EdMinn’s Curious Self-Indictment

Wait – didn’t the DFL in the Legislature spend most of April and May of last year doing the endzone happy dance celebrating having “fully funded” education?

I do believe they did.

So – what is up with this?

Now, when you asked a DFL legislator or an EdMN partisan what “Full Funding” meant, the “answers” should have come with a side of blue cheese for all the word salad. It was gibberish. And that was just the ones that didn’t ignore the question entirely.

As we see now, pretty much intentionally so.

Fully Fungible

A friend of the blog emails:

How can St Paul Teachers be voting to strike for more money? Weren’t Minnesota schools fully funded?

They left themselves a pretty clever out.

  1. The DFL said they were going to spend a $19B surplus to “fully fund” schools
  2. But they would never define what “full funding” meant – cannily avoiding having two of Alinski’s rules, “framing” and “making them playi by their own rules”, against them.
  3. They did, however, do the end-zone happy dance over doing it (whatever it was)
  4. But now teachers are striking and districts want more, and…
  5. …DFLers are telling us to quit talking about the thing we asked them to define in the first place, knowing that…
  6. …they were never aiming their spiel at smart people with critical thinking skills.

It’s fiendish genius, really.

Also destroys education, and contributes to the destruction of a civil society, but tomayto tomahto.

The Real Villains

Just another day at Lakeville North last Tuesday.

https://twitter.com/CrimeWatchMpls/status/1753601194226790698

Those darn Swedish and German kids mixing it up again.

Fortunately, the administration was focused like a laser beam on the real problem:

That’d be the kids distributing the video.

The Government/Industrial complex has learned from the DFL/Media complex: If nobody hears about an incident, it never happens. And if all they hear is your version of the incident, then that’s “the truth”.

Let’s Not Forget…

…who the real victim in the Claudine Gay flap at Harvard (according to the university’s governing “Corportation”) actually is.

It’s Claudine Gay:

“And she’d have gotten away with it, if it wasn’t for those darn meddling pouncing conservativesI”!

And while Gay is gone, let’s remember that it’s not for the reason she should have been tossed:

And that’s the real atrocity, here.

UPDATE: The “community” is speaking:

My question: Is the AP proverbially “saying the quiet part out loud” – is plagiarism the new norm among “elite academics”?

Settler Projects

Among the “setter projects” that Americans established as we (yes) conquered the North American continent, along with representative democracy, were universities.

And I’m thinking that those are among the “settler projects”…

…that actually need to be dismantled.

Or at least, it’s time for an actual honest-to-god McCarthy-style purge of Universities.

Inconvenient

I wonder if the members of the DFL “coalition”…

…will start to put together for themselves how much of that “alliance” is built on social gaslighting and browbeating by their white, pronouned, “progressive” overseers. (and, naturally, their “leaders” bellying up to the trough for their graft paymetns)?

Junk Food For Thought

One the current tropes among the populist right is that “college is useless, and you should send your kids to learn a trade”.

There’s a truck loaded with cinder blocks full of truth in there – for many 18 year olds, a year or two spent learning how to weld, be an electrician or mechanic or tool and die maker would be a much faster path to self-reliance than four years at college racking up debts while learning little or nothing that one needs to succeed in the world.

Now, let’s be clear, here – I don’t think college needs to be a longer more expensive trade school; there can be value to learning a “liberal art”, something traditionally intended to teach one to think rather than strictly to design, build or fix something…

provided that that that education actually teaches how to think.

We’ll come back to that.


As I’ve noted elsewhere, my father was a great teacher. He taught. high school speech, writing and literature, and college-level education classes. He was one of the two best teachers I ever had. He also used to agree, at least hypothetically, with the likes of Mike Rowe – the ideal education, he said, was spending a few months or years learning a trade, and then going on to some other course of more abstract study after one could pay the bills.

This, of course, may have been a little idealistic projection from a man who, on good day, knew which end of a screwdriver to hit the nail with. He was and remains a brilliant teacher – and one of the least handy people I’ve ever met, myself included.

When I was in high school. and college, I had not the slightest interest in going to trade school – not out of any sense of college being “above it all” or “better” – I was every bit as peripatetic back then as I am today, and if could have squeezed in learning how to machine metal or be an electrician, I would have.

