READING BEFORE WRITING

Reading and knowledge never seem to find their way into
discussions of Literacy in Our Schools.

Reading Before Writing

Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review
8 September 2018

The extra-large ubiquitous Literacy Community is under siege from universal dissatisfaction with the Writing skills of both students and graduates, and this is a complaint of very long standing.

The Community response is to request more money and time to spend on sentence structure, paragraphing, voice, tone, and other mechanical Writing paraphernalia.

It never seems to occur to them that if students read more, they would know more, and in that way actually have some knowledge they wanted to write about. But reading and knowledge never seem to find their way into discussions of Literacy in Our Schools.

When teaching our students to write, not only are standards set very low in most high schools, limiting students to the five-paragraph essay, responses to a document-based question, or the personal (or college) essay about matters which are often no one else’s business, but we often so load up students with formulae and guidelines that the importance of writing when the author has something to say gets lost in the maze of processes.

On the one hand writing is difficult enough to do, and academic writing is especially difficult if the student hasn’t read anything, and on the other hand teachers feel the need to have students “produce” writing, however short or superficial that writing may be. So writing consultants and writing teachers feel they must come up with guidelines, parameters, checklists, and the like, as props to substitute for students’ absent motivation to describe or express in writing something they have learned.

Samuel Johnson once said, “an author will turn over half a library to produce one book,” the point being, as I understand it, that good writing must be based on extensive reading. But reading is just the step that is left out of the “Writing Process” in too many instances. The result is that students in fact do not have much to say, so of course they don’t have much they want to communicate in writing.

Enter the guidelines. Students are told to write a topic sentence, to express one idea per paragraph, to follow the structure of Introduction, Body, Conclusion, to follow the Twelve Steps to Effective Writing, and the like. This the students can be made to do, but the result is too often empty, formulaic writing which students come to despise, and which does not prepare them for the serious academic papers they may be asked to do in college.

I fear that the history book report, at least at the high school level in too many places, has died in the United States. Perhaps people will contact me with welcome evidence to the contrary, but where it is no longer done, students have not only been discouraged from reading nonfiction, but also have been lead to believe that they can and must write to formula without knowing something—for instance about the contents of a good book—before they write.

A nationally famous teacher of teachers of writing once told me: “I teach writing, I don’t get into content that much...” This is a splendid example of the divorce between content [reading and knowledge] and process [techniques] in common writing instruction. 

Reading and writing are inseparable partners, in my view. In letters from authors of essays published in The Concord Review since 1987, they often say that they read so much about something in history that they reached a point where they felt a strong need to tell people what they had found out. The knowledge they had acquired had given them the desire to write well so that others could share and appreciate it as they did.

This is where good academic writing should start. When the motivation is there, born from knowledge gained, then the writing process follows a much more natural and straightforward  path. Then the student can write, read what they have written, and see what they have left out, what they need to learn more about, and what they have failed to express as clearly as they wanted to. Then they read more, re-write, and do all the natural things that have always lead to good academic writing, whether in history or in any other subject. 

At that point the guidelines are no longer needed, because the student has become immersed in the real work of expressing the meaning and value of something they know is worth writing about. This writing helps them discover the limits of their own understanding of the subject and allows them to see more clearly what they themselves think about the subject. The process of critiquing their own writing becomes natural and automatic. This is not to deny, of course, the value of reading what they have written to a friend or of giving it to a teacher for criticism and advice. But the writing techniques and processes no longer stop up the natural springs for the motivation to write.

As students are encouraged to learn more before they write, their writing will gradually extend past the five-paragraph size so often constraining the craft of writing in our schools. The Page Per Year Plan© suggests that all public high school Seniors could be expected to write a twelve-page history research paper, if they had written an eleven-page paper their Junior year, a ten-page paper their Sophomore year, and a nine-page paper their Freshman year, and so on all the way back through the five-page paper in Fifth Grade and even to a one-page paper on a topic other than themselves their first year in school. With the Page Per Year Plan©, every Senior in high school will have learned, for that twelve-page paper, more about some topic probably than anyone else in their class knows, perhaps even more than any of their teachers knows about that subject. They will have had in the course of writing longer papers each year, that first taste of being a scholar which will serve them so well in higher education and beyond.

Writing is always much harder when the student has nothing to communicate, and the proliferating paraphernalia of structural aids from writing consultants and teachers often simply encumber students and alienate them from the essential benefits of writing. John Adams urged his fellow citizens to “Dare to read, think, speak and write” so that they could contribute to the civilization we have been given to enjoy and preserve. Let us endeavor to allow students to discover, through their own academic reading and writing, both the discipline and the satisfactions of reading and of writing carefully and well.

