Category Archives: Education

Posts about education – schools, teachers, philosophy and, much of the time, how badly our education system works.

Win-Win

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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

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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.

Hero For Today

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I don’t know who this guy is.

I don’t know where he teaches.

I’m sure he’s in a boatload of legal and professional trouble for beating the stuffing out of that gabbling little prick.

But I’d love to find out. And if theres a legal defense fund, he should have his people call my people.

https://twitter.com/FightHaven/status/1614985827314028545

Unquestionably

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The U of M paid Nikole Hannah-Jones $50K to speak at the U – and complied with a demand to conceal the evidence (emphasis added by me):

Hannah-Jones participated in a Dec. 6 “moderated discussion” as part of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs Distinguished Carlson Lecture Series.

According to a contract obtained by Alpha News, the university paid Hannah-Jones’ agents $50,000 for her appearance on campus. The contract prohibited the university from recording the live event, which some school officials took issue with.

“Is the no recording item firm? I would like to remove that if possible. I am looking at one of our local news reporters for the moderator, and we’ve had great success with replaying the conversation via Minnesota Public Radio when we use their hosts. This, along with providing the recording to classrooms for instruction and discussion is important to us,” wrote Gail Fridlund, an events manager with the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

But of course, the U acquiesced.

Tom Gagnon, executive vice president of the Lavin Agency, said “that provision is firm” but offered to explain the “good” reasons for the recording prohibition.

“I don’t want folks to think she’s being a diva!” he said in a later email.

The university ultimately agreed to prohibit recording and covered the costs of Hannah-Jones’ travel and lodging expenses.

Those “good reasons” are none other than you and me – taxpayers with the capacity for critical thinking. They’ve seen what happens when the plebs see how the grift works.

If someone knows someone with a samizdat recording, let me know.

For The Children

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The number of assaults on teachers in classrooms.

The superintendent’s salary.

The achievement gap.

Two of those numbers are getting worse. One of them is getting better.

Any guesses?

Here you go:

There is, of course, a highly competitive market for Big city schools superintendents. The market for “top” candidates is incredibly competitive, and the salaries show it.

I’ve been trying to figure out why for a couple decades now. All of them talk about metrics that improve, but year over year things always get worse.

I’m trying to figure out any other field were actual accomplishment plays no factor in skyrocketing salaries.

This Is Today’s DFL

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This is what every family in the Minnesota public school system faces todaym. This person is running for the Centennial school board:

This is the educational/industrial compex’s priority.

This is on the ballot in two weeks. Never forget it.

UPDATE: And the consequence of school board members like her aren’t remotely, uh, academic:

“Fridays and breaks can never come soon enough for me this year. I’ve always been able to make it to MEA without needing time off to recover, but not this year. This year I feel like I’ve been run over by a train every day I leave. This week I politely asked a student, that wasn’t supposed to be in my room, to go to her class. This was four minutes after the bell had rung. Her response, ‘Quit talking to me. Get out of my space.’ I was 3-4 feet away. I then calmly repeated that she needed to leave, and she responded with, ‘Shut the fuck up you bitch ass ho.’”

This is an inevitable result, not only of people like the woman in the first tweet, but of the concrete policy prescriptions of “Pacific Educational Group” – the San Francisco consulting firm employed by the Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Edina and many other metro school districts.

Darn Those Redneck MAGA Fascists

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Parents shut down a Dearborn, Michigan school board meeting over the distribution of “woke” books:

A school-board meeting in Dearborn, Mich. was shut down earlier this week by hundreds of protesters opposing the circulation of LGBTQ books across the city’s public-school system.

Viral videos recorded by a Detroit Free Press reporter circulated on Twitter showing pandemonium breaking out at the meeting Monday night. Many of the protesters carried signs in English and Arabic: “Keep Your Dirty Books in the Closet,” “Stop Grooming Our Kids,” and “Homosexuality Big Sin,” some read.

Darn those redneck fascists with their signs in English and…

…uh, what now?

