Friends, we're all familiar with American higher ed's headlong rush to abandon standardized testing, and, as such, to base admissions not on objective ability, but on subjective qualities that will yield, it is assumed, a more diverse student body. The philosophy is simple: merit be damned, because we need more blacks and Hispanics, pronto! Well, the same approach is gaining more and more acceptance in elementary and secondary education too. To the extent that public ed used to practice "streaming" and "selective admissions", in order to group high-achieving students together to maximize their access to high quality education, now the emphasis is instead on "social justice" and increasing access for students of color, regardless of whether they are capable of taking full advantage, and regardless of the deleterious effect it may have on everyone's education if teachers have to pitch their lessons to students of wildly different levels of ability. The upshot? Excellence is less and less relevant to modern educators and education bureaucrats. A "good" school is not a school with brilliant teachers or brilliant students -- it's a school with the "correct" demographic balance of teachers and students, all of whom are single-mindedly woke and getting woker. Whether anyone, at the end of the day, can read and write, or add and subtract, is beside the point. Welcome to the "new normal"!
In other news, as the drama of the election of a new House Speaker plays out in Washington, D.C., a similar farce played out in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where it looks like Democrats have failed to secure control of the lower house of the state's legislature -- which is a rare piece of good news in PA. It's not exactly a "red wave", but it blunts the "victory" that the Dems claim to have won in 2022, and that's something.
Dr.Waddy from Jack: Recently I cited an article in 12/18/22 American Thinker byBruce Deitrick Price titled "Why are communists determined to destroy America?" . In it he uses the term "cultural marxism" and its the first place I've seen it. I understand him to say that marxists expected workers to rise against WWI and when they did not, blamed their long established cultures for blinding them. Marxists then determined to destroy these culture s by attacking EVERYTHING constructive, cherished or asserted by them: people, institutions fundamentals and
ReplyDeletetraditions.Deitrick maintains that tactic, "cultural marxism" ,thrives today and that "wokeism " is its latest manifestation. That works for me and I intend to use that term frequently. I see
in the attack on merit based advancement you have described above yet another example of cultural marxism. The personal satisfaction accruing to achievement through honest effort and its material benefits are essential to our culture and therefore a prime target for counterintuitive onslaught from the cultural marxist left.
Dr.Waddy from Jack: I think all of us on the common sense side have observed: " Sheesh! This left attacks every dang thing we value! " Cultural marxism confirms and explains this, I think. And just to be sure not to miss a goosestep they arrogate to themselves unassailable license to enforce their dissembling by any means necessary, as Lenin bade them do.To propose doubt is "irrelevant, irreverent and immaterial".
ReplyDeleteDr.Waddy frm Jack: Pennsylvania is good people; its God's country! They don't deserve to be ruled by dems ,as we in the People's Republc of NY know only too well. NY is a one party dictatorship where common sense people are numerically overpowered by lala land NYC Majority rule does not always yield justice. The real America starts at the PA border.
ReplyDeleteJack, I'm very surprised to hear that you haven't come across "cultural Marxism". I kinda think you have, in fact, because I use the term on a regular basis. It's been around. I like it, because it reveals a fundamental truth: the Left remains committed to Marx's fundamental vision of radical transformation, demonization of the ruling class, popular mobilization, and some version of dictatorship. The difference is that they long ago dropped most of the inane economic provisions in Marxist theory -- partly because most of them are profiting from state capitalism. Many "cultural Marxists" couldn't tell the proletariat from a pomegranate, but they still see the world in (utterly subjective) us versus them terms, and boy do they hate Team Them!!! Meanwhile, they also understand, as perhaps Marx didn't, that real power doesn't reside in control over the "means of production", but in operating the levers of culture and morality.
ReplyDeleteDr.Waddy from Jack: I stand corrected; surely you did so. In athletics and the military it is vital to commit certain actions to "muscle memory" so that when a trigger is perceived, one reacts consistently, reflexively and without contemplation.I agree, most cultural marxists would not know Marx from the Three Stooges.They are conditioned to swing into hate fueled action at the very hint of opposition or failure to afford exclusive definition of certain terms, such as the myriad "isms" they assert, to the left.Call it "correct memory". The final objective is absolute, arbitrary power to the conscious marxists supported by the worker ants.Then: eg.first it was equality, now it is equity; it was "let a hundred schools (of thought) bloom" and then it was "struggle against Confucius" etc, etc ad nauseum. Since the left claims irrefutable wisdom, any decision it makes, no matter how counterintuitive is automatically given full totalitarian credit.
ReplyDeleteQuite so, Jack. In the end, it amounts to little more than self-worship on the leftists' part, and it's a remarkably credulous/vacuous form of it, too.
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