But to my Dad’s point, I also figured I already had a trade; I’d started in radio when I was 15, and had learned a lot. I figured my fallback would be working at some station, somewhere. It wasn’t the dumbest idea, at a time when radio was a tough but viable way to make a living. It’s not advice I’d give a kid today, but that was then.

With the “trade” part figured out? I sought a life living in my head; I majored in English and minored in History and German. I also majored in Computer Science almost long enough to get the minor, but I hated it, and didn’t touch a computer for seven years after I graduated – but that’s another story. And for me, at least, the promise of a “liberal arts” education was fulfilled; I learned how to think, and when the opportunity to jam a bunch of different facets from my background together into a new career fell into my path, I was able to jump on it.

Of course, I’m not sure colleges today teach critical thinking the way Dr. Blake did.

But I come here not to wallow in nostalgia, but to weaponize it.


While I don’t disagree in the least with my Dad, or Mike Rowe, I also think this is a lousy time for conservatives who are so inclined to completely abandon the academy, if only because it’s people from Harvard and Penn and MIT who will write the histories and the textbooks and play an inordinate role in defining our culture…

…and if you see the people who are driving our system toward collapse and calamity today, that should be pretty terrifying. Because just as Califonria-style government followed Californians who fled to Colorado, a society run by the products of our crypto-Maoist university system – the judges, politicians and culture-definers of tomorrow – will follow you into your shop van or plumbing business.

Big Left has been ‘marching through the institutions” for over fifty years; they’re not going to be set back to square one by a season of scrutiny. But it’s an opportunity. And the future of a free society demands that some young conservatives, and the older ones that still control some levers of power (if only their checkbooks) take a shot at that tackle, before the current wave of barbarism completely rewrites the definition of “freedom” for a few more generations.

Fake News?

Someone claiming to be MN State Senator Grant Hauschild posted this on TWitter yesterday:

This must be a Russian hoax. Hauschild,and the rest of the DFL caucus in the legislature, to say nothing of the Flanagan/Klink Administration, spent the whole first half of summer high-fiving each other over “fully funding education” (in between selfies of grinning legislators stuffing donuts and corn dogs in each others mouths).

Now, they never, not once, explained what that meant.

For that matter, the term has vanished from the DFL’s chanting points since about Bastille Day.

Weird.

Compromise

Someone walks up to you with a baseball bat. They say they want to kill you.

Your response is “no, I don’t want to get beaten to death with a baseball bat”.

Looks like you have a standoff. A controversy. A conundrum.

Someone else steps in and asks “How about we compromise? Will you settle for a traumatic brain injury?”

It’s the middle way, after all. The guy with the bat might even say “sure, I just wanna hit you, hard!“

You might respond “No – in fact, I don’t want anyone hurting me in any way. At all”

And the buttinski responds “Why won’t yiou compromise?”

Who’s right?

You?

The guy with the bat?

Or the person striving to find the middle ground between the two of you?

If your response is “I’m putting my foot down; nobody is hitting me with a bat for any reason at all“, and the other to ask “why do you hate the guy with the bat?“, does that change anybody’s mind?

Point being, sometimes the middle path, the compromise, is not the most moral path forward.

America’s Hitler Youth

Americans overwhelmingly consider Hamas a terrorist organization, and condemn the wanton slaughter of October 7.

But among Americans under 24 years old, the split between pro-humanity and pro-Hamas is not only depresslingly closely-fought, but the pro-terror side has a slight edge.

Putting it bluntly, a thin majority of young Americans are OK with genocide. They may couch it in intersectional twaddle, they may hedge the ugly parts.

But a generation that grew up chanting “punch a Nazi” yapping about colonialism and calling their elders “fascists” around the Thanksgiving table are now supprting an actual Fascist regime that actually is killing minorities to further a thousand year old colonial movement.

Why?

It’s the professors:

The first order of business is to heap scorn on a generation that has adopted this morally bankrupt perspective and the older adults in their lives who have so maliciously led them astray. The second task at hand is for us to understand what convinced the younger generation to sacrifice their humanity upon the altar of an intellectual fad. The answer can be found, at least in part, in one odious word that has claimed the benignity of this generation and so many before them: “framework.”