Ooof. A protected class going after a couple of protected classes. That’s gotta be awkward.

Wonder what Rashida Tlaib has to say about it?

Buyin’ Time

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You knew it was coming. And here it is — student loan “forgiveness,” baby:

President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that he will forgive $10,00 in federal student debt for most borrowers, fulfilling a campaign pledge and delivering financial relief to millions of Americans.

Biden will cancel up to $20,000 for recipients of Pell Grants.

“Both of these targeted actions are for families who need it the most,” the president said in remarks from the White House on Wednesday afternoon.

I love the smell of moral hazard in the morning. But if there’s a cohort of our society that really loves this sort of thing, it’s the folks who assumed their “Studies” degree was their ticket to the carriage class. The donks long ago realized they have neither reason nor incentive to bestow other people’s resources on the working class or the small business dudes, because they aren’t picking up the check at Le Diplomate. The “S” in an S corporation now stands for suck it.

At this point, the game is evident even to those who’d rather not think about politics — helping the commonweal is right out. Higher education is the best thing the donks have going and subsidizing their efforts is the highest and best use of other people’s money. And if you look at the price tag, you’re probably a denier. And if you paid your own way to go to trade school, you’re a chump. The rewards go to Derrida, not derring-do.

The timing is crucial here — there’s no question this move will piss off millions of potential voters, but there’s also no question that we’ll all be getting a steady supply of ether from the Alliance for a Better Minnesota and the constellation of like-minded political action groups flattering the Studies majors from Olaf and Kenyon and Swarthmore (and Eau Claire and Bemidji, too) that despite everything, they are actually part of the in-crowd. The checks will clear in plenty of time for the clientele, but the unwilling benefactors will be too busy trying to make payroll to get out and door knock.

But hey, have a nice day!

 

 

 

 

 

The Emancipation Of No Expectations

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I listen to NPR, on occasion. I do it so you don’t have to. Freedom isn’t free.

And in and among the hours and hours of bald-faced Democrat public relations and PR, you find the occasional nugget of brilliance.

On occasion, that brilliance is utterly in spite of any original intentions.

Such is this hour-long documentary by one DJ Cashmere – which I thought was a hip-hop stage name for a moment, but is in fact the name of a nebbishy-sounding former high school teacher at “Nobles Street School”, a “chain” of Chicago-area “no-nonsense” charter schools. Cashmere went on to become a journnalist…

…under which guise he came back to report on, as “APM Reports” says:

In this hour, DJ, who is white, revisits his old school as it tries to reinvent itself as an anti-racist institution. And he seeks out his former students to ask them how they felt about being on the receiving end of all that education reform, and what they think now about the time they spent in his classroom.

While I eschew the term “dog whistle” as a way of slighting other points of view, the story is full of terms that both sides have staked out, for and against. The blurb notes “At the time, Noble followed a popular model called “no excuses.” Its schools required strict discipline but promised low-income students a better shot at college.”

That discipline included uniforms, plus some pretty rigid behavioral expectations; being late, disruptive, or tardy with homework was not tolerated; detentions flew like spitballs for infractions, not only of disciplinary rules, but for being in class late or having uniforms out of spec.

No education model is a panacaea, but Noble Street had good results – good enough that close to 10% of Chicago families, overwhelmingly “of color” and low income (just like Twin Cities charter schools) put their kids in Noble Street schools. There were exceptions. When dealing with human beings, nothing is ever foolproof. But pretty much every objective measure – graduation rates, test scores, college acceptance rates, crime rates – showed the concept worked well for most kids.

And then…

…well, the blurb mentions the dramatic peak; management at Noble Street changed. Noble Street’s “no excuses” values were patriarchal, colonial and, despite the overwhelming approval of the overwhelmingly of-color clientele who’d voted with their and their kids’s feet to get into Noble, “white supremacist”.

And so they changed.

As to the results?

You can listen to the story here (I can’t embed it, unfortunately).

