Just A Thought, But Hear Me Out
Maybe the racially neurotic should not be teaching children.
Say, the kinds of people who insist that maintaining discipline in class and ejecting those who seriously misbehave – thereby enabling the rest of the class to have some chance of learning something – is merely “upholding white supremacy,” and so, by implication, very, very bad. The kinds of people who, when their own words are quoted verbatim and they consequently encounter pushback, seemingly for the first time, complain about the stress of being disagreed with.
As we’ve seen many times, when said neuroticism is made modish, statusful, and an institutional obligation, the practical results are not entirely inspiring. With six experiments in racial immunity from discipline, in six different cities, resulting in six surges in violent classroom assaults, up to and including actual riots. And with apologists for the policies doubling-down and subsequently claiming that “African-American boys” are more “physical” and “demonstrative,” and so punching teachers in the face, and groping them, and setting other students’ hair on fire, is how those students “engage in learning.”
And when educators have practised such dishonesties and have learned to perform the required mental contortions, the results can be quite eye-widening. We might, for instance, turn to Dr Albert Stabler, an assistant professor at Appalachian State University, whose thoughts are much aligned with those of our TikTok teacher linked above.
Writing in The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, Dr Stabler confessed his innate wrongness – “I am a white teacher” – before disdaining the “white feelings” of fellow educators who objected to being punched and humiliated with increasing frequency, and with something close to impunity. Among them, our woke educator’s immediate predecessor, a female art teacher whose hair was forcibly cut by a black student. These objections were denounced by Dr Stabler as constituting “white supremacist violence,” while the actual violence – the punching and cutting and so forth – was waved aside as a display of the students’ “cultural knowledge” and “kinetic” creativity.
Not, I think, a happy trajectory.
Update, via the comments:
Regarding Dr Stabler and his peers, and their merry mental dance, Mike says, not unreasonably,
These people aren’t just pathetic, they’re twisted.
Well, pathologically unrealistic, certainly. The term that comes to mind is pretentious degeneracy. Again, the kinds of people to whom one probably shouldn’t entrust one’s children.
The feats of mental contortion – and the sheer, practised dishonesty – are, it’s true, quite something. Oddly, it’s often the small details that give the game away. For instance, Dr Stabler’s airy dismissal of what was done to his predecessor – because she, the victim, was white and therefore, it seems, undeserving of redress. As if forcibly cutting a female teacher’s hair, leaving her in tears, wasn’t obviously done to dominate and humiliate her. As if a person’s willingness to gratuitously punch someone, or grope them, or gleefully violate them in some way, couldn’t possibly tell us quite a lot about that person’s character – and about how much, or little, their wellbeing should concern us.
Instead, these acts of (often quite ingenious) malice are construed as innocuous and forgivable, while objections to being assaulted and humiliated are framed as the real problem, the thing we must correct. All those “white emotions.” A term used repeatedly, disdainfully, and generally as a euphemism for physical safety and expectations of civilised behaviour. And so, the aggressors, being supposedly oppressed, must forever be indulged and with ever greater latitude. As if an imperviousness to normal consequences will do anything but inspire more of the same, only with more daring and inventive sociopathy.
As a blueprint for a Really Bad Situation – a demoralised and hopelessly dysfunctional environment – it’s hard to fault. A blueprint, one assumes, to be extended beyond the classroom. 
I have read that in the 19th Century America had the most educated populace in the world, and this was before you had to have a degree in education to become a teacher. The hegemony of schools of education have only done harm.
If you don’t think that being beat desensitizes you and makes you more out of control, you need a timeout.
Beating is beyond spanking. There’s quite the broad line there but doing physical harm requiring even something as minor as a bandaid should be a line clear enough for any reasonable person to understand and of course a line that should not be crossed. You bring up poor minority households and such, a bit of a stereotype. Yet keep in mind that historically and even to a significant degree today, the poor face a far greater risk when their children stray and they generally have far fewer tools, and time, at their disposal to enforce discipline. Much of the extreme beating is generally drug or alcohol driven. Far worse damage can be done psychologically with the spoken word in many instances. Better to give a child a smack on the fanny than call him or her “stupid”.
But more in general, the go-to attitude of our society that “all violence is wrong” and even further, that being angry is some sort of moral failing is a big, big problem that has brought us to where we are today.
my parents taught me to read using phonics when I was 7. By 5th grade I was reading at 12th grade level.