In 1625, Francis Bacon wrote, “Reading maketh a Full man, Conference a Ready man, and Writing an Exact man.” These benefits are surely among those we should not withhold from our K-12 students.

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CRT AND THE RED GUARDS

 “The first thing Mao’s Red Guards did,” she tells IWF, “was to abolish law enforcement.”

Independent Women’s Forum
2-4-2022

She survived Mao’s Cultural Revolution and doesn’t want to see it happen here.

Xi Van Fleet

When Xi Van Fleet, a Loudoun County mother, pushed back against Critical Race Theory at a heated Loudoun County School Board meeting last summer, her words carried special weight. 

An immigrant from China, who as a child had lived through Mao’s Marxist Cultural Revolution, Xi described CRT as the indoctrination of children. What she was seeing in Loudoun County, she said, reminded her of what she witnessed growing up in Mao’s China.

“I’ve been very alarmed by what’s going on in our schools,” Fox News quoted Xi Van Fleet as telling the Loudoun County School Board members. “You are now teaching, training our children to be social justice warriors and to loathe our country and our history. Growing up in China, all of this sounds very familiar. The communist regime used the same critical theory to divide people. The only difference is that [they] used class instead of race. This is indeed the American version of the Chinese cultural revolution.” 

“Critical Race Theory is indeed the American version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” Xi contended. “The critical race theory has its roots in cultural Marxism. It should have no place in our schools.”

A video of Xi’s remarks went viral. She was in the headlines and soon Sean Hannity invited her to appear on Hannity. “Am I ready for all this?” she recalls thinking. “It was such a big decision. And I decided yes. All this is worth it because, I can do something to help to save America, yes. So, I went to Hannity. I’d never ever, ever, ever, ever been interviewed by anyone. And I think it’s God’s will that I did well.” Requests for other interviews poured in after Hannity. She’s game to accept invitations. “If anyone offers me a platform, an interview, I will do it. I feel like this is the reason that I was brought to America, and this is the moment that was designed for me to use my story to help save America.”

Xi, who came to the United States in 1986, when she was 26, told IWF that she has been watching the development of what she believes are parallels with China under Mao and her adopted country for nearly a decade. But the riots of the summer of 2020 convinced her that the process had reached a critical point. 

“I could not remain an observer,” she told IWF. “I had to do something. It was the time of Covid, plus the death of George Floyd. It was a perfect storm that brought communism to the American streets and revealed its true face. Before, I would say that there was a tendency. But, no, this is not a tendency. This is the American cultural revolution being played out before our eyes. Too many Americans have no idea what is really going on. Why? Because we have never taught students, the American people, about the crimes of communism.”

Influenced by Marxist thought, her parents joined the revolution in 1949. “Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, which was officially the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, in 1966,” Xi recalls. “It lasted ten years until his death in 1976. I was a first grader when the Culture Revolution started. I lived through the whole revolution. By the time it was over, I had finished high school, and I was sent to the countryside to work in the fields for three years. And at the end of that time, Deng Xiaoping took over and decided to open up China and I was able to go to college at the age of 19.”

Xi compares what she saw happening in the United States to what she had seen as a child in China. “The first thing Mao’s Red Guards did,” she tells IWF, “was to abolish law enforcement. It wasn’t defunding the police but it was so similar. With law enforcement abolished, nobody could stop the Red Guards. They were just like BLM, antifa. What we saw on the streets of American cities 2020. We saw violence, rioting, looting, and burning—just like the Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution. Mao also launched a great cancel culture. He wanted to cancel everything that wasn’t communism. He called them the Four Olds, or the Four Old Things. 

“They were old ideas, old traditions, old habits, and old customs,” Xi continues. “So, they basically cancelled Chinese traditional culture. So, the Red Guards pulled down any statue that is Buddhist, or that is not communist. They burned down the temples, they went home to home to break into the house and destroy anything that’s old. Old books, old vases, I mean just insane. I saw so many on the street one by one things pulled out, smashed, burned, and homeowners were just howling, and some were beaten if they resisted. The Red Guards wanted to get rid of the Four Olds, just like the burning of churches here, or the pulling down of statues, and they changed the names of streets, of schools, of stores, and even personal names. If a street was called, for example, Prosperity Boulevard, it became Anti-imperial Boulevard or whatever. If you had a traditional name, it was a good idea to change it.” 

Downtown Washington, D.C.’s Black Lives Matter Plaza? Used to be two blocks of 16th Street. “The naming of the street has been seen by many as not only a reaction to the protests but part of it,” the New Yorker magazine’s Kyle Chayka ecstatically noted. 