Like all human behavior, there are as many sides to the story as there are people. But it’s a lede that one might suspect public radio would bury, and you’d be at least partly right. The results that parents were looking for – the sort of accomplishment based measures that modern Big Left has called “patriarchal” and “white supremacist” – didn’t fare well.

It’s worth an (occasionally infuriating) listen.

While Building The Case That “Public Schools Are Essential For Democracy”…

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…one might be well-placed to shuffle past the Minneapolis Public Schools’ latest collective bargaining agreement:

To be, uh, fair, it doesn’t mean all white teachers get laid off before all minority ones. The union would never go for that.

No, just that honkeys are first people at any given level of seniority to get whacked.

One of the proposals dealt with “educators of color protections.” The agreement states that if a non-white teacher is subject to excess, MPS must excess a white teacher with the “next least” seniority.

“Starting with the Spring 2023 Budget Tie-Out Cycle, if excessing a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the site, the District shall excess the next least senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population,” the agreement reads.

That’ll fix that achievement gap…

As The Kids Get Ready…

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… for another year of school, their teachers are getting ready as well:

“Interrupting whiteness“

Now, here’s a little dirty little secret of mine; I can and do ignore people who create new adjectives by adding “–ness” to the ends of nouns, willy-nilly.

When I first started hearing “progressive“ activists jabbering about “whiteness“ a few years back, I got to confess, I ignored it. The idea that there is some essential, internal racial trait that unifies a term that covers Armenians and Norwegians, or Italians and Irish, is the kind of laughable absurdity you get from… Well, racists who are trying to pound facts into shape to fit is theory.

It’s always hard to pick which leftist pathology to ignore, and which to take seriously.

Of course, looking at the “crowd“ in this photo, I’m not sure I would take them “seriously“ if they weren’t all intimately involved in teaching the children of whatever parents weren’t smart enough to get them out of the Minneapolis Public schools…

The Right Indoctrination

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SCENE: Mitch BERG is at REI, getting a handlebar cell phone carrier for hjs bike. He rounds the corner from the coffee cups, and runs into Avery LIBRELLE, who is shopping for…something? BERG tries to backpedal quietly away, but it’s too late.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Oh, shhhhhhhhure as I stand here today, it’s Avery…

LIBRELLE: Shut up. The Supreme Court just violated the separation of church and state, by allowing an educator to pray at school functions.

BERG: Well, you got a few of the facts right.

LIBRELLE: What would you think if a Muslim were to throw down a prayer mat on the fifty yard line and delay the kickoff while he prayed to Mecca?

BERG: Coach Kennedy didn’t interrupt the game with an ostentatious prayer in the middle of the field. It was a personal observance, after the game, involving him and only him. Other than the fact that it took place on the field around people, it couldn’t have been less public.

LIBRELLE: It caused an uproar.

BERG: It caused a small group of progressives to go to the school board and, after years of such observances, change the district policy to ban “demonstrative religious activity, readily observable to (if not intended to be observed by) students and the attending public.” 

LIBRELLE: So what would you think if a Muslim did something like that?

BERG: Have you actually been in the Midway Target? The Roseville Walmart? Seeing Muslims throwing down their mats at prayer time in an out of the way part of the store is nothing new at all. I care about it no more than a Christian praying whereever they want.

LIBRELLE: Yeah, but what if a non-Christian kid sees the demonstration, by one of their school’s authority figures? That’s going to put pressure on them. (Nods smugly)

BERG: So let me get this straight: a Christian school staffer, praying, privately but in public view, is…

LIBRELLE: Oppressive, fascist and probably white supremacist and racist.

BERG: Mkay. In the meantime, a non-binary or LGBTQ teacher telling kids the details of their personal and identity’s sexual orientation, including how their various orientations practice intimacy, to kids of all beliefs, including Christian and even Muslim kids, telling them there are infinite genders and no real notion of masculine and feminine, when they’re still at an age where the parents haven’t had “the talk” with them themselves yet?

