UNEDUCATING AMERICA

As scholars Lance Izumi and Wenyuan Wu have chronicled, many students report increased ideological indoctrination in the classroom, which is leading to weaker standards and lower expectations.

City Journal

Uneducating America

The latest NAEP scores show that the nation’s youth are painfully ignorant about U.S. history and civics.

Larry Sand
May 18, 2023

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, is a test that measures the knowledge of American students in various areas. The results of the NAEP test in U.S. history and civics, taken in 2022, were released early this month. They paint a grim picture: according to the data, just 13 percent of eighth-graders met proficiency standards for U.S. history, meaning that they could “explain major themes, periods, events, people, ideas and turning points in the country’s history.” Additionally, about 20 percent of students scored at or above the proficient level in civics. Both scores represent all-time lows on these two tests.

The multiple-choice questions on the NAEP history test are very basic. For example, one question asks, “Susan B. Anthony was a leader who helped

immigrants come to the U.S.
women win the right to vote
older people win the right to get Social Security
children win the right to an education.”

Another asks, “Indentured servants were different from slaves because indentured servants were

freed at the end of their term
did much easier work
came from the West Indies
were paid less money.”

Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics—the organization that creates, designs, develops, and implements the NAEP—told reporters that while the civics scores are “alarming,” even more distressing were the history results. While many analysts rushed to blame the Covid-induced school closures for the abysmal showing, Carr noted that the problems well predated the pandemic. “For U.S. history, I was very, very concerned. It’s a decline that started in 2014, long before we even thought about COVID. This is a decline that’s been [going] down for a while.”

It’s not only students’ history and civics NAEP scores that are deficient. In November 2022, the scores released for the reading and math test taken earlier in the year showed that just 33 percent of the nation’s fourth-graders were proficient in reading, and 36 percent proficient in math. The eighth-graders did even worse: 31 percent scored as proficient in reading, while a painful 26 percent showed proficiency in math. According to the report’s authors, “the national average score declines in mathematics for fourth and eighth graders were the largest ever recorded in that subject.”

Relatedly, the national average score on the 2022 ACT, a college admissions test, fell to 19.8 (out of a possible 36), down from 20.3 in 2021, according to data released in October 2022 by the nonprofit that administers the test. While education leaders invariably use the pandemic lockdowns as an excuse, the Wall Street Journal observes that this is the fifth consecutive year that ACT scores have declined, and the first time that the average score has dropped below 20 since 1991. English scores fell to 19 out of 36, down from 19.6 last year.

Weighing in on the NAEP history results, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona explained that the poor scores “further [affirm] the profound impact the pandemic had on student learning in subjects beyond math and reading.” Fair enough, but then Cardona ludicrously proclaimed: “Now is not the time for politicians to try to extract double-digit cuts to education funding, nor is it the time to limit what students learn in U.S. history and civics classes. We need to provide every student with rich opportunities to learn about America’s history and understand the U.S. Constitution and how our system of government works. Banning history books and censoring educators from teaching these important subjects does our students a disservice.”

Just how does keeping a six-year-old from being exposed to books with explicit sexual themes translate to banning books and censoring educators? As for funding, we are pouring record amounts of cash into the bottomless education pit, and it’s done very little to help. While there’s no doubt that the forced Covid shutdowns did damage, other causes explain why students are not learning effectively. As scholars Lance Izumi and Wenyuan Wu have chronicled, many students report increased ideological indoctrination in the classroom, which is leading to weaker standards and lower expectations. “One California student reported that a teacher at his school told the class that perfectionism and striving for perfection was part of white supremacy culture. Another of his teachers ‘made it seem like it was bad to have a good work ethic or to be supportive of meritocracy.’ In his school, grades were inflated, low grades were eliminated, late assignments were allowed, and multiple retakes of exams were permitted. Rigor simply disappeared.”

When teachers spend time forcing race- and gender-infused woke gibberish down the throats of American children, less time is available for more traditional subject matter. Here are a few of the myriad instances of students being hammered with the ravings of the woke:

In Buffalo, New York, students were told that “all white people” perpetuate systemic racism, and kindergarteners were forced to watch a video of dead black children, warning them about “racist police and state-sanctioned violence” that might kill them at any time.

The San Diego Unified School District orders students to “confront and examine your white privilege” and to “acknowledge when you feel white fragility.” 

Additionally, children are told to “understand the impact of white supremacy in your work.”

In a training session for teachers in Seattle, schools were deemed guilty of “spirit murder” against black students.

In Springfield, Missouri, teachers are trained that people are given a “biological sex assigned at birth,” which often conflicts with their “gender identity” and “gender expression.”

In Illinois, the Evanston–Skokie school district has adopted a curriculum that teaches pre-K through third-grade students to “break the binary” of gender.

