in the hard sciences and the great scholars who have made American universities the best in the world. Well and good.

But many university administrators have other priorities. The University of California system has been raising tuitions and cutting departments. But, reports John Leo in the invaluable Minding the Campus blog, its San Diego campus found the money to create a new post of "vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion."

That's in addition to what the Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald calls its "already massive diversity apparatus." It takes Mac Donald 103 words just to list the titles of UCSD's diversitycrats.

The money for the new vice chancellorship could have supported two of the three cancer researchers that the campus lost to Rice University in Houston, a private school that apparently takes the strange view that hard science is more important than diversity facilitators.

This doesn't just happen on the Left Coast. The University of North Carolina at Wilmington saved some money by lumping together two science departments and raised spending on its five diversity-multicultural offices.

But, to quote George W. Bush, is our students learning? Not very much, concludes the California Association of Scholars in its 87-page study of the University of California system.

Students aren't required to study American history or Western civilization. But they're subjected to a lot of political indoctrination by leftist activists. "Far too many" have not learned to write effectively to read "a reasonably complex book."

"In recent years, study after study has found that a college education no longer does what it once did and should do," the report concludes. "Students are being asked to pay considerably more and get considerably less."

What's more important for America? Being able to solve quadratic equations or feeling that just the right number of transexuals are being admitted into your college?

Reynold's Law.

Subsidize middle-class status markers and you don't get more of the middle-class, you get fewer people with the virtues that make the middle class possible.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Dwindling Power Of A College Degree.“Until the early 1970s, less than 11 percent of the adult population graduated from college, and most of them could get a decent job. Today nearly a third have college degrees, and a higher percentage of them graduated from nonelite schools. A bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability. To get a good job, you have to have some special skill — charm, by the way, counts — that employers value. But there’s also a pretty good chance that by some point in the next few years, your boss will find that some new technology or some worker overseas can replace you.”
Of course, one reason why a bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability is that a bachelor’s degree has gotten much easier to get, as part of a conscious strategy of giving everyone the markers of intelligence and capability. Remember Reynolds’ Law:

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

Victor Davis Hanson on Higher Education.

Things that can't go on, don't go on.

By 2011 we all know that faculties are overwhelmingly liberal. That in and of itself would not be so alarming if they were not activist as well. By that I mean academics are not just interested in identifying supposed past American sins, but also in turning disinterested instruction into political advocacy, especially along race, class, and gender lines. Rosie the Riveter, the Japanese internment, and Hiroshima all deserve study, but they are not the sum total of World War II. Today’s average undergraduate may know that African-Americans were not integrated into American units during World War II, but they have no clue what the Battle of the Bulge, a B-29, or Iwo Jima were. They may insist that global warming is real and man-caused, but would have trouble explaining what exactly carbon is.

And:

As the economy cooled, cash-strapped parents increasingly had little money to ease the mounting burdens. What was once a rare $10,000 student loan became a commonplace $50,000 and more in debt. Living at home until one’s late twenties is in part explicable to the mounting cost of college and the accompanying dismal job market — and the admission that many college degrees are no proof of reading, writing, or thinking skills. (Note as well that the themes and ethos of the university were not “life is short, get on with it”, but rather population control, abortion, careerism, metrosexism, etc. that contributed to the notion that one’s 20s and even 30s were for fun and exploring alternatives, but most certainly not to marry, have children, get a job, buy a house, and run the rat race.)


I noticed about 1990 that some students in my classes at CSU were both clearly illiterate and yet beneficiaries of lots of federal cash, loans, and university support to ensure their graduation. And when one had to flunk them, an entire apparatus was in place at the university to see that they in fact did not flunk. Just as coaches steered jocks to the right courses, so too counselors did the same with those poorly prepared but on fat federal grants and loans. By the millennium, faculty were conscious that the university was a sort of farm and the students the paying crop that had to be cultivated if it were to make it all the way to harvest and sale — and thus pay for the farmers’ livelihood.

How could a Ponzi scheme of such magnitude go on this long?