I had a similar experience – phonics was used in school and reinforced at home. And my parents were readers too and I got full access to their books and magazines – westerns were a particular favorite, some sci-fi and then the stories in everything from Reader’s Digest to Saturday Evening Post. We didn’t have TV in the house until I was in grade school and, even then, it was restricted. So reading was a big deal.
Oh dear, my white privilege is showing!
Phonics: my parents taught me to read using phonics when I was 7. By 5th grade I was reading at 12th grade level. I taught my kids that way and they were likewise so far ahead. It baffles me that teachers hate it.
It had generally fallen out of favor when I was in grade school, at least in south Florida. Such that the mothers in the neighborhood bought phonic workbooks for us kids that we all had to work through. Which wasn’t much appreciated at the time after a day in school. I found them rather boring and easy/obvious but they seem to have worked. If only there was a “phonics” for math, maybe the 44 year old woman that we play poker with could make 20 cents change from 50 cents for a 30 cent bet.
The current fad around here in high school math is “no textbooks” just online stuff. Maybe saves $ but very bad for the kids.
The full article for them as are interested.
IMHO this sentence really nails it:
Phonics: having first learned Polish, then French – phonics for English was much more hit and miss. By the time I went to English school I went mostly by the “whole language” approach. The requirements in my day to read out loud in class provided ample opportunity for correction of English phonics outliers. Years later, when it came time to teach my daughters, we started with a phonics based approach – it worked well for one, the other just learned the words in English rather quickly. I think the lesson here is not to be dogmatic about any one approach.
Priorities. Because we are ruled by the best and the brightest.
I think the lesson here is not to be dogmatic about any one approach.
I think the key factor here is how quickly each child progresses beyond needing phonics.
Priorities. Because we are ruled by the best and the brightest.
Freeman Dyson has said many times that a key factor in his disenchantment with elites was what he saw during WWII in RAF Bomber Command: Thousands and thousands of deaths due purely and simply to bad decisions made by people who, being in positions of authority, were supposed to be wiser and more knowledgeable than their subordinates.
What *am* I looking at?
:::snort::: I don’t see how anyone could tell the difference between the AI and “real rap” stars in the first place.
:::snort:::
Hard to know where to start, really.
“amalgamation of
gross stereotypesaccurate depictions”“It would be a shame if you shared this anti-rape poster.”
Anti-rape: as the brits say, better dead than rude.
Item: Some years back, I read of a student-athlete at the University of Illinois, a football player. The young man was smart enough to know that he would never play professionally, and determined to use his sports scholarship to get a proper degree. He got respectable grades, but had to work very hard for them, because he was dyslexic.
Then a counselor recommended that he take Latin for his foreign-language requirement. Latin instruction began with its rules of grammar and spelling. As he mastered Latin’s rules, he also came to understand English’s similar (though less consistent) rules, which he had never been taught, and his dyslexia went away.
He said it was like someone turned the lights on.
[Above previously posted here.]
Item: During WW II, the US Army tested all recruits for literacy. Of recruits who had at least five years of school, less than 1% were illiterate. (There were many illiterate recruits, but those had no schooling.) During the Korean War, that same group tested IIRC about 15% illiterate. The difference was that in the 1930s, many American schools adopted the “look-say” method. This was after the WW II recruits had completed their first years of school, but before the Korean War recruits.
After almost 25 years of living and working in rural Africa with my K-12 teacher wife, neither of us can recall a single incident by a student that even remotely resembles these feral beasts,’ “African-American boys” [who] are more “physical” and “demonstrative,” and so punching teachers in the face, and groping them, and setting other students’ hair on fire, is how those students “engage in learning.”
African families cherish educational opportunities and make great sacrifices to attend school. amd African children, as a rule, are exceptionally well behaved. The difference between Africans and Negroes is a matter of culture, not race.
In African urban centres, one will occasionally observe upper grade secondary students and some college students trying to emulate American Negro culture with their dreadlocks, ass-crack baring trousers, and rap music, but they are a definite minority.
To use blackness as an excuse for such behavior when it is simple evidence of cultural rot, then blaming it on white supremacy, is pure horseshit.
Phonics: my parents taught me to read using phonics when I was 7. By 5th grade I was reading at 12th grade level. I taught my kids that way and they were likewise so far ahead.
There’s a pretty obvious confounding factor here.
