Category Archives: Education

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

In Defense Of The Brain

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It’s not news to anyone who’s been following the subject – education is in crisis.  

And the mainstream conservative response seems to be “let it burn!”   If you talk with a lot of mainstream conservatives, the kids should be heading straight out into apprenticeship programs and becoming electricians, HVAC techs, plumbers, truckers…

And I get it; the urge to chuck a mainstream education culture that has grown to hold most of “us” in contempt is tempting.  

But there’s a catch.  Someone’s gonna have to write the history books.  Someone’s gonna have to tell tomorrow’s cultural narrative what today’s cultural narrative was.   If politics is downstream of culture, and conservatives are doing the flooring and concrete finishing for the people that pass that information along, what do you think happens to culture in the future?

More of what is happeninbg tioday, that’s what.  

Which is what I thought when I read this piece by Joanne Jacobs, a Brit academic critic, about today’s woke fad of only teaching kids authors that are “relatable” to people today:

Speaking the language of care, some argue that children in poverty “should be shielded from the rigour of canonical texts, or complex scientific ideas, or abstract mathematics, he writes. “That Shakespeare is beyond them. That Bach is meaningless to them. That the laws of thermodynamics belong to someone else’s world.”

School “is meant to offer new worlds,” writes McCourt. “It is meant to take the child by the hand and lead them to places they never knew existed, places beyond their post code, places they have every right to belong.”

Remember – “education” and schooling are very different things. 

And it seems to me if you want to make a society decline and collapse, you take away its imagination.  What could do that faster than focusing on the here and now?

The Press Conference I’d Like To See: Take 2

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TAKE 2:  A couple of key paragraphs disappeared from this one on Friday, the first time I tried it…

SCENE:   A press conference at the Minnesota State University system.   Spokesperson Moonbeam BIRKENSTOCK stands nervously in front of a podium, facing a gaggle of barely-engaged press, and Mitch BERG of Shot in the Dark/AM1280/HotAir. 

BIRKENSTOCK:   So, with the changes in federal funding, it appears the Minnesota State University system is going to have to make unprecedented hikes to tuition:

BIRKENSTOCK: Any questions?

BERG:  Yes – wouldn’t that $18 billion in surplruses that the DFL wasted in 2023 and 2024 have come in handy for this?

BIRKENSTOCK:  No hablo ingles…

BERG:   Si no hubiéramos desperdiciado el excedente, ¿seguiría siendo un problema?

BIRKENSTOCK: No further questions.

BERG:  That was English.

(But Birkenstock has left the podium)

(And SCENE).

Schooled

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Joe Doakes, looking at Como Park through his rear-view mirror, emails:

Harvard is pushing back against President Trump’s demands for reform. President Obama praised them for resisting. He is joined by several Thoughtful Republicans Of Moderate Bona fides On Neither Extreme Side (TROMBONES, the new and more acceptable word for people formerly known as RINOs) who agree that yes, racial discrimination is bad, and viewpoint discrimination is bad, and antisemitism is bad, but is that any of the federal government’s business, particularly at their elite private Ivy League alma mater?

Harvard’s defenders have a point. But so does Trump.

The purpose of federal student loans is to help poor kids go to college. The purpose of federal research grants is to subsidize schools who can’t afford to hire good people. Why should grandma pay income tax on her Social Security to subsidize leftist hatred at a billion dollar private school?

Trump should announce that henceforth, student loans and research grants will be based on need – individual and institutional. Harvard can subsidize its own students and researchers to hate whomever they like on their own nickel.

Joe Doakes

I’d love to see schools fill out a FAFSA form and spend a few weeks waiting to see if they get qualified.

DOGE: Making Australia Australian Again

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I’ll admit it – two months of DOGE has made me a little inured to stories about outlandish things that the Federal Government spends our money on.  

Promoting DEI in Serbia?   Transgender comic books in Peru?  Yaaawn.   Get back to me when you’ve got something interesting.  

So when I heard that there was a fracas about funding universities in Australia, a part of me thought of course there is.   Why would we not be funding universities in Oz?”

What I didn’t figure on was that there would be so much of it the risk of losing it would cause a national emergency down under.  The Trump administration is asking seven Australian universities, not to do without all that American aid money, but to justify the aid money they are getting, in terms of American nationional interest.  According to the Guardian:

The Trump administration told Australian university researchers a push to promote administration priorities and avoid “DEI, woke gender ideology and the green new deal” was behind a “temporary pause” of funding, according to a memo seen by Guardian Australia.

University sector sources say the US has severed research funding at six universities – Monash University, Australian National University (ANU) and the University of Melbourne, University of Sydney, University of New South Wales and University of Western Australia – since Donald Trump came to power, including some as early as January. ANU is the first university to publicly acknowledged it.

Which is, according to Sky News, an urgent enough matter that Australian PM Tony Albanese is being urged to drop everything and get on the case:

A memo sent by the US office of managament and budget to an Australian university project on January 27 and retrieved by The Guardian, declared financial assistance for the researchers was a waste of taxpayer money and explained federal spending priority would go towards “the will of the American people”.

“Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing Administration priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending ‘wokeness’ and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and Making America Healthy Again,” the memo said.

“The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.”