Xi was named for the city of Xi’An, but Xi’s name is also the Chinese character signifying the West, with implications of Western imperialism. There was peer pressure to change her name. Xi kept her original name, but she saw many people who adopted a new name to avoid running afoul of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which could be fatal.  

Critical Race Theory famously categorizes individuals as oppressors or oppressed according to factors decided at birth. This labeling reminds Xi of the way people were defined during the Cultural Revolution. “In China, when the communists took over,” Xi says, “right away, there was land reform. China was an overwhelmingly agricultural society. I think that 90-some percent of the population were rural peasants. So, through the land reform, the communists classified people, they divided people into five different categories. 

“The worst was the land-owning class, that’s the enemy. So, by owning land, you were an enemy of the state. And the next category is rich peasant. You’re bad, but not as bad as the landowner. And then middle-class peasant, poor peasant, and then tenant peasants, which is proletarian. About one or two million landowners were executed. And the land was confiscated and then given to the poor peasants. Well, they had a field day for like one or two years, when everything was collectivized, through the collective farming. But then everything went back to the state. But what I’m trying to emphasize is that everyone has a label. You know where you stand.

“Basically, Mao divided China into two major camps: red camp, black camp. Red means you’re okay, You’re the friend with the revolution. Black means that you are the enemy. Not only that, your label is hereditary. Just like CRT. You’re born, if you are born to parents who were labeled as class enemy, you were class enemy at birth. Everyone knew his or her own place. If you did anything that was considered offensive to the ruling class, you became what’s called a counter revolutionary, and you ended up in the black camp. You could start in the red camp and end up in the black camp, but you can never start in the black camp and end up in the red camp. Does it make sense?” Unfortunately, it does make sense to those who have read about or otherwise been exposed to CRT.

After Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping took over in 1979. Deng opened China to foreign investment, and ultimately made it possible for Xi to come to the U.S. to pursue her studies. Xi landed at Western Kentucky University, where she pursued graduate studies in English and met her husband. He wanted to introduce her to his grandmother. Xi was anxious about the racial aspect of the meeting. She needn’t have worried. “My husband’s grandmother was a working-class woman and basically was a factory worker, and probably had never seen a Chinese person before,” Xi recalls. “I believe there was one Chinese doctor in the whole town of Bowling Green. So, I thought she probably would look at me funny or something. She just treated me like a neighbor.

 
“A factory worker, an uneducated woman, accepted me as if I were just from the neighborhood. And that’s not the way in China. In China a foreigner back then would be followed, like a curiosity. So, I’m just saying that that gave me such comfort thinking Americans are really nice people. They don’t look at you by your ethnicity that much. They look at you as a person. I think it’s beautiful.”

“The first thing Mao’s Red Guards did,” she tells IWF, “was to abolish law enforcement.”

The Van Fleets live in Loudoun County and have one son, who graduated from the public school system in 2015. Xi obtained a degree in Library Science from Catholic University, and has had a successful career that enabled her to pursue her passion for travel. She’s been to Peru, Pakistan, India, Russia, the Republic of Georgia, and Armenia and in the past visited her family in China. “I was there when Covid broke out. I took the last flight back to Dallas after President Trump banned international travel,” she says. “I don’t think I will go back. I don’t want to end up, you know, a communist jail and spend the rest of my life there. No. No. I don’t think I can go back.”

Although Xi worries about her family in China, she feels that she must speak out. But she limits herself to speaking out only about her adopted country. “My focus is to save America using my own experience living under communist rule,” she says.

Xi joined the Loudoun County Republican Women’s Club after listening to Fox’s Dan Bongino telling his listeners how important it is to become involved. It was through friends in this organization that she heard about the Loudoun County school board meeting. With some trepidation, she knew she had to speak out and in doing so became a media sensation.

 
“To me, and to a lot of Chinese, it is heartbreaking that we escaped communism and now we experience communism here,” Xi said in a Fox interview after the Loudoun school board meeting. Xi’s mission is to inform Americans and do her best to ensure that her beloved adopted country remains the Land of the Free.

IAN ROWE TESTIMONY

I see young people today trapped between two dominant narratives. The first is what I call blame the system, the belief that America is a oppressive nation; that every institution is steeped in racism; that there is a white supremacist lurking on every corner; that capitalism itself is evil; that these systems are so rigged and discriminatory that the individual is powerless, and only massive government intervention is the solution.

The second narrative I call blame the victim, the idea that America is full of opportunity and that if you are not successful, then it must be your fault. You have some pathology that is the cause of your failure. You should have pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps.

