Elsewhere (270)
John Leo on standards versus appearances:
The nation’s public schools are a mess. Only 37 percent of 12th graders tested proficient in reading and only 25 percent in maths. Yet the inability to read or do maths seems to be no barrier to college. Unprepared students are flooding into college in record numbers. The Bureau of Labour Statistics says 70 percent of white high-school graduates and 58 percent of black graduates in 2016 enrolled in college. In his syndicated column, Walter E. Williams asks, “If only 37 percent of white high school graduates test as college-ready, how come colleges are admitting 70 percent of them? And if roughly 17 percent of black high school graduates test as college-ready, how come colleges are admitting 58 percent of them? It’s inconceivable that college administrators are unaware that they are admitting students who are ill-prepared and cannot perform at the college level.”
From the Walter Williams article quoted above:
College professors dumb down their courses so that ill-prepared students can get passing grades. Colleges also set up majors with little analytical demands so as to accommodate students with analytical deficits. Such majors often include the term “studies,” such as ethnic studies, cultural studies, gender studies… The major for the most ill-prepared students, sadly enough, is education. When students’ SAT scores are ranked by intended major, education majors place 26th on a list of 38.
With that in mind, readers may wish to revisit this tale of modern educational wonders. As I said at the time, a school that has no discernible standards, academic or behavioural, and which makes no distinction between those who study and those who don’t even turn up, is in no meaningful sense a school.
And speaking of analytical deficits:
A member of the pro-abortion club at the University of Minnesota-Duluth compared pro-life students to white supremacists during an open mic event last week. Throughout his [poetry] performance at the “Speak Out for Justice” event on April 21, Student Advocates for Choice member Reilly Manzer condemned the “pale faces” of the pro-life movement for criticising abortion.
Bear in mind that Mr Manzer – whose woke poetry is the obligatory feat of teetering pretension and outright psychodrama, and therefore loudly applauded – is, for many educators, an exemplary product of modern academia.
As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
R. Sherman
Heh … as Peterson says – it’s just a new way to bully and to feel morally superior while doing it.
Gay conversion therapy is wicked and must be made illegal. Masculine conversion therapy, on the other hand….
Feminists speak as if male babies are taken away from their mothers to be brought up in dormitories by drill sergeants, but this year’s college students are the children, and in some cases the grandchildren, of a generation of boys who were shown films like William Wants a Doll in their classrooms (to be more precise, they’re the children of the boys who saw that film and managed to reproduce).
If there was ever, as feminists claim, a huge silenced proportion of men who long to wear pink or work as nurses, that market segment has been fully exploited by now, thanks more to David Bowie and Mark Bolan than to feminist scolding. There’s no shortage of sensitive young men in touch with their emotions who’ve been conditioned to respond to female disapproval as if to an electric shock.
The U of T campaign cloaks itself in “feminism frees men too”, but it’s really quite nasty. It guilt-trips the sensitive young men into feeling that if they take a second look at a co-ed’s legs, they’re part of a systemic continuum of rape culture. And whatever actual rapists there are on college campuses, men who are immune to female disapproval and whose empathy can’t be appealed to, are flattered by such campaigns, which tell them that other men secretly aspire to what they’re doing.
Darleen,
It’s part of the ubiquitous inversion of, what C.S. Lewis called, “The Cardinal Virtues” into their exact opposites. See also, the concept of “privilege” which condemns as immoral what used to be called successful navigation of the vicissitudes of life.
There’s no shortage of sensitive young men in touch with their emotions who’ve been conditioned to respond to female disapproval as if to an electric shock.
When each of my boys turned 16, I gave them a copy of Kipling’s, “If.” To that I appended the words, “Remember: No woman in the history of womanhood has ever fantasized about being ravished by a dude wearing footie pajamas.”
When each of my boys turned 16, I gave them a copy of Kipling’s, “If.”
Hmmm… the twins turn 16 this September. That and 12 Rules should be on the list of gifts.
(thank God their high school has a vibrant JROTC program)
It’s Mean Girls psychology. The rest is pretence.
Most SJWs are women. Coincidence?
Coincidence?
I doubt it. Taken as a group, women are, I think, more inclined to bitchery and passive-aggressive behaviour. The overlap with “social justice” posturing shouldn’t be too surprising. The psychology of “cultural appropriation” complaints, as seen above, doesn’t seem far removed from picking on someone for having an unfashionable bag or the wrong kind of shoes.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/when-society-encourages-mean-girls-to-bully-boys/
girls tend to be quick and sharp at interpersonal thinking with a talent for knowing precisely where to slip in the psychological stiletto.
oh lord, this…
It is why I hated jr. high. I had been a rather independent child and spent the better part of my free time reading or playing outside (I was a tomboy in a neighborhood of boys). I wasn’t fully prepared for the social cliques and social policing that came from other girls. That onslaught of puberty between grade school & jr high was akin to walking from one’s comfy living room down the dark cellar stairs in a horror film.
A themesong for the idiots in Austin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycy15NUDZHM
Like I’ve been saying for a long time, there’ll be no final victor in the War Between the Sexes.
Sure there are, and most of them are named Mohammed.
Another episode in Why We Can’t Do/Have Nice Things
Another episode in Why We Can’t Do/Have Nice Things
Blimey. He’s a charmer. I was particularly swayed by his “typical non-vegan trash” line. One of you ladies should snap him up before it’s too late.
Another episode in Why We Can’t Do/Have Nice Things
The Terrible Sea Lion:
http://wondermark.com/1k62/