West Hartford Public Schools in Connecticut has begun to introduce gender ideology in kindergarten as part of what it calls “social justice lessons.”

So instead of learning factual American history—the good and the bad—students are now at the mercy of far-left advocates pushing a radical racial and sexual agenda. Unless the education establishment reverses course in a hurry, parents, already responsible for feeding, clothing, and housing their children, will need to educate them as well.

Larry Sand, a retired teacher, is president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network.

SLAVERY

Chattel slavery originated in ancient Mesopotamia and is as old as written history. The 4000-year-old Laws of Eshnunna included slaves among the objects that could be bought or sold, such as “an ox or any other purchase.”…In 1650, there were more Englishmen enslaved in Africa than there were Africans enslaved in the English colonies that became the United States.   


FREE BLACK THOUGHT

May 18, 2023

Slavery
WAS AMERICAN SLAVERY UNIQUE?
The roots of chattel slavery and the myth of American exceptionalism
Justin Suran

In her widely read introduction to The 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones declared that slavery in the United States was “unlike anything that had existed in the world before.” The truth is that chattel slavery in the United States had many features in common with other slave systems throughout world history. Chattel slavery and ethno-racial inequality were deeply intertwined long before the slave ship White Lion sold “20. and odd” African captives to colonial Virginians in 1619. The British colonies and later the United States were participants in a transcultural system of exploitation and forced labor rooted in the ancient and medieval past and pervasive throughout the Atlantic world by the 1600s. 

Different types of slavery have been practiced over the course of human history. Historians usually distinguish chattel slavery from other forms of unfree labor (such as serfdom) and other forms of slavery (such as debt slavery). Chattel slavery—the kind that once existed in the United States—treats the enslaved person as an item of property, an object to be bought, sold, or given away. 

Chattel slavery originated in ancient Mesopotamia and is as old as written history. The 4000-year-old Laws of Eshnunna included slaves among the objects that could be bought or sold, such as “an ox or any other purchase.” In Sumerian societies, the sale of chattel slaves was recorded on cuneiform tablets. Around 1750 BCE, King Hammurabi of Babylonia wrote some of the earliest laws on slavery. According to the historian Muhammad Dandamaev, “Babylonian slaves of the seventh to the fourth century [BCE] . . . were the absolute, unconditional property of their owners.” The Code of Hammurabi stated that any slave who “[struck] the body of a freed man” or “[said] to his master ‘You are not my master’” would lose an ear. Slaves were tattooed or branded to signify ownership, and runaway slaves had to be returned to their owners. The penalty for harboring a runaway was death. 

Moreover, the association between chattel slavery and hereditary status dates back to these first civilizations. “The children born to slaves in early Mesopotamia,” writes John Nicholas Reid, “were another commodity that could be bought and sold.” In the process of being sold, an enslaved child could be separated from his or her mother. Heather D. Baker estimates that the majority of slaves owned by elite families in Babylonia were born into slavery. Enslaved children began to work around the age of five.

Mesopotamia was thus the cradle of chattel slavery. But later societies would make even more extensive use of slave labor. The earliest of these “slave societies” (or “slave economies”) was classical Greece. Estimates of the slave population in Athens range from 15 to 35 percent of the total population. Athenian slaves worked as domestic servants, agricultural laborers, and craftsmen, making everything from household furniture and musical instruments to military shields and blades. In the silver mines, slaves worked in chain gangs, often to the point of death. In The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 1, The Ancient Mediterranean World (2011), Tracey E. Rihll sums up their importance: “In the home, in the market, in the workshop, on the farm, slaves accompanied Athenians from cradle to grave, putting food on the table, wine in the jar, clothes on their backs and money in their hands.” 

In classical Greece, as in the United States, political and economic freedom developed alongside slavery. In the city-state of Athens—the birthplace of democracy—chattel slavery enabled Athenian citizens to participate in the political process. The philosopher Aristotle argued that there was no contradiction between slavery and democracy: some people, especially non-Greeks, were “slaves by nature,” lacking the highest forms of reason required of citizens. Slaves could not participate in Athenian assemblies and courts. Nevertheless, slaves owned by the city-state performed public functions in Athens. They were what we today call civil servants: court clerks, accountants, even security forces.  

The Greeks enslaved mostly non-Greeks, whom they viewed as primitive and inferior. Some slaves were captives of war, but most chattel slaves were acquired by way of trade in the Aegean and Black Seas. Slaves were imported from such places as Southeast Europe, Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), and the Eastern Mediterranean. There was a thriving slave trade throughout the region, and the Greeks had access to its markets. According to David Braund’s chapter, “The slave supply in classical Greece,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 1, The Ancient Mediterranean World (2011), “The slave trade was everywhere. At the periphery of Greek culture, slaves were traded all around the Black Sea, in the Adriatic and in the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. So too at its traditional centres—in Athens, Aegina, Corinth, Chios and elsewhere.” 