Both of these narratives are wrong and rob young people of agency, the sense that they can control their own destiny.

AEI
Ian Rowe
Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
House Testimony, January 20, 2022

To Chairman Himes, Ranking Member Steil and the Distinguished Members of the House Select Committee on the Economy, Good Morning.

My name is Ian Rowe.

I submit my testimony today as a proud product of the New York City public school system kindergarten through 12th grade, and a graduate of Brooklyn Tech High School, Cornell University College of Engineering and Harvard Business School. I am the founder and CEO of Vertex Partnership Academies, a new network of character-based, International Baccalaureate high schools, with the first campus to open in the Bronx in 2022.

For the past 10 years, I was CEO of a non-profit network of public charter elementary and middle schools in the heart of the South Bronx and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. We educated more than 2,000 students—primarily low-income, black and Hispanic kids. We had nearly 5,000 families on our waiting list.

Many of our parents understand that racial disparities exist, but they know those disparities do not have to be destiny for their kids. These parents were given the power to choose our schools because they wanted their children to develop the skills and habits to become agents of their own uplift and build a better life, even in the face of structural barriers. In District 8 in the South Bronx, of the nearly 2,000 public school students beginning high school in the South Bronx in 2015, only 2 percent graduated ready for college four years later. That means 98 percent of students either dropped out of high school before completing their senior year or they did earn their high school diploma, but still needed remediation in math and reading—if they did go tocollege.

We cannot ignore that the racial disparities we are seeking to close originated long before they show up for adults as statistical gaps in financial wealth, home ownership or crime. In this district, if only 2% of mostly black and brown kids are graduating from high school capable of doing even basic reading and math, why would we reasonably expect these same kids as adults to be flourishing in higher education and the workplace, starting businesses, getting married, having children within marriage, or any of the other behaviors that typically mark passage into young adulthood and likely entry into the middle class or beyond?

I see young people today trapped between two dominant narratives. The first is what I call blame the system, the belief that America is a oppressive nation; that every institution is steeped in racism; that there is a white supremacist lurking on every corner; that capitalism itself is evil; that these systems are so rigged and discriminatory that the individual is powerless, and only massive government intervention is the solution.

The second narrative I call blame the victim, the idea that America is full of opportunity and that if you are not successful, then it must be your fault. You have some pathology that is the cause of your failure. You should have pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps.

Both of these narratives are wrong and rob young people of agency, the sense that they can control their own destiny. If we want to help young people of all races achieve the American Dream, I propose a new framework FREE based on encouraging young people to embrace four pillars—Family, Religion, Education and Entrepreneurship—A revitalization of the four local, mediating institutions that drive human flourishing.

Family is helping young people understand the importance of forming strong families. Here we should teach decision-making that if you finish your education, get a full-time job of any kind so you learn the dignity and responsibility of work, and then if you have children, marriage first, data shows that 97% of millennials avoid poverty.

R is Religion and the personal faith commitment that can be an anchor in your life.
E is for Education and ensuring that every parent has the right to choose the education that best meets their child’s needs. School choice is fundamental. And the final E is Entrepreneurship, on the ways that young people can access capital, build
wealth.

To see how these FREE pillars of Family, Religion, Education and Entrepreneurship interact, consider that According to the Federal Reserve’s 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, the wealth gap between black and white Americans at the median—the middle household in each community—was $164,100. For some, this gap is vibrant proof of a permanent and insurmountable legacy of racial discrimination.

Yet the same 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances shows that when education and family structure are considered, on an absolute basis, the median net worth of two-parent, college-educated black households is nearly $220,000 and about $160,000 more than that of the typical white, single-parent household. The wealth gap is completely reversed.

We have a moral imperative to encourage young people of all races to adopt a new cultural norm around family, religion, education, and entrepreneurship. I look forward to discussing it in more detail.

SHEEP FACTORIES

The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge. Its domain of inquiry and scrutiny includes all aspects and all values of society…A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community…It cannot insist that all of its members favour a given view of social policy.

UnHerd

How our universities became sheep factories
Our great institutions are now instruments of political indoctrination

by Arif Ahmed
Arif Ahmed is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, and a campaigner for free speech.

January 14, 2022

A joke about education in Soviet Russia:
– My wife has been going to cooking school for three years.


– She must really cook well by now!


– No, they’ve only reached the part about the Twentieth Communist Party Congress so far…

Maybe it’s not so much funny as telling; but what it is telling of is the hijacking of a non-political activity—cookery, but it may as well be biology or history or maths—for a political end.