On October 13, the Atlantic published a fascinating reflection by Helen Lewis on the callous indifference her compatriots on the American left have shown toward the wanton murder of Jews for being Jews. She correctly identified the origins of this phenomenon in the intellectualization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on college campuses, which flattens the distinctions between civilian and terrorist, between West Bank and Gaza, between Hamas and Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian Authority and Fatah, and so on. But that flattening is the outcome. The instrument that pummels the complexities of the region into an unrecognizable paste is that detestable word, “framework.”

“Fitting Israel into the intersectional framework has always been difficult, because its Jewish citizens are both historically oppressed—the survivors of an attempt to wipe them out entirely—and currently in a dominant position over the Palestinians, as demonstrated by the Netanyahu government’s decision to restrict power and water supplies to Gaza,” Lewis wrote. Intersectionality is, indeed, the “framework” on display here. It started out as little more than a thought experiment, but it has since transmogrified into a way of life.

While our modern academic class is largely parasitical and counter-useful, they have perfected the art of self-serving logical gymnastics.

An Idea Almost Too Crazy To Comprehend

Enrollment at Twin Cities schools continues to erode:

We’ll wait for the Walz/Flanagan administration to register their theatrical shock that “free” mystery meat and unrestricted gay porn in school libraries isn’t drawing students like Dave Matthews fans to the last bag of Cheetoz.

But I have a question.

This seems like the sort of story where someone could spend some time finding out whether the parents of senior DFL leadership in the Twin Cities and the state overall – the ones who have kids, at least – send their kids to the schools their union patrons run.

How many City Councilpeople, Mayors, policy staffers, senior bureaucrats and school leadership send their children to Minneapolis and Saint Paul, or indeed any, public schools?

This is the sort of thing that would call for, I dunno, some class of self-styed monastic seekers of information, perhaps working for institutions with printing presses or transmitterds, to do some reporting .

Pretty crazy, I know. .

No Free Lunch

With the advent of taxpayer paid school lunch for literally every student in the state of Minnesota, a friend of the blog emails:

So have you figured out the menu for the first bunch of rich folk’s kids you’ll be buying lunch. I think mine will be liver and onions and lutefisk so they’ll never ask again.

Not a bad idea, at least on the surface.

But remember Dash this is going to be government food.

I have a hunch lutefisk will look pretty good by the time they choke it down for a month or two.

Going Just Fine

The deeply conservative sheriff of Jim Hogg County, Texas, has decided to remove its school resource officers from schools in that rural central Texas county.

Sheriff Jimmy Bob Throckmorton yesterday announced that the Jim Hogg County School District had put bizarre and unworkable restrictions on his deputies.

Oops. Did I say Sheriff Jimmy Bob Throckmorton of Jim Hogg County, Texas? I meant the comfortably left-of-center Sheriff Dawanna Witt, of Hennepin County.

Not sure how that slipped past SITD’s copy-editors.

DFLiars: Flimmed And Flammed

Wait just a doggone minute.

I read this earlier today:

Now, wasn’t it just 2-3 months ago that Ken Martin, Governor Klink and Co-Governor Flanigan, the brodudes in the MNDFL Communications office and the chattering hamsters of the DFL Legislative caucuses telling us they’d “fully funded” education?

Why yes.. It was:

And yet they never actually defining what “full funding” meant…

…oh. Yeah. Now it makes sense.

Deja Vu

First, they ignore you. Then they. mock you. Then they attack you. Then you win”
– Gandhi

I remember during the heyday of the Tea Party, in 2009-10, living through Gandhi’s aphorism – and, in the end, seeing how very overrated Gandhi was as a keeper of profound wisdom.

But I digress.

The Democrats, MSM (ptr) and the Mitt Romney wing of the GOP did their best to pretend it didn’t matter.

Then it turned to mockery and its idiot cousin, uninformed defamation.

Then came the attacks.

And then we won – at least, in 2010. Big Left and Big GOP still don’t want to talk about it, but the Tea Party beat both establishments like Keith Moon beating a rack tom.