LIBRELLE: Essential social education, to make up for the sloth and incompetence of parents.

BERG: Aaaah…

(They are interrupted by an employee)

EMPLOYEE: (to BERG): Can I help yo, sir?

BERG: (waves box with holder). Good to go.

EMPLOYEE: (to LIBRELLE) And you, si…uh, maa… (looks at BERG, startingi to panic a big. BERG shrugs)

LIBRELLE: I need a new seat for my electric recumbent bike.

BERG: So you, the big environmentalist, have switched to a coal-powered bike?

LIBRELLE looks up, alarmed, stammering, giving BERG time to make his break.

And SCENE.

School Days!

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I need to go back to school so I can take out$10,000 in student loans and never pay them back.

I’m thinking Gunsmith School sounds good. Saw it on a matchbook cover. Probably be lots of demand for my services and get paid in cash, after Democrats ban legally-owned guns.

Joe Doakes

I’m going to guess that the base value of a academic program Will increase by $10,000 in the next few years.

Above and beyond inflation, I mean.

The choppers are in the air

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The 1st Biden Air Cav will soon start spraying Agent Green, exfoliating with borrowed dollars whatever canopy of fiscal sanity still remains below.

President Biden told reporters on Thursday that he is considering taking executive action to broadly cancel student loan debt, and a decision may be imminent.

“I am considering dealing with some [student] debt reduction,” Biden said today. However, he appeared to conclusively rule out $50,000 or more in student loan forgiveness. “I am not considering $50,000 [student] debt reduction,” he said. His comment confirms his earlier statements rejecting larger amounts of student loan forgiveness, and would seem to contradict suggestions made earlier this week by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that Biden was seriously considering cancelling $50,000 or more in student loan debt.

Biden did not specify an exact amount of student loan forgiveness that he is considering, although clearly it would be under $50,000. He also did not address rumors that he is considering imposing income restrictions on student debt cancellation.

The proposed debt cancellation would “only” be for the federal student loan program. Even the Socialist Squadrons at Camp Joe don’t yet dare force private lenders to forgive debt.

Schumer wants the $50,000 per snowflake. Biden may opt for $10,000 per, another number mentioned as a possibility.

Whatever the final number, there will be a cost to the taxpayer. Whatever Treasury bonds were used to lend the money still exist, and would need to paid back and are still charging interest. A freebie amount of $50,000 would cost around a trillion.

Then there’s the moral hazard. If the debt can be forgiven once, it can just as easily be forgiven again. Students will start to borrow with the expectation they won’t have to pay back the loans.

So, this is a step out the back door towards “free” education.

Another aspect that Biden needs to tap dance around is a means test, or some kind of income limit. Student loans are held by more higher income people than lower income. Biden can’t be seen to be handing stacks of cash to “rich” kids. (A lot of student debt goes for graduate schools.) So, he might just make it a welfare program and forgive debt only for lower income people.

Perhaps with their free money, the kiddies can take an economics class or two and discuss the idea that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

A square thought in a round mind

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Yesterday Mr. D posted on what any conservative more than five minutes old has learned, which is conservatives are not allowed to have certain thoughts. And, a couple days ago I posted on an irony I’ve longed noticed on the Left, that they view themselves as tolerant and open and decry attempts to enforce, as they see it, conformity, yet they themselves are wholly intolerant when faced with opposing viewpoints.

All this reminded me of a friend of mine from my school daze. He’s a genuinely gentle and nice fellow, but he’s of the Leftist persuasion.

He posted this on facebook awhile back, before the election, and the resulting tongue baths from other lefty friends were what you’d expect.

I believe that the most valuable ideal is kindness.

I believe that all people, regardless of ethnicity, race, religious belief
or non-belief, political alignment, sexual orientation and status in life
are deserving of respect.

I’m not perfect in embracing this next ideal but I do my best. It’s all
about having an open mind. I may not agree with the political positions,
religious beliefs, or phobias of others but I do my best to listen to and
respect others.

