Academia Anthropology Media Politics

Elsewhere (294)

July 29, 2019 by David 103 Comments

Douglas Murray on broadcasters, Twitter and public trust: 

If broadcasters still cared about the editorial independence of their employees, then comments like this [aired on Twitter] would not be made by their journalists. For they further reveal what most of the public have come to suspect – that broadcasters presenting themselves as non-partisan in fact hold very clear political views and that these usually veer in a particular direction… Of course, people have always harboured their suspicions, but not until journalists began to freely give away their thoughts on social media was such a smorgasbord of evidence presented…

On one single occasion in recent years has a television presenter let slip a view that did not fall into lockstep with the narrow orthodoxies of the broadcasting class. When Politics Live presenter Andrew Neil sent out one tweet last year mocking the increasingly conspiratorial Observer writer Carole Cadwalladr, he not only deleted the tweet but himself immediately became a news story. There were swift calls for his sacking, and the BBC felt compelled to publicly chastise Neil. As it happens, despite being almost uncontested as the country’s leading political interviewer, Neil no longer has a regular slot on the BBC. 

Bob McManus on the hustles and dishonesties of state education:

The purveyors of higher-education theory have ginned up one more meritless rationalisation for the sub-par performance of traditional—read: heavily unionised—public schools in American cities. It’s called “math equity,” an emerging doctrine holding that schools can’t teach city kids to count without first exorcising racism—or, as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics declares, without forcing teachers to “reflect on their own identity, positions, and beliefs in regards to racist and sorting-based mechanisms.”

That social-justice pedagogy is fatuous is demonstrated by the enduring success of Gotham’s 216 charter schools, with their heavily minority student bodies, which have outperformed traditional public schools since the first one opened 20 years ago. The reasons for charter schools’ success are many and varied, but their triumph vaporises the principle underlying the ‘implicit-bias’ and ‘math-equity’ evasions—that white teachers aren’t equipped to teach minority kids without first adjusting their sensibilities…

No significant difference in racial makeup exists between New York’s traditional public-school faculty—62 percent white, 38 percent minority—and its charter school faculty—58 percent white, 42 percent minority. Charter schools outperform traditional public schools regularly enough to discredit the idea that unconscious biases among white teachers seriously impede learning among minority kids.

The malign farce of “implicit bias” pseudoscience has been mentioned here before. 

And Celine Ryan on the calibre of people teaching “morality and social justice” at UC Berkeley: 

[Nick] French argued in a recent Jacobin Magazine op-ed that people need to “dispossess the benevolent rich of their ill-gotten gains.” The leftist magazine states that French is also a member of the East Bay Democratic Socialists of America. “We don’t need the wealthy, just their wealth,” French writes.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.




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