Like the Greeks, the Romans made extensive use of chattel slaves. Slavery was critical to the Roman economy and to the expansion of the empire. It’s conjectured that between 10 and 20 percent of the Roman Empire’s population was enslaved. Moreover, the Romans and the Byzantine Empire expanded chattel slavery geographically into Africa, particularly in North and Northeast Africa.
By this time, Africans had created their own indigenous forms of slavery. However, little is known about these indigenous slave systems before the the early seventh century and the start of the Islamic slave trade. Slaves from the interior of the continent were traded through the Kingdom of Da’amat in Ethiopia as early as the seventh century BCE. Later, the city of Aksum (also in present-day Ethiopia) became an important hub of the slave trade. Other slaveholding kingdoms developed in West and Central Africa.

From the 600s through the 1800s, an estimated 11-17 million Africans were forced into the Islamic trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades and sold in places such as Cairo, Baghdad, Istanbul, and Mecca. Islam did not permit the enslavement of other Muslims, so slaves were obtained by raiding or trading with other societies. Africans were used throughout the Islamic world as agricultural laborers, domestic workers, soldiers, and concubines. Ghanian kings benefited from their location between North Africa and West Africa, where the trans-Saharan trade included salt, copper, gold, and slaves. In 1324 Mansa Musa—the Muslim ruler of the Mali Empire and one of the richest men in the world—famously led a caravan to Mecca including thousands of slaves dressed in brocade and silk tunics.   

What today we call “race” was central to the dynamics of slavery in the medieval world, although the modern race concept did not emerge until the late 1600s. Early and medieval Christian writers equated black skin color in general and Africans in particular with monstrosity and sinfulness; similarly, Muslim scholars and Arab slave traders linked color and culture and propagated racist ideas about black inferiority. In the Muqaddimah (1377 CE), the Arab scholar and historian Ibn Khaldun wrote: “the Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because [they] have little that is [essentially] human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals.”   

Recent scholarship has emphasized the significance of race in the Islamic slave trade. In one famous revolt, black slaves from East Africa (the Zanj) rose up against their Arab slave masters in the Abbasid Caliphate. For fourteen years (869-883 CE), the Zanj and their supporters conducted a “racialized” rebellion, raiding towns, seizing weapons, and freeing slaves. They captured the city of Basra and came within seventy miles of the Abbasid capital, Baghdad. Ethno-racial distinctions between Europeans and Turks or Europeans and Berbers were also clearly demarcated. European as well as African slaves were held within the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire for hundreds of years. In one famous story, the Englishman John Smith was captured in battle and sold to a Turk before he escaped enslavement and helped colonize Virginia in 1607. The Barbary pirates, who were mostly Muslims operating from North Africa, raided Europe’s coastal towns and merchant ships and sold those whom they captured into slavery. The term “white slavery” was used to describe the European Christians held as slaves along the Barbary Coast. Adam Nichols estimates that between the late 1500s and the early 1700s, the Barbary pirates might have enslaved as many as 25,000 Britons. In 1650, there were more Englishmen enslaved in Africa than there were Africans enslaved in the English colonies that became the United States.    

In 1444, enslaved Africans disembarked from Portuguese ships at Lagos in the south of Portugal. Around that time, Portuguese traders began shipping Africans as slave labor to sugar plantations on Cape Verde and Madeira, islands off the coast of West Africa. African kings, chiefs, and slave merchants assisted the Portuguese by selling Africans into slavery in exchange for rum, guns, and other goods. Within a hundred years, people of African descent would become a significant minority group in Portuguese cities such as Lisbon. With bases on the west coast of Africa, Portuguese traders quickly dominated the early transatlantic slave trade and continued to do so for 150 years. 

In the 1500s, the Spanish began importing enslaved Africans into the Western Hemisphere. In 1525 a slave ship arrived in Santo Domingo, Hispaniola, with 200 captives. Black sailors, mostly enslaved, some of them free, at times participated in the colonizing efforts of both Spain and Portugal. The conquistador Juan Garrido, a free man of African descent, took part in the Ponce de Leon expedition that explored Florida as well as the Cortes expedition that laid siege to the Aztecs. The first African slaves in what would become the United States arrived in 1526—well before 1619, one might note—at the Spanish colony of San Miguel de Gualdape, near modern-day Savannah, Georgia. There were enslaved Africans in the first permanent European settlement at St. Augustine, Florida. Between 1581 and 1640, an estimated 450,000 enslaved Africans arrived in Spain’s colonies in the Americas; roughly half were brought directly from Africa under the Spanish flag.