Lots of reasons. The university was deeply embedded with a faux-morality and a supposed disdain for lucre. “College” or “university” was sort of like “green” — an ethical veneer for almost anything imaginable without audit or examination (Whether a Joe Paterno-like exemption or something akin to Climategate or the local CSU campus where the student body president recently boasted that he was an illegal alien and dared authorities to act — to near unanimous support from the university.) Since World War II, a college degree was rightly seen as the key to middle class upward mobility. That belief was enshrined, and so we forgot to ask whether everyone was suited for college, or whether the college educated per se were always more important to the economy than the self-, union-, or trade-schooled welder, concrete finisher, or electrician.

Liberalism, fads and the soft science...

....""Your mind can’t be broadened if you barely use it."

Here is an interesting discussion of whether colleges should push "STEM" subjects, i.e., science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and de-fund soft sciences like anthropology. It sounds like it might be worth it just to make a bunch of obnoxious leftists find work:

As you can see, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in anthropology is about 30:1. This obviously has an effect in the orientation of the discipline in terms of the values which they impart to their students. A substantial number of anthropologists don’t consider themselves scientists. Quite often they’re clearly activists, and you know very well what direction their activism is going to go. As one of five non-progressive people involved in science communication I have seen firsthand how narrow-minded and partisan people who come out of the social sciences aside from economics can be. While a liberal biologist is strongly influenced by their political outlook and will defend it forcefully, anthropologists seem trained to throw around scurrilous terms and associations as if that was the ultimate training of their profession. While normal people believe that their ideological opponents are wrong, it seems that many anthropologists as activists believe that their political enemies are malevolent demons. Who wants to continue funding wannabe-kommissars?

And there is this:

To recap, here is my main issue with the current proponents of the liberal arts:


1 – The professoriate seems inordinately hostile to half the political spectrum. That’s fine if you’re drawing from private resources, but this is not usually the case.

2 – Those without social capital derived from family connections need to accrue specialized technical skills to compensate for their deficit. Upper class and upper middle class individuals with an entree into white collar jobs by virtue of their class status can afford to focus on becoming more polished. Everyone should not be given the same advice, because not everyone starts from the same life circumstances.

3 – The average American college student doesn’t learn much, because they aren’t that bright or intellectually oriented. They don’t do their reading until the last second, and have only marginal passion for the books which they purchase. Your mind can’t be broadened if you barely use it.

4 – Those liberal arts graduates who are very bright are too often enamored of the latest intellectual fashion, and are keener upon signalling their ideological purity and intellectual superiority than actually understanding anything.

It's almost as if the modern university system was designed to create a servile class of students who lacked the ability to question if they were actually getting an education.

Victor Davis Hanson observes:

So here is where the last thirty years all led: to too many students who are indebted, poorly educated, and without skills like high-tech engineering, sophisticated medicine, or computer design that the country needs. They are consumed with contemporary furor as the education bubble of nearly a trillion dollars in debt is about to burst. They are mad at the system that they were taught oppresses them, but also at themselves. Who would not be after spending so much money for something of so little value? Nothing is more embarrassing to watch than arrogance coupled with ignorance — and spiced with occasional glibness and the slow realization that they’ve been had.


Beyond Reproach

It is taboo for the Obama technocracy to consider exploiting the vast natural riches of America. And how can one admit that printing money destroys prosperity? Who can confess that expectations of government subsidy ruin personal initiative? So how, then, can students question the utility of their educations? They don’t dare object to the university’s manner of operations, or how their loans underwrote the need for a six-figured assistant provost of internal development or associate vice president for diversity awareness — or a vast number of new hip professors who just thirty or forty years ago would not be seen as professors at all.

I think in over twenty years of teaching I received about 5,000 memos warning me about insidious practices of sexism, racism, classism, or other sorts of oppression, what the chair, dean, provost, president was doing about it (usually setting up a watchdog faculty committee) — and not a single one wondering how we could bring rigor to the curriculum and real learning to the students.