That end was not (or not only) to stuff your mind with state-approved facts (“facts”); it was to fashion a new man. Enthusiastic about “progressive” causes, responsive to peer pressure and ready to join in exerting it, and completely self-righteous, Homo Sovieticus would be the raw material of the Marxist New Jerusalem. As Stalin put it when toasting tame writers: “The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks.”

Communism has passed away. But the production of souls, or rather their engineering, survives in the capitalist Anglosphere. In our Higher Education sector it doesn’t just survive—it thrives, in the form of political indoctrination passed off as “training” or “mission statements,” specifically on the Thirty-nine Articles de nos jours: racism, unconscious bias, transphobia and the rest of it.

St Andrew’s, for instance, insists that students pass a “diversity” module in order to matriculate. Questions include: “Acknowledging your personal guilt is a useful starting point in overcoming unconscious bias. Do you agree or disagree?” The only permitted answer is “agree.” But what if you don’t feel, and don’t want to accept, personal guilt for anything? What if you think (like Nietzsche) that guilt itself is counterproductive? As one student aptly commented, “Such issues are never binary and the time would be better spent discussing the issue, rather than taking a test on it.”

My own university, Cambridge, wants academic staff to undergo “race awareness” training. This advises you to “assume racism is everywhere.” Attendees are also reminded that “this is not a space for intellectualising the topic.” You might have thought “intellectualising”—ie thinking about—it is the kind of thing Cambridge academics should do. But don’t feel bad about getting that wrong; or at least, don’t feel bad about feeling bad: we are also told that these sessions aim at “working through” the feelings of shame and guilt that you might have on your journey in “developing an antiracist identity.”

It isn’t just Cambridge and St Andrews. There is anti-racism or “unconscious bias” training being offered to, or more likely thrust upon, staff and/or students at Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Goldsmiths, KCL, Liverpool, Oxford Medical School, Sheffield, Solent, Sussex and doubtless hundreds of other universities and departments across the country.

It isn’t just training either. The very purpose of a university is being redefined. You might think they exist to conduct teaching and research. That would be naïve. Most universities now routinely call themselves anti-racist institutions, where this means: actively campaigning for a political end. For instance, Sussex says: “[a]s an institution we must actively play our part in dismantling the systems and structures that lead to racial inequality, disadvantage and under-representation.” Bristol expects all its members to “stand up” to racism “wherever it occurs.”

And on modern definitions, it may occur more often than its perpetrators or victims have ever noticed. For a thoroughly representative example: one Cambridge department tells students that expressions of racism include “beliefs, feelings, attitudes, utterances, assumptions and actions that end up reproducing and re-establishing a system that offers dominant groups opportunities to thrive while contributing towards the marginalisation of minority groups,” Notice that this definition is effectively suppressing beliefs (not just behaviour) on the vague and possibly intangible basis of whether they “reproduce a system.”

Now imagine being a clever, white 18-year old, not at all racist and not at all privileged either, away from home for the first time, in a lecture or class in (say) sociology, or politics, or philosophy, where a lecturer asserts, perhaps quite aggressively, that white people are inherently racist. Your own experience screams that this is wrong. But do you challenge it? Of course not—after all, it may have, and could certainly be presented as having, the effect of “marginalising minority groups”; and your own institution has told you, through formal training and via its website, that this is racism and we must all stand up to it.

So you keep quiet. So does everyone else; and the lie spreads. Repeat for white privilege, or immigration, or religion; perhaps also, given similar training and encouragement, for abortion, or the trans debate, or…Repeat for a thousand students a day, every day, for the whole term.

 
There is in Shia Islam the most useful concept of Ketman. It is the practice of concealing or denying your true beliefs in the face of religious persecution. At best our hypothetical student spends her university career—possibly, the way things are going, the rest of her life—practising a secular form of Ketman. Or worse: habitual self-censorship of her outer voice suffocates the inner one too; she starts to believe what she is parroting; she denounces others as racists, or transphobes or whatever; and then after three or four years, starts working for a publisher, or a media outlet, or a big corporation; and the euthanasia of the West continues.

I should say that anti-racist training or rhetoric does not only appeal to the ideologues who appear to welcome that process. There are other motives, of which at least one is quite understandable. Genuine racism and racial discrimination do exist—there is less now than 30 years ago, but you still notice it. You notice or hear about slurs, pointed comments, racist graffiti or physical violence; you notice being overlooked.

I remember looking for a room to rent when I first started working in London. All my white friends had found one pretty quickly. But for some reason, whenever I showed up to see one it had “just been taken.” I’ll never know how much of this was racism in my own case; but I do hear, and I have no reason to doubt, that similar things happen today.