By the mid 1600s, racial slavery had been institutionalized in the Catholic colonies controlled by Spain and Portugal. Soon the Dutch, English, and French would become heavily involved in the transatlantic slave trade. The Dutch and English had begun using enslaved Africans on their sugar plantations in the Caribbean, where slaves worked in brutal conditions and typically died after a few years.

Between 1500 and 1866, Portugal, Britain, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark together transported an estimated 12.5 million Africans involuntarily to North and South America. Roughly 95 percent of those slaves were sold to plantations in the Caribbean and South America. About 450,000 were sold to buyers in North America. Because the birth rate exceeded the death rate, the population of African American slaves in the United States increased to 3.95 million people by the 1860s, when the total population, slave and free, was 31.5 million.

Early in 1776, the English-born writer and revolutionary Thomas Paine urged the American colonies to separate from Britain: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” he wrote in Common Sense. “A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now.”

The American Revolution would soon catalyze abolition laws in the northern states of the new republic (VT, 1777; PA, 1780; MA and NH, 1783; CT and RI, 1784; NY, 1799; NJ, 1804) and supply opponents of slavery around the world with powerful new ideological weapons. But the revolution did not begin the world over again: its floodwaters did not wash away the sins of the colonial era. Lasting 89 years in the South after independence was declared, chattel slavery in the United States was less remarkable for its differences from other slave systems than for its striking resemblances.

[Justin Suran, a Camp Hill, PA, resident, has taught history at the high school and college levels. His publications include the book chapter, “‘Out Now!’: Antimilitarism and the Politicization of Homosexuality in the Era of Vietnam,” in the volume Gender and Sexuality in 1968: Transformative Politics in the Cultural Imagination, Lessie Jo Frazier and Deborah Cohen, eds., Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, and a column in Lancasteronline titled, “It’s not you—it’s me, Alexa.” His dissertation, Reason's Frontier (University of California, Berkeley, 2003), explored psychiatric science and therapeutic culture in twentieth-century California.]

STRATEGY FOR MASS MURDER

 
The strategy to bring about communism is to dismantle or undermine western society by attacking five societal components that maintain the hegemonic “oppression”: educational establishments, media, the legal system, religion, and the family…. The authors do, conveniently, leave out the fact that the ideology underlying the radical social movements of the 20th century are attributed with mass murder on an unimaginable scale.

The Anti-American Psychological Association
Psychology and the Declining Public Trust

Eddie Waldrep, PhD
May 16, 2023


 Our country, and indeed the world, has gone through a lot in the past couple of years. The COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd by a police officer, a racial reckoning, rioting, and a tumultuous transition of presidential power that has marred our democratic institutions to name a few. With so much going on, the radical political changes within the American Psychological Association (APA) may have easily escaped the attention of many.

For example, the APA has been gradually changing the way race is approached. Officially, in 2017 it updated standards on multiculturalism to include embracing “intersectionality,” a conceptualization of the myriad ways in which one is oppressed via group identity. In 2019, a Task Force on Race and Ethnicity Guidelines in Psychology noted drawing upon Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a guide and in 2020 the definition of racism promoted by the APA was officially changed. The redefinition changed it from internal prejudicial beliefs and interpersonal discrimination to a “system of structuring opportunity.” What led to this change and why does it matter so much?

Social Justice versus Critical Social Justice

 
These changes came as a result of the changing focus of APA, and academia in general, from traditional social justice movements to Critical Social Justice (CSJ). Traditional social justice sought to end institutional oppression, discrimination based on immutable characteristics, focus on universal humanity of every individual, and for equality of opportunity for each to pursue their own self-directed goals. These are indicative of aspirational goals found in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech. There are contemporary organizations promoting the same pro-human ideals such as the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) and many others. On the other hand, there is CSJ that has skyrocketed in the public sphere in recent years and is much more pernicious.

The boom of CSJ is not a mere phenomenon. It is the result of decades of planning referred to as “the long march through the institutions,” a neo-Marxist approach to establish the conditions for revolution. This built upon the work of Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci who developed the concept of “cultural hegemony.” Cultural hegemony was posited as an explanation for why the grand Marxist revolution and utopia had failed to manifest itself. Basically, if people were able to have a comfortable life in a free market society, then they lack the motivation to burn down western society to make way for the grand utopia.

Critical Critical Theory Theory

 
The hegemony is thought of as an invisible, largely undetectable, ubiquitous force that nobody intentionally directs but by which all are influenced. This is where the “fish in water” analogy stems from the that is commonly used to explain “white privilege.” In their book, Black Eye for America, Swain and Schorr (2021) note that the strategy to bring about communism is to dismantle or undermine western society by attacking five societal components that maintain the hegemonic “oppression”: educational establishments, media, the legal system, religion, and the family. Douglas Murray also noted this attack in his recent book, The War on the West.