Then, pulling a 12-G turn, he posted this awhile later…

I am tired of listening to you all! And now I ask that if you truly believe
that we are better off under the current President, if you believe that we
don’t need stricter laws and bans of certain guns, and/or if you have or
intend to disparage the young people of March for Our Lives…then please
unfriend me now and save me the trouble of having to do so myself, which I already have done for some others.

I no longer have the patience to listen to you.

The resulting tongue baths from other lefty friends were what you’d expect.

Continue reading →

Don’t Say Logic, Knowledge Or Boundaries

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SCENE: It’s 6AM, at Twin Cities International. Mitch BERG is leaving an airport bar, after having his ritual shot of whiskey before getting on a plane for a business trip. As he turns to walk down the concourse, he almost literally runs into Aaron ROSTON, A writer at the (possibly fictional) progressive blog “MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com“.   ROSTON is a crossing guard at a school in rural southern Minnesota, and is a bullying activist – mostly focusing on promoting bullying of children of conservatives. He is wearing a t-shirt that says GAY on the front.

ROSTON: Merg.

BERG: Hey, Aaron. On your way to Florida, I see?

ROSTON: Not bad, for a stupid person. How could you tell?

BERG: Just a hunch.

ROSTON: You’re an idiot, so you should know Governor DeSantis’s bill makes it illegal to say “gay” in Florida. I’m going there to practice civil disobedience and also spend my stimmy checks.

BERG: Civil disobedience?

ROSTON: I’m gonna say gay gay gay gay gay gay gay gay gay gay…

BERG: Huh. Courageous. Of course you are, and you do realize that the Florida law doesn’t make talking about homosexuality illegal. It just bars teachers from doing spontaneous sex ed classes with kids under the age of 8.

ROSTON: You’re too stupid to be an educator, so I’ll explain this to you. What if I have a kid who has two mommies, or two daddies, and is confused about the situation? What am I supposed to do?

BERG: If a kid has same-sex parents who haven’t explained the situation to the kids, that’s both weird and – here’s a radical notion – their business, not yours.

ROSTON: So you’re a mouth-breathing gay hater. What if I wanted to tell my children…

BERG: They aren’t “your children”. You’re a public employee – a crossing guard, as it happens, but I hear teachers who say the same thing – who is part of a system we, the public, pay to teach our kids how to read, write, do math, think critically, and other skills. So – you were saying?

ROSTON: What if I wanted to tell (makes scare quotes) my students that my partner and I were going axe-throwing over the weekend?

BERG: Then you tell them you’re going axe-throwing. Big whoop.

ROSTON: You moron. And what if I then wanted to tell them that after axe-throwing, we were going to go back to my place and __________ his __________ in the ___________ until ___________ with a…

BERG: (Interrrupting): Well, if it were my five-through-eight-year old, I’d be calling the police and teaching you a lesson about boundaries.

ROSTON: So you hate gays.

BERG: Hey, look – over there! A kid in a wheelchair with a MAGA hat.

ROSTON: WHEREWHEREWHEREWHERE! I wanna make him cry…

(sees nothing)

ROSTON: (Looks around frantically) Where? Merg?

(But BERG has disappeared)

And SCENE

Can The Center Hold?

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I’m not one of those conservatives that bags on teachers as his default setting. My mother’s parents were teachers. My dad was a great teacher. My little sister teaches. Three out of four of them voted or vote GOP. Teachers are as individual as anyone else.

Now, as an example, when bad cops – corrupt sergeants, mobbed-up detectives, thumpers on patrol, sadists in squad cars – emerge, the question pops up; why don’t the good cops do something about the bad cops? Why does the “thin blue line” seem to believe standing with a bad cop is more important than good civilians?

So – let’s take that (perfectly valid) logic and apply it to teachers. Why aren’t the good ones able to do something about teachers like this?

The question is only partly rhetorical.

“Great Time For A Strike, Denise…”

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Minneapolis teachers will likely be walking off the job.