The cuts would leave a $600M hole in Australian research budgets. 

And if you guessed some Ozzie academics would refer to Americans wantintg American money to serve American interests as “foreign interference” – well, you’ve been paying attention this past four years (and you know that public unions are pretty much the same around the world):

The National Tertiary Education Union’s (NTEU) national president Alison Barnes slammed the missive, and said the Albanese government had to “guarantee Australian researchers would be protected.” “The federal government must push back on the Trump administration’s blatant foreign interference in our independent research in the strongest possible terms,” she said.

Not to mix my metaphors, but “the first three weeks of a new diet are the. hard part” seems appropriate under the circumstances.  

A Cold Mississippi, Only Dumber

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Reading and math scores in Minnesota schools are lagging behind those of smug Minnesotans’ eternal punching bag, Mississippi.  

This should fix that:

Starting this fall for the 2025-26 school year, Minnesota’s public schools will be required to teach third graders how to use non-binary gender pronouns in writing sentences.

The Minnesota Department of Education’s new K-12 English Language Arts (ELA) standards and benchmarks were adopted in 2023 and are scheduled for full implementation at the beginning of the 2025-26 school year. Reviewed and revised on a 10-year cycle, Minnesota’s ELA standards and benchmarks are organized into three strands: 1) reading, 2) writing, and 3) listening, speaking, viewing, and exchanging ideas.

That’ll fix things.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

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University of Kansas prof says that men who don’t vote for Harris/Klink should be…

Well, it’s all right here.  Go for it. 

Not that this is news, necessarily.

The University issued one of those “Oaaaaakaaaay, we’ll look into it, because hypothetically that’s not the kind of thing we approve of here, if it happened…” statements that says between the lines “our PR department is working overtime on this one…”

 

Pounce

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In my interview with former Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka last Saturday, we talked about the depths of Governor Klink’s radicalism. 

With that in mind – with any luck, this should turn up in the Veep debate tonight:

In a very significant development — I am almost prepared to say the most significant development in the current presidential contest — it has recently been revealed that Brian D. Lozenski, an associate professor of urban and multicultural education at Macalester College and a leader in the development of Minnesota’s proposed ethnic studies curriculum, explicitly called for the “overthrow of the United States.” This goal has demonstrably shaped Minnesota’s ethnic studies standards, according to which students are taught as early as kindergarten that America is evil. The video recording of Lozenski was made two years ago but was taken down the day after it was spotted by Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center…  

And for someone who’s made a bit of an art form out of concealing his radical nature under a couple of layers of Elmer Fudd-wear, it’s actually been kind of brazen of Walz.

But there’s not much point in trying to make Lozenski look like anything but a CRT Kommissar:

To make as explicit an assertion as did Lozenski is extremely rare; indeed, I have never seen or heard such an admission. The destructive intent of ethnic studies or CRT has been very apparent and much commented upon for many years by the conservative commentariat. But Lozenski’s open, cavalier articulation makes the destructive nature of ethnic studies virtually impossible to deny. 

So the debate should be interesting, for a change.

Outcomes

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Look – it’s not like there’s any reason at all, ever, that I’d vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.   I am not better off than I was four years ago, and likely either are you. 

But in addition to the whole “communist” thing, she appears to have been exactly the kind of soulless bureacratic bean-counter and image-polisher that I excoriated here. 

Kamala learned well from her Marxist parents; you gotta break some coconuts to make an omelet unburdened by the brat that has been. 

Or something like that. 

The Kristallnacht Theme Park

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Harvard and MIT disgraced the nation’s “elite academia” last year.

Columbia says “hold my kombucha”:

Yep – progs standing in the door of the schoolhouse, trying to keep the race they hate out.

Is a single Democrat office-holder or leader anywhere going to condemn this?

“Columbia University’s Public Safety and the NYPD cannot guarantee Jewish students safety”.

Oh, I suspect the NYPD could do it, if there were any political will to do so.

The fact that there isn’t should make every American sick to their stomach.

Bonus question: as someone else put it (I wish I could claim credit) – if Trump was responsible for what happened in Charlottesville, why aren’t Biden and his boss responsible for this?

Saint Louis Park Schools Seeks Word Salad Chef

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Saint Louis Park Public Schools is looking for a new Assistant Superintendent.

But not just any Assistant Super. Nosirreebob.

This one is going to have some extra special administrator-fu (emphasis added):

The first sentence of the position’s summary says, “the Assistant Superintendent proactively supports the Superintendent to create and communicate anti-racist structures and systems, works to interrupt systems of oppression, and serves as a role model for culturally relevant pedagogy.”

The school district continues its summary of the position by saying the assistant superintendent must be “unwaveringly committed to anti-racist actions and use data to adapt and sustain their efforts towards racial equity to plan, direct, and coordinate action to achieve the mission and strategic objectives.”

The job description continues by saying the school district is seeking an assistant superintendent who can “examine the presence and role of ‘Whiteness’ in systems and structures,” and is “open to feedback regarding their own racial blind spots.”

The job will pay between $130-200K.

I think we finally found out what “fully funding education” means.

EdMinn’s Curious Self-Indictment

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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

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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

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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…

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…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

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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

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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

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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?

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.