If there was ANY silver lining to the year-long (in places like CA) lockout of students from their schools and subjecting them to Zoom classes, it was that parents got a ringside seat at what was really going on in the classroom – and how much they were lied to by teachers.
And let’s not forget this rather telling incident:
Needless to say, one of many.
It’s boring. No exciting theories to study and apply. And worst of all, anyone can teach children using phonics.
Among educators, not least leftist educators, there is a tendency to self-flatter and inflate their own importance. For instance, taking credit for other people’s ability, i.e., a child’s cleverness, as if the child’s IQ were something that had been bestowed by the teacher, whose role in that matter is somewhere between slim and pretty much irrelevant. The idea that a clever child might be clever despite their education – say, at the hands of leftist educators – not because of it, is practically anathema.
And simultaneously, we see great efforts being made, by leftist educators, to eradicate reliable tests of ability, which are deemed racist and unfair, and to shut down programmes for gifted children, on grounds that the reality of “natural gifts and talents” is something to be rejected as inegalitarian and ideologically offensive.
This bit from the above, among others, seems apposite:
Very much related.
The University of Texas at Austin is offering a “brand new” course on Democrat activist, pro-abortion, pro-China, climate change hypocrite pop star Taylor Swift this fall semester, titled “Literary Contests and Contexts — The Taylor Swift Songbook.”
As I have no idea who she is, I may have to take out a student loan to help me negotiate the years of rigour and dedication that this course will demand.I say this because success with the Taylor segment opens the doorway to an Honours course in English.
I am slowly coming to the conclusion that a good number of the problems we are dealing with, especially from the left but a significant number from the right as well, a good number of these problems could be solved, and especially avoided, if we simply stop taking women seriously. Seriously.
Item: During WW II, the US Army tested all recruits for literacy…The difference was that in the 1930s, many American schools adopted the “look-say” method…
I wouldn’t be surprised if the correlation is not spurious. And I am certain that the education establishment would not change its ways even if a connection were proved.
Seriously.
What was it Gene Wolfe wrote?
“Only women and flakes see ghosts”?
Item: During WW II, the US Army tested all recruits for literacy…WWII…Korean War…
However, other factors seem likely. For instance, science fiction writer Gene Wolfe wrote in his Korean War memoir that many of the recruits around him were not very suitable, having physical and mental problems. I’ll speculate that the Army was not calling up WWII veterans and thus, only a few years after WWII, was faced with a very limited pool of quality candidates–although one might also allow for the possibility that he saw a non-representative sample.
After almost 25 years of living and working in rural Africa with my K-12 teacher wife, neither of us can recall a single incident by a student that even remotely resembles these feral beasts,’…
I have read that African immigrants have a very low opinion of black Americans in general, seeing them as grievance-obsessed fools, and especially despising ghetto blacks as, well, barbarians.
Squires: What??
There is a strange cultural thing in black culture in the US where black girls get the ok to dress nice and study, because it doesn’t conflict with being feminine (of course some of them go gangsta) but the model for black boys is gangsta, so they won’t study, act out to prove how tough and cool they are. The result is that far more black girls graduate college and their earnings are better.
The movement to get rid of grades and valedictorians and honors classes is so twisted. Very smart kids can be way ahead of the slow kids, like 3 grades ahead. To make them take all the same classes together is a guarantee of dysfunction and failure.
“Only women and flakes see ghosts”?
Exactly. Similarly, I was thinking this last night during a lull in our poker game, the inability of certain generations to make change, maybe it’s not so much a generational thing. Maybe it is more a function of more and more women taking cashier-type checkout jobs combined with the types of women who used to do those jobs well enough moving on to other positions up the Peter Principle ladder. I honestly cannot think of a single man that I know, not even one “mentally challenged” guy, who cannot make change out of 50 cents.
What??
From the short story Try and Kill It.
[ Sounds of tomorrow’s Ephemera being compiled. ]
[ Wipes sweated brow. ]
From the short story Try and Kill It.
Could those have been words spoken by one of the characters, but without any indication that the reader should accept that point of view? Gene Wolfe has, on occasion, said that he finds the existence of ghosts quite plausible. (I’ll hesitate to say that he firmly believed in the reality of their existence because it’s been a while since I have read or heard him talk about that.) Bear in mind: (1) Wolfe works very hard to have his characters say what fits their personalities, not what suits any “message” Wolfe wants to promote. (2) Wolfe often writes stories in which characters are “unreliable narrators”: They lie or forget or get confused, and one has to pay very close attention.