The authors do, conveniently, leave out the fact that the ideology underlying the radical social movements of the 20th century are attributed with mass murder on an unimaginable scale. Throughout the special edition, the argument is made, consistently, that this ideology, advocacy, and radical social transformation should be incorporated through all aspects of psychology: research, training, and delivery of clinical services. 

CRT is just one iteration of the application of Critical Theory to different aspects of society (e.g., race, gender, sexuality, queer, colonialism, etc.) and often is presented as diversity, equity, and inclusion. CRT and intersectionality have been encouraged to be adopted incultural competency trainingand stem from the same origin. Intersectionality, applied socially, is designed to get people to think of how they are constantly oppressed, in any variety of ways, in any given situation, to promote social divisiveness. The concept of intersectionality was popularized by Marxist lawyer and key developer of CRT, Kimberle Crenshaw. In her 1991article for the Stanford Law Review, she argues that universal humanity ought to be rejected and focusing on race should be retained and be used for political power.

This is the exact opposite of Dr. King’s approach.  She makes the distinction between “I am black” vs. “I am a person who happens to be black”. She is critical of the latter and states, “’I am a person who happens to be black,’ on the other hand achieves self-identification by straining for a certain universality (in effect, “I am first a person”) and for concomitant dismissal of the imposed category (“Black”) as contingent, circumstantial, nondeterminant” (pg. 1297). Hence, the CRT focus on “centering race” to achieve ideological and political goals associated with imposing Marxist ideology to “dismantle” western norms and practices centering individual human rights and liberties.

The Modern Echoes of the Ugly History of Collectivist Ideologies

 
This ideology has a horrendous track record for humanity. Simply relabeling the ideology does not change that fact. American Psychologist, the “flagship publication” of the APA, went so far as to dedicate an entire special issue promoting this ideology in 2021. The edition editors criticize the field of psychology for “failing” to focus on structural power dynamics and for not creating “lasting social change” (Eaton, Grzanka, Schlehofer, & Silka, 2021). These are references to postmodern philosophy, Marxist structural determinism and social engineering. The authors go on to state “articles in this special issue build the case for a public psychology that is more disruptive and challenging than simply aiming dominant, canonical, and mainstream psychological research and practice outward” (pg. 1211).

Flynn and colleagues, 2021, discuss civil disobedience and criticize nonviolence as the only acceptable form stating, “we encourage psychologists to think critically about the effects of privileging certain acts of civil disobedience over others on the basis of decontextualized tactics alone, such as the assertion that property destruction invariably denotes a protest tactic outside the bounds of civil disobedience” (pg. 1220). They go on to describe strategies to twist and manipulate APA Ethics to justify any means they appear to see fit to dismantle “systems of oppression”. For example, regarding Principle C: Integrity, they state, “we also read it as authorizing clandestine methods of civil disobedience to contest injustice (e.g., deception, evasion) when methods maximize benefits and minimize harm” (pg. 1224). This stretches the intent of the use of deception from research methods, a researcher pretending to be a student for example, to justifying outright dishonesty.

And of course, the special issue would not be complete without an article criticizing “good” psychology. Note, the use of “Critical” in this context is related to neo-Marxist “Critical Theory” and not critical thinking. Grzanka and Cole, 2021, make an argument for what they describe as “bad psychology”. They argue that “good psychology” (maintaining rigorous methodological, scientific, and objective standards) is a problem because it gets in the way of the radical political agenda of transforming society the way that they think is best.  They state, “we contend that what is commonly thought of as ‘good’ psychology often gets in the way of transformative, socially engaged psychology. The radical, democratic ideals inspired by the social movements of the 20th century have found a voice in the loose network of practices that go by the term critical psychology and includes liberation psychology, African American psychology, feminist psychology, LGBTQ psychology, and intersectionality” (pg. 1335).

The authors do, conveniently, leave out the fact that the ideology underlying the radical social movements of the 20th century are attributed with mass murder on an unimaginable scale. Throughout the special edition, the argument is made, consistently, that this ideology, advocacy, and radical social transformation should be incorporated through all aspects of psychology: research, training, and delivery of clinical services.

 
How could the American people continue to trust the organization if this ideology is being actively promoted? What would psychotherapy look like within this ideological framework? I would argue that society would not and should not continue to trust APA if this continues. This is not sound, competent, professional, empirically informed psychology. This is Psychological Lysenkoism.