But bringing in diversity training because racism still exists is like prescribing leeches because people still get headaches. As hundreds of studies attest, it just doesn’t work. It may even exacerbate existing prejudice. 

 A 2016 study of more than 800 US firms finds that:
five years after instituting required training for managers, companies saw no improvement in the proportion of white women, black men, and Hispanics in management, and the share of black women actually decreased by 9%, on average, while the ranks of Asian-American men and women shrank by 4% to 5%. Trainers tell us that people often respond to compulsory courses with anger and resistance—and many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterward.

 
Paying for something with no proven benefits is bad enough. Compulsory training may actively be making things worse.

 
Another motive, equally understandable but less laudable, is corporate self-interest. I remember arguing at length about training with a well-intentioned senior functionary at a Russell Group university who finally “justified” it on the grounds that “At least we’re doing something.” Doing something, at least seeming to do something, is a familiar practice: oil companies that ostentatiously invest in renewable energy, or tobacco companies that publicly support health research. Since summer 2020, what has especially moved the highly-paid bureaucrats running higher education is the need to look as if you care about racism. Hence, perhaps, all the expensive and useless training; hence the solemn statements about George Floyd and police violence; hence the rhetoric of the “anti-racist” (not just not racist, but anti-racist) university.

One obvious problem of corporate whitewashing is the unevenness with which it is applied. Racism is bad, but so is much else. And yet our soi-disant “anti-racist” universities rarely if ever call themselves “anti-genocide” or “anti-corruption” or “anti-censorship” or (for that matter) “anti-corporate-bullshit.” In summer 2020, you could hardly move for universities making fatuous assertions of “solidarity” with victims of racism. But you won’t find similarly prominent (and probably not any) support, from the same sources, for free speech in Hong Kong or for the non-extermination of the Uyghurs. But then upsetting China might affect your bottom line.

This isn’t empty whataboutery. Making corporate statements on racism, and not on these other things, means implicitly ranking anti-racism as the more pressing cause. Confiscating their time and attention for anti-racism training means imposing the same judgment on its staff and students; in effect, doing our thinking for us. Thanks for the offer, but I think we can manage for ourselves.

 
Whatever the source of demand for training, supply has rushed in to meet it. The winners are (a) the university leaders who can loudly proclaim their woke credentials and (b) the diversity-industrial complex whose clients they are. 

The immediate losers are the staff and students who expected, and deserved, to give or get education not indoctrination; but in time the losers will be all of us.

It isn’t too late, though. The obvious solution is the immediate and permanent scrapping of any kind of politically or ideologically oriented training or induction. It has no place in a university.

Then, enforce explicit institutional neutrality. In February 1967, the President of Chicago University appointed law professor Harry Kalven Jr to chair a committee tasked with preparing a “statement on the University’s role in political and social action.” The upshot was the Kalven Report, which stated in the clearest possible terms both the essential function of the University and the essential requirement for political neutrality that followed:

The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge. Its domain of inquiry and scrutiny includes all aspects and all values of society…A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community…It cannot insist that all of its members favour a given view of social policy.

These words should be installed in 10-foot high neon in the office of every Vice-Chancellor in the country. And their universities should commit, publicly and non-negotiably, never to take a corporate stance, in any direction, on any political or social question.

The Higher Education Bill currently going through Parliament imposes a new duty on universities to promote the importance of free speech. Clarifying what this means will be the job of guidance to be issued by the Office for Students. That guidance should recommend both the scrapping of political training and the adoption of institutional neutrality. Doing that and then enforcing it would clearly signal, what I very much hope is true, that the regulator sees the difference between properly run universities and the sheep-factories that they are on the way to becoming.

KHOA KIM SANDS

January 10, 2022

Mr. Fitzhugh,
 
I wanted to tell you a bit about my history endeavors at my school apart from The Concord Review. Over the last five years, I've become increasingly alarmed at the state of history education. Students don't understand how history connects to their lives and the importance of studying history. Students are extremely passionate about current events and world affairs but don't understand how history can provide the context to understand these issues. I am concerned about how ubiquitous “social media education” is. Students are so confined to ideological echo chambers, with no historical nuance or context to inform their opinions. Reading your blog, I can tell you share these concerns.
 
Last year (around the same time I was working on Theocracy in Tibet), I began designing a history course to teach, titled Conflict in Context. The course focuses on the history of imperialism, and its effects on the modern world. Each unit covers a different model of “empire”—Europe, the Islamic World, China, and America. Students will learn about Westphalian Pluralism, Islamist universalism, etc, and different cultural systems of legitimacy.
 