[ Sounds of tomorrow’s Ephemera being compiled. ]
So that’s what that sound is. I was about to call the RSPCA.
So that’s what that sound is. I was about to call the RSPCA.
Yes, and there’s more swearing than you’d imagine.
This is a Facebook link so don’t know if everyone can view it…protest and counter-protest in NZ where the white people are stand strong and all anti-fascist against the mix of whites, asians, Maoris, etc. Way to go, white people! Way to go!
https://fb.watch/f7f1zO7AvN/
Not a new thing… In 1992 we moved to a new neighbourhood, and I went to the nearby Safeway to buy groceries. My bill came to $28.35 or something. I gave the cashier (I would guess, just out of high school – maybe 18?) a twenty and a ten and then fished in my pocket for change, coming up with a quarter and a dime. She looked at me like I had two heads, so I explained “that’s so you can give me a toonie (two-dollar coin for you foreigners), so I don’t have to carry as much change.”
She continued to be confused, but entered the $30.35 cash tendered into her cash register – miracle of miracles, it indicated change due of $2.00 on the nose! She was openly amazed, saying “Oh right – wow, you old people are really good at that stuff.” I didn’t appreciate being classed with ‘you old people,’ being in my mid thirties at the time.
I didn’t appreciate being classed with ‘you old people,’ being in my mid thirties at the time.
[ Slides comfy chair, blanket to dcardno. ]
Not a new thing… In 1992
Well, 1992 is new to some of us old people. That was about the time it started to get embarrassing. You will note the “she” there. More to my point.
I didn’t appreciate being classed with ‘you old people,’ being in my mid thirties at the time.
Started happening to me in early thirties. Didn’t like it either.
I didn’t appreciate being classed with ‘you old people,’ being in my mid thirties at the time.
A week or two ago, while grocery shopping, I was referred to as “young man.” The lady in question was, I should point out, pushing 80 and her vision possibly not what it was.
There have been many videos, dating back to Jay Leno, of interviews of young people on the street who literally know nothing, not who the VP is, not when WWII or civil war were, what communism is, how many people on earth (7 million hahaha was one answer), nothing at all.
Hey, where’s my comfy chair and blanket? And hot tea? I feel aggrieved, too!
A week or two ago, while grocery shopping, I was referred to as “young man.”
That happened all through my forties and fifties. Felt odd. On the other hand, it was annoying when, in my teens, an elderly person would address me as “boy”.
I want my own reparations. I’ll found the League of the Easily Offended. All of you are invited to join. Demonstrations will be conducted for maximum hilarity.
This is very disappointing. Can’t we do anything to provoke you?
There have been many videos, dating back to Jay Leno, of interviews of young people on the street who literally know nothing, not who the VP is, not when WWII or civil war were, what communism is, how many people on earth (7 million hahaha was one answer), nothing at all.
Granted. Many of my classmates in school, many who got better grades in certain subjects than I did, didn’t seem to know much about those subjects just a few months later. And many of them that I am still in touch with seem to know even less today. But making change from 50 cents is a basic life skill. As I said, mentally challenged people…well men according to my limited sampling of just one anyway…can do this. But even in the context you speak of, what do you suppose the male/female ratio is there? And keep in mind that Leno is an entertainer and thus things will have a significant PC bias. I also find a lot of people are actually embarrassed to know many things so they pretend not to know. I have seen friends in certain situations pretend to not know things that I know that they know. It’s shocking. But knowledge of stuff you need to know to get by in basic life…it’s pathetic. And it is thick especially among the homochromosomal.
Re ‘Not entirely unrelated’ it’s fascinating how the left-leaning and uselessly educated in-group manage to combine the very worst of white savior complex with the Noble Savage racist tropes. Then, nobody challenges them, they only hear similar viewpoints, or if they hear something objectionable, let the emotions flow.
Those clips prove that there are some dummies in the general population, but not that the general population are all dummies. Somebody answering correctly isn’t funny, so we never see those clips – instead we see people guessing that there are 10 stars on the US flag, or not knowing what country California is in. Admittedly, at least when doing these man-in-the-street gigs at elite universities, they shouldn’t be able to find anyone who doesn’t get the right answers (unless they set up shop near the grievance studies end of the campus), but at Disneyland (etc) it’s not surprising to find a moron or ten over the course of a day.