Critical Theory Ideas are Bad Psychology

 
APA has allowed, even endorsed, the miscommunication of psychological science that has the potential to negatively affect the mental health of individuals and society overall. Concepts such as implicit bias and microaggressions have questionable validity yet are so prominently displayed that they have the effect of gaslighting society. The net effect is to have people wondering if every interpersonal interaction is racist or bigoted and second guessing each encounter for intent and impact. These are reflective of the precepts and goals of CRT itself. The implicit idea is that almost everything is or can be racist is a central tenet of the ideology. From there, the goal is to then create the critical consciousness necessary to give rise to social unrest and revolution. The first paragraph of the intro to CRT, written for high school students, sets itself aside from traditional civil rights, and “questions” equality theory, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law. Delgado and Stefancic (2017) state, “Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law” (pg. 3).

An additional tenet is that the voices and “lived experiences” of marginalized groups ought to be accepted unquestioned. However, the hypocrisy of the framework is laid bare when the “voices of color” dissent from the prevailing narrative. Prominent examples are those of John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Wilfred Reilly, Roland Fryer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Darryl Davis, Jason Hill, Coleman Hughes, Eric Smith, Ian Rowe, Thomas Sowell, and the list goes on and on. The same dissociation occurs with members of various marginalized communities when anyone of that community doesn’t toe to line with the ideological framework. The individual does not matter, only the prevailing ideological narrative and political agenda. Anything, or anybody, that interferes with that agenda is inherently loathsome. The most common response to any individual expressing skepticism or dissent is to label the individual (any applicable variation of -ist or -phobic) and should not even be allowed to have a voice!

APA Should Adopt a Pro-Human (All Humans) Orientation

 
In psychological practice, we should focus on the individual with inherent dignity, value, and careful consideration of how factors influence the individual. APA ought to return to a pro-human orientation. The “critical” movement denies the individual and views them as simply a representative of a superimposed group identity or combination of identities. This is antithetical to our field. The adoption of radical political ideology has even led to the resignation of at least one leadership role in protest. When we focus on our universal humanity, we can celebrate our differences. If not rejected as morally abhorrent as it is, then the American people would rightly lose trust in the organization and damage trust in our profession.

NO PROGRESS

First, it starts with teachers’ deep disciplinary knowledge and love for their subject matter. It’s impossible to teach what one doesn’t know and tough to convey effectively what one finds dull. When teachers are passionate about sharing content, that passion is infectious.

Education Next Spring 2023
“Stop Wishing Away Evidence of No Progress”

 
Instead, “transmit what is finest in our multicultural inheritance,” says David Steiner

Frederick Hess

David Steiner, the executive director of the Institute for Education Policy at Johns Hopkins University, has written a new book, A Nation at Thought: Restoring Wisdom in America’s Schools. I first got to know David two decades ago, when I talked him into writing a chapter that took a hard look at course syllabi in teacher preparation (for the 2004 book A Qualified Teacher in Every Classroom?). His reward for a pioneering analysis was to become a pariah in education school circles. But this didn’t stop his career in education: David became the director of arts education at the National Endowment for the Arts, returned to academe as the dean of Hunter College’s school of ed., and then served as New York’s education commissioner. Meanwhile, Kate Walsh, one of my co-editors on that 2004 book, launched the National Council of Teacher Quality, which earned big headlines when it supersized his scrutiny. The publication of his new book seemed like a good chance to talk with David about schooling, wisdom, and the changed educational landscape. Here’s what he had to say.

Hess: You’re out with a new book, A Nation at Thought: Restoring Wisdom in America’s Schools: What prompted you to write it?

Steiner: First, observations: I had too many visits to schools in which elementary-aged children were alive with energy and curiosity, while older students were visibly listless, bored, or acting out. And second, research: understanding how our nation’s academic standards, assessments, and teacher-preparation programs work against rigorous and compelling instruction. For example, the major 5th and 10th grade standards in English/language arts are practically identical: “Determine the meaning of words.” At the core of these standards is the requirement to find the main idea in each text. But after doing so a hundred times a semester, it’s tough to be excited about reading the next book. The architect of our ELA standards has said the skill set of a strong reader is that of a detective. This sounds intriguing: Should we transform a novel or play into a crime scene? But what would it mean to “solve” The Bluest Eye or War and Peace? Can we answer why Hamlet prevaricated by circling the “correct response” in a multiple-choice test? We need to re-evaluate our standards to foster engaging responses from students when they read these books.

Hess: The subtitle is Restoring Wisdom in America’s Schools: What do you mean by “wisdom”?

Steiner: ChatGPT tells us it’s the ability to make sound judgments and exhibit practical knowledge. I say it’s having one’s mind furnished with the riches of our collective culture—the active recall of scientific knowledge, paintings, film, music, poetry, and narratives from fiction and nonfiction—past and present. This makes sound judgments possible, rendering us more thoughtful. We spend more of our life with ourselves than with anyone else. When we have only our minds as interlocutors, what is the quality of that private discourse? The gift of an education in wisdom is that our inner dialogues are worth having, meaning we won’t be a complete bore to ourselves.

