Category Archives: Education

June 21, 2017

College students testify: Free speech under assault on campuses

Posted on June 21, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on College students testify: Free speech under assault on campuses

‘I cannot name a single conservative speaker that has been brought to campus by the administration.’

College students and professors delivered a dire warning to Capitol Hill Tuesday that free speech on campus is coming under “attack,” telling lawmakers that conservative views are in danger of being “shut down.”

Students who say they’ve faced “considerable backlash” for exercising First Amendment rights testified as part of a packed panel of witnesses before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“In classrooms, liberal arguments are often treated as unquestionable truths,” said Zachary Wood, a 21-year-old student at Williams College in Massachusetts.

Other views, he suggested, are not welcome. “I cannot name a single conservative speaker that has been brought to campus by the administration,” Wood said.

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Posted in Education, Free Speech, Radicals

June 16, 2017

Marxist Wisconsin Professor Rakes In $170,000 Per Year Teaching About Inequality And Oppression

Posted on June 16, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on Marxist Wisconsin Professor Rakes In $170,000 Per Year Teaching About Inequality And Oppression

“Human emancipation” is the goal of Marxism, the fat-cat professor explains.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison offers a sociology course informing students that capitalism creates “a world of great misery, inequality and oppression” that “is irrational in ways that hurt nearly everyone.”

Erik Olin Wright, the well-heeled professor who teaches the graduate-level course, rakes a sweet annual salary of $170,000 per year.

The MacIver Institute, a free-market think tank, obtained the syllabus for Wright’s course by way of a public records request. The course is entitled: “Class, State, and Ideology: An Introduction to Social Science in the Marxist Tradition.”

The affluent professor’s course syllabus, which goes on — and on — for almost 80 pages, declares that capitalism “generates harms” and “generates injustices” which “can be broadly grouped under three rubrics: exploitation, domination and irrationality.”

Marxism, on the other hand, is an “emancipatory social science” that seeks to “fulfill the goal of generating critical social scientific knowledge relevant to the task of challenging systems of oppression.”

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Posted in Cultural Marxism, Democrats/Progressives, Education, Radicals

June 10, 2017

50% of California Kids Can’t Read

Posted on June 10, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on 50% of California Kids Can’t Read

Among Hispanic boys, less than a third met the dumbed-down government standards in English. And among whites, while the numbers are slightly better, more than 40 percent failed to meet even the basic standard. In every grade except 11th, less than 50 percent of students met the literacy standards, which again, are dumbed down to the extreme.

In California’s government schools, even the official data shows that children are being turned into lifelong illiterates on an industrial scale — and at hefty taxpayer expense. Unfortunately, children all across America are being victimized by this. And the cause is hardly a secret, having first been exposed over 150 years ago.

The latest numbers from the California Department of Education tell a tragic tale. According to an analysis of the data by CALmatters, less than one fourth of black boys meet even the dumbed-down Common Core standards used by today’s government schools. More than half of them scored in the lowest possible category, suggesting they are unable to read even the most basic material.

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Posted in California Story, Education

Colleges now teaching social justice to high-schoolers

Posted on June 10, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on Colleges now teaching social justice to high-schoolers

At least three universities will offer social-justice themed summer programs for high-school students discussing topics such as Black Lives Matter and “Gayborhoods.” Some of the programs, such as one at the University of Pennsylvania, will cost more than $7,000 to attend.

Colleges across the country are playing host to month-long summer programs that aim to teach high-school students the merits of social justice.

The month-long Social Justice Intensive summer program at Sarah Lawrence College is one such program, vowing to teach high-schoolers “theoretical, historical, and present day perspectives on issues such as class, gender, sexuality, and race.”

While students can’t earn college credit from these classes, they will still be taught by Sarah Lawrence Professors, who will offer courses such as “Intersectional Social Justice” and “Finding Our Voices: From Activists to Allies” at a cost of $6,580.

“Intersectional Social Justice,” taught by Professor Rachel Simon, will serve as a primer on intersectionality, arguing that the theory describes how “oppressive institutions” (such as rape culture and classism) are “interconnected” and thus “cannot be examined separately from one another.”

According to a course description, Simon will discuss issues such as Black Lives Matter, Feminist Activism, and what is apparently known as the “Theater of the Oppressed” in order to teach students ways to “dismantle” those “larger systems of oppression.”

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Posted in Cultural Marxism, Education, Radicals

June 8, 2017

Conservative student flees small Boston college after year of harassment

Posted on June 8, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on Conservative student flees small Boston college after year of harassment

Emerson College freshman bullied so badly she transferred.

What Lexie Kaufman loves most about Emerson College is its academics. A journalism major, she praised that department and its impressive television studios on campus.

But she won’t be returning for her sophomore year to the small, Boston-based liberal arts school, what she considered her “dream college” when she entered as a freshman.

“It’s a shame, in the end,” she said in a recent interview with The College Fix. “It’s been nothing but awful to me.”

Why so? Because she’s a conservative, and the constant bullying from peers she received over her freshman year sent her packing.

It started during her first days on campus, when Kaufman faced the wrath of her classmates simply because of her political views. In high school, she wrote for The Odyssey Online and the conservative opinions she proffered therein made her disliked immediately at Emerson, she said.