I got approval from my school’s faculty to teach the course as an elective this semester: I'll be the first student teacher at my school. I started teaching last week, and the course has been very successful so far. Currently, the students have read Fukuyama’s The End of History?, and are beginning the unit on European Pluralism by examining the failures of Christian hegemony through the Holy Roman Empire.
 
I thought you would appreciate hearing about my course, and I’m happy to continue to update you throughout the semester. The students will be required to write a term paper.
 
Again, thank you for publishing my paper and for the Emerson Prize. This is the first academic accomplishment I can be truly proud of, knowing it was not influenced by grade inflation or other factors. I am truly honored.
 
Khoa Kim Sands
[Oakland School for the Arts
Theocracy in Tibet,
Spring 2022, Emerson V32]

WATER FOR CHINA

 AEI Op-Ed 

China is running out of water and that’s scary for Asia

Of all Bejing’s problems—demographic decline, a stifling political climate, the stalling or reversal of economic reforms—dwindling natural resources may be the most urgent.

Hal Brands, December 29, 2021

Nature and geopolitics can interact in nasty ways. The historian Geoffrey Parker has argued that changing weather patterns drove war, revolution and upheaval during a long global crisis in the 17th century. More recently, climate change has opened new trade routes, resources and rivalries in the Arctic. And now China, a great power that often appears bent on reordering the international system, is running out of water in ways that are likely to stoke conflict at home and abroad.

 
Natural resources have always been critical to economic and global power. In the 19th century, a small country—the U.K.—raced ahead of the pack because its abundant coal reserves allowed it to drive the Industrial Revolution. Britain was eventually surpassed by the U.S., which exploited its huge tracts of arable land, massive oil reserves and other resources to become an economic titan.

The same goes for China’s rise. Capitalist reforms, a welcoming global trade system and good demographics all contributed to Beijing’s world-beating economic growth from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. The fact that China was nearly self-sufficient in land, water and many raw materials—and that its cheap labor allowed it to exploit these resources aggressively—also helped it to become the workshop of the world.

Yet China’s natural abundance is a thing of the past. As Michael Beckley and I argue in our forthcoming book, “The Danger Zone,” Beijing has blown through many of its resources. A decade ago, China became the world’s largest importer of agricultural goods. Its arable land has been shrinking due to degradation and overuse. Breakneck development has also made China the world’s largest energy importer: It buys three-quarters of its oil abroad at a time when America has become a net energy exporter. 

China’s water situation is particularly grim. As Gopal Reddy notes, China possesses 20% of the world’s population but only 7% of its fresh water. Entire regions, especially in the north, suffer from water scarcity worse than that found in a parched Middle East.

 
Thousands of rivers have disappeared, while industrialization and pollution have spoiled much of the water that remains. By some estimates, 80% to 90% of China’s groundwater and half of its river water is too dirty to drink; more than half of its groundwater and one-quarter of its river water cannot even be used for industry or farming.

 
This is an expensive problem. China is forced to divert water from comparatively wet regions to the drought-plagued north; experts assess that the country loses well over $100 billion annually as a result of water scarcity. Shortages and unsustainable agriculture are causing the desertification of large chunks of land. Water-related energy shortfalls have become common across the country.

The government has promoted rationing and improvements in water efficiency, but nothing sufficient to arrest the problem. This month, Chinese authorities announced that Guangzhou and Shenzhen—two major cities in the relatively water-rich Pearl River Delta—will face severe drought well into next year.

The economic and political implications are troubling. By making growth cost more, China’s resource problems have joined an array of other challenges—demographic decline, an increasingly stifling political climate, the stalling or reversal of many key economic reforms—to cause a slowdown that was having pronounced effects even before Covid struck. China’s social compact will be tested as dwindling resources intensify distributional fights.

In 2005, Premier Wen Jiabao stated that water scarcity threatened the “very survival of the Chinese nation.” A minister of water resources declared that China must “fight for every drop of water or die.” Hyperbole aside, resource scarcity and political instability often go hand in hand.

 
Heightened foreign tensions may follow. China watchers worry that if the Chinese Communist Party feels insecure domestically, it may lash out against its international rivals. Even short of that, water problems are causing geopolitical strife.

Much of China’s fresh water is concentrated in areas, such as Tibet, that the communist government seized by force after taking power in 1949. For years, China has tried to solve its resource challenges by coercing and impoverishing its neighbors.

 
By building a series of giant dams on the Mekong River, Beijing has triggered recurring droughts and devastating floods in Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and Laos that depend on that waterway. The diversion of rivers in Xinjiang has had devastating downstream effects in Central Asia.