Of course, in 2012 and onward, the Empire struck back. Big Left and Big GOP teamed up, in effect, to smother the insurgents. It didn’t help that, by dint of being elected to actual office, the Tea Party became “the establishment” that the Ron Paul crowd railed against in the next presidential cycle. The momentum ebbed – as it often does when grassroots movements have to get back to their day jobs.

The cycle has cycled.

“The Strib paid notice in its op-ed page that the “Mama Bears” – who’ve been sitting it out, apparently, since Sarah Palin left the stage – are back (emphasis added):

These conservative mothers and grandmothers, who in recent years have organized for ”parental rights,” including banning discussion of gender identity in schools, have been classified as extremists by the Southern Poverty Law Center. They have also been among the most coveted voters so far in the 2024 Republican presidential primary.

Donald Trump praised their work, saying organizations such as Moms for Liberty had taught the liberal left a lesson: ”Don’t mess with America’s moms.” Ron DeSantis said ”woke” policies had “awakened the most powerful political force in the country: mama bears.” His wife, Casey DeSantis, who launched ”Mamas for DeSantis” in leadoff-voting Iowa, said moms and grandmas were the ”game changer” in DeSantis’ blowout win for a second term as Florida governor. She predicted they will be again as he runs for president.

Who wants to tell columnist Sara Burnett know that nobody outside the mainstream media thinks the SPLC has any more objective down the middle credibility than ISAIAH or Moms Want Action?

Ye shall know them by their opposition:

”Republicans have decided that this is, I think, their golden ticket for the primaries to rile up their base,” said Katie Paris, who runs Red, Wine and Blue, a network of women pushing back on GOP-backed policies such as the anti-LGBTQ and anti-trans efforts of Moms for Liberty.

Leave it to Big Left to try to rally women around box wine. What next – an activist group called “Valium Girls?”

”Call it ‘parents’ rights,’ call it ‘mama bears,’ and try to make it sound like something that would be common sense. … The reality about ‘parents’ rights’ is that it’s just about the rights of a vocal minority that is trying to carry out an extreme political agenda.

I can’t wait for the next Minnesota DFLer to try to comment on that last sentence.

Representative Walter Hudson put it best:

Much more to come

Saint Paul Schooled

A friend of the blog emails:

Saw this on Facebook last night. My sense is that there is more to this story, but then again, it is Saint Paul Public Schools, so maybe there isn’t….

There may very well be more to the story. If I were a gambling man, I would say that that “more“ is a St., Paul Schools bureaucrat list ir misfiled the title.

As I’ve noted in this space, assuming the SPPS operates for anyone’s benefit but it’s own is always your first mistake.

Read:

I’m watching this one.

There Isn’t Much…

…about the way high school was when I was a kid that makes me sit up and say “damn, they had the right idea.”

But I do know that if some students had started a petition saying “we don’t want to have graduation at the Civic Center [the only building in town big enough to hold the graduation], so move it or we won’t attend”, the principal – Virgil Buchholtz, who’d been a Marine fighter pilot during World War II – would have settled that quickly and sharply.

Perhaps it’s not being a teenager. Perhaps it’s having raised teenagers. Perhaps it’s reading some history, and realizing how deeply stupid movements on the macro scale led by “youth” tend to be.

But I wish someone in the Chaska/Chanhassen school district had the same common sense that Mr. Buchholtz had when I read stories like this:

Next week, Eastern Carver County Schools plan to host graduation ceremonies for Chaska and Chanhassen high schools at Eden Prairie’s Grace Church. But this year families are pushing for a change in venue after Chaska High Schooler Eli Frost created a petition.

On the petition that now has 364 signatures, Frost wrote: “Grace Church has a long history of making derogatory, public statements against the LGBTQ+ community. Further, they do not support divorce even in situations of domestic violence. As a community of students and parents who represent a wide variety of marginalized identities, we must change this venue.”

Young Mr. Frost has gotten a lot of facts wrong – go ahead and follow the link to Grace Church’s response.

And I hope the Chaskahassen schools have a sudden attack of common sense in the next week.