“I walked into this school not being liked by a lot of people, getting nasty stares, getting weird comments on my whiteboard on my door …” she said.

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Posted in Education, Radicals

June 6, 2017

Exclusive Test Data: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

Posted on June 6, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on Exclusive Test Data: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

Results of a standardized measure of reasoning ability show many students fail to improve over four years—even at some flagship schools, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of nonpublic results.

Freshmen and seniors at about 200 colleges across the U.S. take a little-known test every year to measure how much better they get at learning to think. The results are discouraging.

At more than half of schools, at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table, The Wall Street Journal found after reviewing the latest results from dozens of public colleges and universities that gave the exam between 2013 and 2016.

At some of the most prestigious flagship universities, test results indicate the average graduate shows little or no improvement in critical thinking over four years.

Some of the biggest gains occur at smaller colleges where students are less accomplished at arrival but soak up a rigorous, interdisciplinary curriculum.

For prospective students and their parents looking to pick a college, it is almost impossible to figure out which schools help students learn critical thinking, because full results of the standardized test, called the College Learning Assessment Plus, or CLA+, are seldom disclosed to the public. This is true, too, of similar tests.

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Posted in Education

Evergreen prof publicly berated peers on ‘Equity Council’ (Video)

Posted on June 6, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on Evergreen prof publicly berated peers on ‘Equity Council’ (Video)

Yet another video out of Evergreen State College shows a faculty member on the school’s “Equity Council” berating her white peers for being “those motherfuckers that we’re pushing against.” The campus has been embroiled in controversy following student protests against a professor’s email questioning the school’s decision to ask white students and faculty to leave campus for a day of diversity programming.

The video shows Professor Naima Lowe screaming at two of her white colleagues, and while it is unclear what exactly sparked the confrontation, Lowe appears to be upset with the two for their work on Evergreen’s “Equity Council,” saying that “the Equity Council handed you a way to do this easily.”

Notably, Lowe is herself a member of the Equity Council, according to its website, which describes the council as one committed to advancing “aspirations for greater equity, diversity, and inclusion of underrepresented populations in our campus community” through the development of “proactive, strategic, and sustained initiatives for progressive institutional change.”

“You are now those motherfuckers that we’re pushing against. You can’t see your way out of your own ass,” Lowe goes on to tell her colleagues, adding that the student protesters “are literally asking for the same shit students have been asking for since the 70’s. None of this is new.”

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Posted in Education, Radicals

June 2, 2017

Parents sue San Diego school district over ‘Anti-Islamopobia Initiative’

Posted on June 2, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on Parents sue San Diego school district over ‘Anti-Islamopobia Initiative’

Say CAIR’s alleged ties to terror present a conflict.

A group of San Diego parents are suing to try to stop the school district’s campaign against bullying of Muslims, saying that officials’ plans go beyond anti-bullying and end up actually promoting Islam.

That, the parents said in a complaint filed last week, amounts to an unconstitutional promotion of a religion.

The school’s plans include sending a letter to staff and parents warning about the dangers of Islamophobia, seeking to recognize Muslim holidays in the school calendar, providing resources for students during Ramadan and engaging in what the parents called “formal partnerships” with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

The parents said the San Diego Unified School District has joined with CAIR to “set up a subtle, discriminatory scheme that establishes Muslim students as the privileged religious group within the school community.”

The school district didn’t want to comment on pending litigation, but a spokesperson directed The Washington Times to an op-ed in The San Diego Union-Tribune addressing the policy decisions.

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Posted in Education, Islam, Law & Courts

June 1, 2017

Epic fail: Every student flunks state exam

Posted on June 1, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on Epic fail: Every student flunks state exam

Zero proficiency in math, English in probe of 6 inner-city schools.

In an astonishing outcome, an investigation of six Baltimore schools found not a single student passed the state’s proficiency test in the subjects of math and English.

Five high schools and one middle school were surveyed in a probe by Baltimore’s Fox TV affiliate, which spotlighted one school in which 89 percent of the students had the lowest score on a scale of 5.

Scores of 4 or 5 indicate proficiency with the subject, but at Frederick Douglass High School, only one student got as high as a 3 on his state exam.

WBFF-TV profiled one student at the high school who was among the 50 percent of his class that graduated. At the age of 3 months, Navon Warren’s father was shot to death, and before his 18th birthday, two uncles and a classmate were gunned down on the streets of his city.

His mother, Janel Nelson, reacted to the finding that not a single student at the school passed the proficiency exam.

“That’s absurd to me. That’s absurd to me,” she told the station. “That’s your teachers’ report card.”

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Posted in Education

May 31, 2017

The State of Modern Academia with Dr. Gad Saad (Video)

Posted on May 31, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on The State of Modern Academia with Dr. Gad Saad (Video)

I recently chatted with the talented illustrator Matthew Drake about a broad range of topics including Bill C-16, campus lunacy, anti-science movements, social justice warriors, and evolutionary psychology. A portion of our full chat was subsequently sketched by Matthew using time-lapsed animation (see THE SAAD TRUTH_440). Apologies for looking so tired. We held this chat in the evening following a long day of work.

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Posted in Education, Gad Saad