A growing source of tension in the Himalayas is China’s plan to dam key waters before they reach India, leaving that country (and Bangladesh) the losers. As the Indian strategic analyst Brahma Chellaney puts it, “China’s territorial aggrandizement in the South China Sea and the Himalayas…has been accompanied by stealthier efforts to appropriate water resources in transnational river basins.”

In other words, the thirstier China is, the more geopolitically nasty it could get.

1619 PROJECT

 The malicious, historically illiterate 1619 Project keeps rolling on 

December 21, 2021
George F. Will

WASHINGTON — The New York Times is like God, who, if Genesis reported Creation correctly, beheld His handiwork and decided “it was very good.” The Times is comparably pleased with itself concerning its creation, “The 1619 Project.” This began in August 2019 as a special edition of the paper’s Sunday magazine. Now it has become a book by which the Times continues attempting to “reframe” U.S. history. The Times describes the book as “a groundbreaking work of journalism.” That description damages journalism’s reputation for respecting facts, which the 2019 writing that begot this book did not do. The 1619 Project’s tendentiousness reeks of political purpose.

The Times’s original splashy assertion—slightly fudged after the splash garnered a Pulitzer Prize—was that the American Revolution, the most important event in our history, was shameful because a primary reason it was fought was to preserve slavery. The war was supposedly ignited by a November 1775 British offer of freedom to Blacks who fled slavery and joined British forces. Well.

That offer came after increasingly volcanic American reactions to various British provocations: After the 1765 Stamp Act. After the 1770 Boston Massacre. After the 1773 Boston Tea Party. After the 1774 Coercive Acts (including closure of Boston’s port) and other events of “The Long Year of Revolution” (the subtitle of Mary Beth Norton’s “1774”). And after, in 1775, the April 17 battles of Lexington and Concord, the June 17 battle of Bunker Hill and George Washington on July 3 assuming command of the Continental Army.

Writing history is not like doing physics. But event A cannot have caused event B if B began before A.

 
Addressing the American Council of Trustees and Alumni last month, Gordon S. Wood, today’s foremost scholar of America’s Founding, dissected the 1619 Project’s contentions. When the Revolution erupted, Britain “was not threatening to abolish slavery in its empire,” which included lucrative, slavery-dependent sugar-producing colonies in the Caribbean. Wood added:

“If the Virginian slaveholders had been frightened of British abolitionism, why only eight years after the war ended would the board of visitors or the trustees of the College of William & Mary, wealthy slaveholders all, award an honorary degree to Granville Sharp, the leading British abolitionist at the time? Had they changed their minds so quickly?…The New York Times has no accurate knowledge of Virginia’s Revolutionary culture and cannot begin to answer these questions.” The Times’s political agenda requires ignoring what Wood knows:

“It was the American colonists who were interested in abolitionism in 1776.…Not only were the northern states the first slaveholding governments in the world to abolish slavery, but the United States became the first nation in the world to begin actively suppressing the despicable international slave trade. The New York Times has the history completely backwards.”

 
Wood’s doctoral dissertation adviser in 1960 to 1964 was Bernard Bailyn, the title of whose best-known book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, conveys a refutation of the 1619 Project’s premise that the Revolution originated from base economic motives. When Bailyn died a year after the 1619 Project was launched, the Times’s obituary noted that he had challenged the “Progressive Era historians…who saw the founders’ revolutionary rhetoric as a mask for economic interests.” Actually, the rhetoric gave momentum to ideas that were the Revolution.

The 1619 Project, which might already be embedded in school curricula near you, reinforces the racial monomania of those progressives who argue that the nation was founded on, and remains saturated by, “systemic racism.” This racial obsession is instrumental; it serves a radical agenda that sweeps beyond racial matters. It is the agenda of clearing away all impediments, intellectual and institutional, to—in progressivism’s vocabulary—the “transformation” of the nation. The United States will be built back better when it has been instructed to be ashamed of itself and is eager to discard its disreputable heritage.

The 1619 Project aims to erase (in Wood’s words) “the Revolution and the principles that it articulated—liberty, equality and the well-being of ordinary people.” These ideas are, as Wood says, the adhesives that bind our exceptional nation whose people have shared principles, not a shared ancestry.

The Times says “nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional” flows from “slavery and the anti-black racism it required.” So, the 1619 Project’s historical illiteracy is not innocent ignorance. Rather, it is maliciousness in the service of progressivism’s agenda, which is to construct a thoroughly different nation on the deconstructed rubble of what progressives hope will be the nation’s thoroughly discredited past.