Your Private Catholic University Dollars At Work

University of Saint Thomas, as a matter of policy, apparently doesn’t tell young women if their assigned dorm roommate is is a bio-male who identifies as female:

This, according to [UST Housing Director Zoe] Chang, is done as discreetly as possible in order to avoid upsetting parents. The video, OMG said in an email, documents the “mountain of rule changes and preferential treatment provided to trans students when it comes to their housing accommodations.”

The video:

If progressive policies are so unambiguously good, why do they have to lie about all of them?

Who’s The Boss

I enjoy every broadcast I do. I joke – about 65% tongue in cheek – that the worst day on the air is better than the best day off the air.

But some are better than others.

Hour two, last Saturday, was fun even by that standard.

My guest for the first half-hour, Cassie Fredregill, told the infuriating story of her go-round about having her ten year old daughter in a class on reacting to sexting.

It’s the sort of thing you’d expect to hear about the Minneapolis or Edina schools.

But this was Little Falls 

Listen to the first half hour for. yourself. .

Gary Gross has been covering the story here, here, here, here, here and here,

If you’re not outraged, you are part of the problem.

Much more coming later this week, and on next Saturday’s show.

(The third quarter-hour includes an epic takedown of Cori Bush and “woke” attacks on Western Civilization in general).

Contempt

It was probably 15 years ago that I wound up running into a young Assistant US Attorney at a social event.

We got to talking – as I am wont to do with, well, people.

What quickly became evident in talking with him – early 30s, graduate of an Ivy League law school after having been a legacy Ivy League undergrad – was the sheer contempt he had for the people outside the federal “criminal justice” system he met.

Example: we got to talking about gun control. He was a Hillary guy. And he went to a demo the ATF put on for federal “criminal justice” employees, where they learned some basic firearm safety, and got to test-fire some of the guns the Feds used. And with that, he did in fact consider himself to be one of the class that should have the right to keep and bear arms (not that he would). The rest of the plebs, naturally,, should be disarmed forthwith.

Now bear in mind this AUSA wasn’t working on organized crime. Or even “crime” as most of us would understand it. His bailiwick was various abstruse import regulations. Not cocaine or fentanyl, mind you; things like wood, food and alcohol, livestock, furniture.

So that’s right – he oozed with sneering contempt for otherwise honest people who ran afoul of abstruse import regulations.

And he didn’t seem to be all that unusual among federal “criminal justice” employees.


Of course, I ran head-on into the contempt another tranche of government employees – the public school system – feels for the peasantry, first-hand, around that same time.

My own struggles with the Saint Paul school system were at a time when the big dumb consultant idea was “zero tolerance” for even the faintest most ethereal hint of “violence”.

Dumb as that could be – and outmoded as it has apparently become, given the evaporation of safety in Saint Paul schools – it was a fart in the breeze compared to the contempt shoveled at parents since the dawn of “woke” education.

I figured – correctly – that Saint Paul and Minneapolis would be pretty hopeless.

But – Little Falls (via Gary at LIberty & Proosperity Blog)

“My name is Cassie Fredregill, a local resident of Little Falls. As my 10-year-old daughter came home from school one day, she told me that there was going to be a class on sexting. As any concerned parent, I reached out to her teacher to confirm what my daughter told me and asked what this class was going to be about.” The thought of a 10-year-old getting taught about sexting is utterly repulsive…

…Cassie wondered why she hadn’t received paperwork that permitted her to opt her daughter out of the class.

In response?

The school district barred her from parent teacher conferences.

She was not happy (jump to 5:25):

Point being, a distressing number of schools are starting to see parents as the enemy – and themselves as a class of aristocrats who shouldn’t have to be troubled by them.

I’ll have Ms. Fredregill on my show on Saturday.

Paranoid!!!!

I was reliably informed that stories of teachers subverting parents will to “transition” or otherwise influence (but don’t you dare say “groom”) children were “paranoisa”, misinformation and right wing hate speech:

A family in New York has filed a lawsuit against the Brookhaven-Comsewogue School District, Terryville Road Elementary School, and 5th-grade teacher Debra Rosenquist because they allege that Rosenquist attempted to secretly transition the gender of their 10-year-old daughter without notifying the parents.

The student – who is identified as A.V. in the complaint – became confused as to her gender during the 2021-2022 school year because Rosenquist insisted on using a male name and male pronouns to refer to the student.