 
Hess: You say that American education lost its way when it turned away from the academic core. Can you say a bit about what you have in mind?

Steiner: Understandably disillusioned by too many failed efforts at education reform, we started by shooting the messenger—deciding that test results don’t matter—and simultaneously became fascinated by shiny new goals: metacognitive thought, positive mindset, 21st-century skills, and creative thinking. The research base supporting our focus on these goals is far weaker than most educators assume. Social and emotional well-being is important: We absolutely need mental health counselors for distressed children and supportive, responsive teaching that is simultaneously exacting and demanding from our teachers. Research on SEL has produced a small number of useful findings, such as the importance of a child making a trusting connection with an adult in the school. But arguing that, after millennia of pedagogy, we have suddenly discovered a new science simply isn’t justified.

 
Hess: That sounds appealing, but just what does “teaching that is simultaneously exacting and demanding from our teachers” look like in practice?

Steiner: First, it starts with teachers’ deep disciplinary knowledge and love for their subject matter. It’s impossible to teach what one doesn’t know and tough to convey effectively what one finds dull. When teachers are passionate about sharing content, that passion is infectious. Second, we need to help teachers not to teach down to children from marginalized communities. All students will rise to rigorous and passionate teaching if it is offered to them. Finally, as a society, we need to stop telling ourselves that we can replace academic mastery with critical thinking about nothing in particular.

 
Hess: You write, “If you wanted to design an education system for failure, what we’ve got is pretty close.” What do you mean by that?

Steiner: Three of the major pillars of our education system—how we prepare teachers, what we test, and what they teach—embody industries that exist in their own bubble. Teachers are given a curriculum to teach that they have never or barely seen before. Our ELA tests don’t evaluate what students read and instead reward the affluent for their greater levels of background knowledge. Too many of our teachers are taught to act as DJs, curating individual playlists of materials from Google, thus ensuring that a child’s education is a matter of random luck. As a whole, our system is siloed and incoherent, and then we are surprised when students have trouble learning.

Hess: You also suggest that we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking that things are getting better—in terms of GPA and graduation rates. What makes you say that?

Steiner: We have assumed that 20 years of rising high school GPAs and graduation rates, stronger 4th grade reading results, and higher numbers of Americans graduating from college mean that American schooling is doing something fundamentally right. But it isn’t: As 12th grade NAEP results indicate, our high school seniors are doing no better than they did two decades ago. Grade inflation—both in high schools and institutions of higher education—ensures that we now count as success what was once considered failure. Are there extenuating explanations for flat outcomes? Well, from 2002 to 2020, inflation-adjusted per-pupil expenditure rose. While the percentage of children receiving lunch support also rose, child-poverty rates in 2000 and 2020 were the same. Yes, certain states wrongly underfund the education of underprivileged students, and the rising number of English-language learners is educationally challenging, although only 4 percent of NAEP’s 2019 12th grade reading test-takers were ELL students. But on balance, flat results mean what they say. We need to stop wishing away evidence of no progress.

Hess: We’ve talked a lot about the challenges. So, what needs to be done? What are a few of the key steps when it comes to doing better?

Steiner: In pre-K education, we need to learn from what has and hasn’t worked with Head Start and benefit from international experience to create both scale and quality control. Then, we need to shift our teaching and testing from a damaging overemphasis on so-called “skills” to a focus on rich content and conceptual understanding. We should replace the isolation of one teacher in one classroom with team teaching under the guidance of properly compensated master teachers. We need a new school calendar to reduce summer melt. Finally, we should expand the list of subjects that can count for children’s futures: High school students should be able to study such disciplines as the arts, graphic design, statistics, environmental science, and foreign languages and to link success in their studies directly to college entrance and/or future employment.

Hess: If I’m a public official or educational leader and this resonates, how do I get started?

Steiner: First, align the instructional core. You should create knowledge-based standards; insist on high-quality, content-rich instructional materials; provide assessments that test mastery of those materials; attract a diverse teaching core; and provide a full year of clinical preparation to teach those materials under the supervision of well-prepared mentors. Second, attend to the bookends. You should close the early opportunity-to-learn gaps and create opportunities for high school students to study a wider array of subject matter. Finally, stop playing political football with education. Instead of culture wars, transmit what is finest in our multicultural inheritance and educate children to be thoughtful guardians and informed inventors of our collective future.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.