The timing…doesn’t seem great, from their perspective:

Public school enrollment continues to fall in Minnesota

I think Majority Leader Gazelka got this one right:

Some Conclusions “Science” Needs To Make

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I’m not sure there’s scientific evidence of any of these – but if someone gave me a seven figure government grant, I’m sure I could come up with some.

School Kids “Walking Out Of Class” Is Not Spontaneous: Big Left must be trying to get people to the polls in nine months; the headlines are again full of stories of teenagers “walking out of school” to “protest” “causes”.

Amazingly, there were news cameras waiting right there as they walked out of school, carrying their professionally printed signs!

Those are some pretty motivated, well-funded, well-organized high school kids!

There are, of course, exceptions.

Mascists, Lockdown Fanboys/Fangirls Will Exhibit Deep Psychological Issues When Crisis Fades: The people hectoring you about your mask at Target are having the time of their lives right now. Feeling that they’re saving lives by badgering people about masks, virtue-signalling their vaxx status, and demanding we stay the locked-down course are living out their version of fighting an existential threat – sort of like their grandfathers landing on Utah Beach, only with DoorDash bringing them Oaxacan tacos, left “safely” on their doorsteps.

And like many of those veterans, when the crisis is over, so will end The Best Years Of Their Lives.

I”m picturing a movie in ten years about the readjustment blues and trauma that “veterans” of the pandemic will feel – sort of like Coming Home, only with DoorDash bringing Oaxacan tacos.

Hard To Believe…

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…that a city run by Kim Norton, which has been becoming blue-er and blue-er over time, would play passive-aggressive bureaucratic pattycake games with the citizenry…

…right?

A group of parents, with a Twin Cities law firm, are asking for records related to the district’s adoption of Critical Race Theory.

And how did that go over?

“On Nov. 12, an attorney representing the district said that it would cost ‘Equality in Education’ $901,121.15 to obtain the records and they must prepay before the district completes their request,” the report reads.

The battle lines for next November could not be clearer.

There’s A Part Of Me…

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…that looks at an article like this, (and, for that matter, infuriating junior-high-level behavior like this among America’s future US attorneys) cheering on the demise of regard for academia outside, well, academia, and things “More, faster, now!”.

But while it’s a fact that academia has tutyhis rned into a cesspool of leftist indoctrination, I get to this bit here (I’ve added emphasis):

Unfortunately, as we’re starting to see, there’s a bit of a pushback against that sort of thing. It’s limited, but more and more people are flocking toward non-woke entertainment. People are starting to look to the trades as an option after high school. Folks are backing laws restricting some of the leftist indoctrination on our school campuses.

Nothing wrong with looking at the trades.

But academia, worthless as it largely currently is, is of disproportionate importance in a society’s future. As Orwell said, “He who controls the future, controls the past. He who controls the present, controls the past”. Academia controls, not history, but how history is passed down to future generations; they control a disproportionate share of the cultural “present”.

And telling kids who have it in them to fight that battle, to instead go and be an apprentice electrician, is a little like Eisenhower sending the D-Day invasion ashore in New Jersey rather than Normandy. It’s a path of lesser resistance, but it doesn’t really win the war.

I suspect what society really needs is an academic equivalent to Fox News: for conservative money to go to building a classically-liberal academic system, and letting people vote with their feet.

Which is far easier said than done – but then, isn’t everything that’s worth doing?

The Inmates Are Running The Asylum. And The Schools.

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Schools in Edina – once known as a good school district – are

Pictures of Normandale Elementary School in Edina show students eating their lunch outside with hats, coats and mittens on.

“Since the beginning of school, I learned that essentially if you brought a lunch from home, you were eating outside,” said Carissa Palm, the mother of a third-grader at the school.

The related article, from KSTP-TV, is too full of nauseatingly idiotic school administrator pullquotes, or, worse, “no comments”, to get through without yelling at the screen.

Government is the things we do together – stupidly and with the lowest common intellectual denominator in charge.