Weird. I’m reliably – and very angriliy – informed this can not be:

In October 2021, the teacher began to call A.V. by the name “Leo” and use he/him pronouns for the child. No one in the district informed the parents (referred to as L.N. and E.V. in the complaint) of these changes.

Several months later, in January 2022, the school’s principal informed the parents that the child had met with the school psychologist (without the parents’ knowledge) and had drawn a girl with the words “I wanna kill myself” and “I feel sad a lot.” The psychologist determined this was because A.V. was confused about her gender identity.

This was the first time A.V.’s parents had heard anything about the confusion regarding A.V.’s gender identity or new name and pronouns forced on the child by the teacher.

Here’s the entire complaint against the Suffolk County schools, over the episode…

…that can not possibly have happened.

The Experts

Remember learning to read?

I do.

We’ll come back to that.


Years ago, when I was looking for alternative ways of schooling my kids, I ran across the Sudbury Schools . The Sudbury model makes kids responsible for their own education. Radically so – nobody tells them what to learn and when. Literally – there is nothing saying “Kids have to be able to read or do math at a specified level by the time they’re X years old”. Teachers are there to help the kids learn what they ask to learn.

Nobody tells kids “Today it’s reading time”. The kids learn to read when they learn to read. Some learn by asking teachers to show them how; some, by asking other kids; others just translate the alphabet.

But while nobody tells Sudbury kids when or how to learn to read, they all do – by the time they’re eight, all of them read at or well beyond “grade level”.

One Sudbury advocate pointed out – i’m paraphrasing, here – that by age five, children learn a whole language, often more than one, along with a world of other material, all by absorbing it from people and the world around them, in their own ways.

Indeed, you have to work hard to prevent children from learning.

And at age six (or earlier, now), that’s exactly what the system does for most kids; forces them to abandon their own style of learning, and learn by sitting in straight lines and listening to someone tell them what and how to learn.

They point out that if kids learned how to speak their native language/s the way they are taught to read or do math or science, we’d have a generation of kids with “Speaking Disabilities”, complete with a class of clinicians earnestly treating it.


Anyway – learning to read.

Dad was an English teacher, and Mom read to me a lot as a kid. I learned my alphabet, and learned how letters and sounds corresponded, and one day when I was four, I clearly remember driving down I94 to pick up Dad at grad school at North Dakota state in Fargo, and seeing the word “FAR-go” on the sign on the freeway, and saying it out loud to the amazement of my mom and grandparents (but not, I suspect, my infant sister).

Come to learn there are three schools of thought for teaching kids how to read.

  • Whole Word: If you’re a certain age, you might remember the “Sally Dick and Jane” books? They taught kids to recognize words by repeating them over and over, and associating them with sounds they recognized. It was probably what I did in the car that day on the way to Fargo – associated some sounds and letters with a word I’d been hearing a lot, since it’s where Dad had spent the summer.
  • Phonetic: Learning to sound words out. OK, I’d done a bit of that in reading the sign. F sounds like “Eff”, “A” can be “ah”, and I sorta wung it. Better example: in third grade, my teacher pointed at a map to an island in the Pacific and asked who could tell her what she was pointing at. I raised miy hand, since even then I believed in faking it ’til I made it – and then started sounding out the unfamiliar and frankly weird word. “Huh Ah Wah…Yiy?” “Yes! Hawaiii”, she cheered, as I sat there, amazed, feeling like I’d broken a secret code by accident.
  • Whole language: teaching kids to guess until they get it right.

I’m being a little flippant with that last, but we’ll come back to that in a moment.

We’ve known for decades that people have different learning styles. Some learn by doing, some by watching others do, some by doing while being supervised, some by reading and analyzing, and so forth. It’s utterly uncontroversial.

But somehow, when it comes to children, educational theorists throw that out the window. I’ve written before about the dismal failiure of the “Park your ass in a seat for six hours a day and move when you’re told to” model of education in teaching boys.

Now, it turns out we have an epidemic of children who can’t read – and it appears to be linked to an educational fad related to the third bullet point, “Whole Language Reading” – and the wholesale logrolling of teachers by “experts” and a thriving, well-oiled consultant class.