HUMAN ASPIRATION

The creation of the United States of America was one of the most extraordinary pivots in human history because it sought to extricate humanity from the shackles of perpetual subjugation. America meant no feudalism, no religious wars, no state-centered society. The creation of the United States was a philosophical revolution made political reality on a continental scale. American optimism is intertwined with the notion that we, the people, are created equal, with a God-given right to liberty. Equality is our shared origin, but it is not our destination, because we are free to pursue happiness as we see fit. The American dream allows us to act according to our consciences and convictions, our hopes and desires, our ambitions and our efforts. 

The American dream is unique for everyone—and in America we can pursue happiness in different ways. Indeed, our free-market economy, our respect for the individual, and our federal system of government rest on our guarantee of social and political pluralism. As Americans, we are free to live where and how we want, to believe what we will, to associate with communities and groups of our own choosing, and to spend our time as we wish—and where these freedoms have been violated, it has been a violation of the American promise that can always be redeemed, because it is written into our political DNA through the Declaration of Independence and into our laws through the Constitution. America’s success has been a success of freedom, mass prosperity, science, and innovation. Most of all, America’s success marks the success of human aspiration.

The ultimate irony is that the young people who condemn America for its flaws do not recognize that their standards of justice, equality, freedom, opportunity, and prosperity are entirely the product of our history. They carp at the extraordinary achievements of the American past—and do not recognize how that makes them less capable of building an even more extraordinary future. Their cheap cynicism leads them to believe that all this talk of freedom, individual agency, and opportunity is a lie, a fraud, a malevolent myth—which is a perfect excuse to do nothing, to drop out, to accept no responsibility for one’s life. I never hear young people professing love for their country. I used to. But not lately.

This is when I really think teachers have a front row seat for America’s decline. G. K. Chesterton observed, “Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.” Our young people must be reminded of the “obvious things” about our country’s history, its extraordinary achievements, its still bountiful promise and potential. More than that, they must come to know the boundless possibilities of a good life, a full life, a life of service to our country, our families, and our highest ideals.

Jeremy Adams, Hollowed Out: A Warning about America's Next Generation (134-135). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.

RONALD REAGAN

 

In his farewell address of January 1989, President Ronald Reagan already saw this trend as a problem. Presciently, he said: 

“An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn’t get these things from your family you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-sixties.

“But now, we’re about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren’t sure that an un-ambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t re-institutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs [protection]. So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important—why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, 4 years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-day, I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father, who’d fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, “[W]e will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did.” Well, let’s help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual.”

Jeremy Adams, Hollowed Out: A Warning about America's Next Generation (116-117). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.

BOLSHEVIKS 1917-1920

A number of historians have rightly emphasised the point that the February revolution in 1917 did not provoke a counter-revolution. The overthrow of the Tsarist regime prompted a wide variety of reactions among the former ruling class: a resignation to events, a bitterness at the incompetence and obstinacy of the imperial court, yet also an initial optimism among its more liberal and idealistic members. Most of the nobility and bourgeoisie supported the Provisional Government in the hope that it would at least restrain the worst excesses and keep the country together. The initial absence of any attempt to fight back illustrated not so much apathy, as the feeling that there was little of the ancien regime left that was worth defending.

A determination to resist only began to develop during the summer, when the Bolshevik programme polarised opinion. The question is important when it comes to the origins of the civil war itself, which led to the deaths of up to 12 million people, the utter impoverishment of the whole country and suffering on an unimaginable scale. Konstantin Paustovsky lamented the lost opportunity for democratic change. ‘The idyllic aspect of the first days of the Revolution was disappearing. Whole worlds were shaking and falling to the ground. Most of the intelligentsia lost its head, that great humanist Russian intelligentsia which had been the child of Pushkin and Herzen, of Tolstoy and Chekhov. 

It had known how to create high spiritual values, but with only a few exceptions it proved helpless at creating the organisation of a state.’ Spiritual values never stood a chance against a fanatical determination to destroy all those of the past, both good and bad. No country can escape the ghosts of its past, least of all Russia. The writer and critic Viktor Shklovsky compared the Bolsheviks to the devil’s apprentice who, in an old Russian folk tale, boasted that he knew how to rejuvenate an old man. To restore his youth, he first needed to burn him up. So, the apprentice set him on fire, but then found that he could not revive him. 

Fratricidal wars are bound to be cruel because of their lack of definable front lines, because of their instant extension into civilian life, and because of the terrible hatreds and suspicions suspicions which they engender. The fighting right across the Eurasian land-mass was violent beyond belief, especially the unspeakable cruelty of Cossack atamans in Siberia. Even that arch-conservative politician V.V. Shulgin believed that one of the major reasons for the failure of the Whites was a ‘moral collapse’—that they behaved as badly as their Bolshevik enemy. There was, nevertheless, one subtle yet important difference. All too often Whites represented the worst examples of humanity. For ruthless inhumanity, however, the Bolsheviks were unbeatable.

Antony Beevor, Russia (501-502). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.