I listen to NPR so you don’t have do – but there are some pearls among the swine. And one of them is this piece, from one of NPR’s “investigative reporting” podcasts. about the history, effects, and star power of “Whole Language” learning, and the way a whole lot of NPR-listening, laptop-class parents discovered the whole scam when they were stuck at home watching their teachers flail away on Zoom.

It’s – trust me on this – worth a listen:

To sum up: For decades, teachers essentially ignored the fact that kids learn reading the same way humans learn everything – via combination of methods unique to most every individual – and imposed a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching reading based on one scholar and “expert’s” very striated study of child cognition. The consultants latched onto the experts, and sold the schools on their, for lack of a better word, product.

And today, a staggering percentage of kids can’t read – far, far worse than when “Why Can’t Johnny Read” first came out and started the furor over failed education…

…68 years ago.

Remember this, by the way, as the DFL moves to destroy home schooling.

Win-Win

A friend of the blog emails regarding the “Muhammad” flap at Hamline that I wrote about last week:

It is entirely possible that Aram Wedatalla read the syllabus for the course last summer, saw that there was a warning about the image of the Prophet and signed up for the course with an eye toward kickstarting her political career by manufacturing this incident. Aram Wedatalla is after all President of the Muslim Student Association at Hamline. This is a great resume builder for someone who sees their future in the NGO/Nonprofit universe and eventually following in the footsteps of Ilhan Omar into public office. The mind positively boggles at the thought that she was “blindsided” by the picture of the prophet, Aram Wedatalla is not an Innocent.

It’s very entirely plausible.

In fact, it’s entirely possible this entire situation has resulted in no victims whatsoever.

Wedatalla may have launched her career – no mean feat for a “-studies” major at an also-ran university.

Professor Lopez Prater? She became a national cause celebre, perhaps the most famous adjunct professor in the country, and got herself a gig at a more viable school.

The U of M Art Department profs that spoke out on her behalf? They got to thread that needle between being keeping their “woke academic” card and still defending free speech (by one of their own, natch).

There were no losers!

Other than Hamline.

Flailing

Hamline University – my neighbor here in the MIdway, a university with almost as much hamfisted woke cred as Saint Thomas and Macalester, recently fired an art professor for showing an artistic representation of Mohammed.

Here’s a quick rundown:

López Prater, an adjunct professor, showed a picture of the Prophet Muhammad in an art history class-causing an uproar back in October. Since, many Muslims viewing visual representations of the prophet are prohibited, some thought the professor’s actions as highly “Islamaphobic”. Take a look:

Despite a “trigger warning”, it appears the student was triggered when Dr. López Prater, showed the classroom a medieval depiction of Muhammad, an “incident of hate and discrimination“, apparently. Hell, even the university’s associate vice president of inclusive excellence (AVPIE) found it to be “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic“.

It sent the message for all to hear: “triggered students are more important than academic, or really all, freedom.”

The story got some national play – which couldn’t have helped the struggling little university.

Of course, Hamline’s concern for diversity of academic opinion, or for that matter the less fashionable consitutional rights, is just as dismal.

But let’s stick with today’s controversy. Hamline is trying to back-track. Ellen Watters, chair of Hamline’s board of trustees, wrote:

In the interest of hearing from and supporting our Muslim students, language was used that does not reflect our sentiments on academic freedom. Based on all that we have learned, we have determined that our usage of the term ‘Islamophobic’ was therefore flawed…It was never our intent to suggest that academic freedom is of lower concern or value than our students — care does not ‘supersede’ academic freedom, the two coexist.

But it may be too late. Lopez Prater has filed suit:

The lawsuit filed on behalf of López Prate states the professor suffered loss of income from her adjunct position, emotional distress and damage to her professional reputation and job prospects.

David Redden, a lawyer for Dr. López Prater, says the university’s change of heart on the “islamaphobia” accusations does not change the lawsuit and that he, and his client, will pursue legal action against the university.

And other academics have risen to the defense…

…of their fellow academic.

So the good news is, even some academics have reached a point where they won’t spontaneously erupt into a Maoist struggle session on command. Provided it’s their freedom at stake.

It’s a tiny, tiny start.