In addition, schools are funded based on standardized test scores, which encourages many schools, especially in poorer areas, to teach to the tests—instead of teaching students to think.
Witness all the accelerated programs that have been shut down, the many recent attacks on objective standards—all in the name of “equity” (which does not mean equality of value, treatment, or opportunity—it means creating equal outcomes by whatever means is available —consider the implications carefully).
Universities are being forced to grapple with these ideas, with the core question being “does our university still value the pursuit of truth, critical thinking, and free inquiry above all else, or will we acknowledge that ‘people from oppressed classes have a truth unto themselves that cannot be taught but must be respected, and all opposing viewpoints must be shut down’?”
If this movement hasn’t yet affected you, it will soon. It’s ripping apart social groups all over the place.
(I can give examples of all I’ve described in the morning if you’re interested. I’m just tapping this out before bed.)
What you write sounds plausible, but it also mirrors a lot of what we hear from the right that is at times overstated.
I'd love to hear a set of sober examples- I don't have any connection to early education anymore and I'm really curious.
This is in the US/UK.
The problem is, these students are not coming here to learn how we're all equal, they're paying for a degree that proves they're very much not equal to about a billion people back home (compare the median wage in China with the cost of a one-year MSc in the UK for example).
That's also why most of our Covid-19 planning is around how do we deal with the income loss if 50% fewer international students enrol next year, the options seem to be government bailout or bust.
So there may be an unspoken rule in some places that you don't criticise the latest theories on diversity, but there's an even more unspoken rule that you don't publicly apply them to the situation in Tibet or Urumqi.
It will be extremely interesting to see how these two pressures interact over the coming decade.
New York City has (or had?) an active effort in place to cancel/dismantle "gifted" programs in primary and secondary education. Here's the PDF released by their committed last August: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/1c478c_f14e1d13df45444c883bbf... . There are lots of other examples of this phenomenon around the country... I doubt I need to come up with more examples now.
Notably, the University of Chicago came firmly down on the side of free inquiry: http://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/documents/re...
An excellent, charitable, clear-minded discussion on critical theory in general: https://youtu.be/p6DnHxuuXI4
Here's a good introduction to many of the practical, everyday consequences of CRT/I's influence in American culture. It's an interview with Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay (this is part 1, and I think there are 3 or 4 parts in total): https://youtu.be/YDFL3xwEEG8
-- that last one in particular, if you watch the whole thing, is chock full of great examples.
Hope that's helpful. That's all I was able to find in the time I had.
If you accept this point of view - and lots of educators past and present have done so, including white male ones - then the student slogan "Why is my curriculum white?" makes sense. Would a stock of common background knowledge (for want of a better word) be that much less effective if it included slightly less Hemingway and Twain and slightly more contributions from more diverse authors? So the argument goes, if (to simplofy a lot) white kids learn about white culture at home and black kids learn about black culture, but the test to get a good job includes the "culture fit" part of can we hold a conversation based on the kinds of analogies and forms of speech you learn at college, then it's (1) unfair if the thing you learn at college just happens to be "white culture" and (2) even more so if a more diverse college education would serve _exactly the same purpose_.
The million dollar question is whether (2) is true. I personally think it mostly is for "arts", mainly because there are different cultures with different languages even within "the west" and several of them seem to work about equally well.
But here's the rub: science doesn't work like that.
There's a philosophical argument that Twain _created_ Huck Finn, but Newton only _discovered_ the laws of motion - if Twain hadn't lived then we might have equally good literature, but it would not be the same. But if Newton hadn't lived, someone else would have discovered F=ma and the like by now, and the formula would be exactly the same.
My main worry is that if the US tries to turn science/tech into liberal arts and China doesn't, then we're creating a new kind of inequality: in a generation or two they will wipe the floor with us. But I'm happy to listen to any argument from the SJ/CRT/I side that doesn't imply us handing over our place in the world to a power who very much believes that all races are not equal.
Meanwhile, countries which no such handicap will rise economically and be able to export more of their own ideologies.
Soviet Union had great schools, doesn't mean their economy was doing well.
The US is still doing well even when its school system and even university system have not really been that great overall.
In practice it hasn’t worked out that way.
Instead it has:
1) Created a cultural barrier between the average Joe and the “liberal elite”.
It turns out that Twain etc are approachable to the average high school diploma American in a way the replacements texts are not.
2) Created a clear divide between minorities who study at elite US universities and the rest of us.
For example there is a level of alienation between Chinese tech workers who went to college in the US vs other Chinese tech workers here.
3) Created a group of “liberal elite” who think they can speak on behalf of, and even lead, other cultural groups when what they have learned isn’t representative of those cultures at all.
My understanding is that you're saying there is a causal link between admission programs being shutdown and CRT/I, and that the particular aspect of CRT/I that causes this is an insistence on equal outcomes across social groups. I'd be interested to first establish what the actual statistics are wrt gifted and talented student programs - are the closing faster than they opening? Are they shrinking or expanding? Where approaches have changed, are the outcomes definitely worse? etc.
Does this mean we are discounting material possibilities, such as just not having enough money or changing demands/restrictions on expenditure? Accelerated programs sound a lot like arts programs - easy to cut with minimal blowback. Are we also discounting that providing fair access to accelerated programs turned out to be far more complicated than we originally thought and that the choice has been to cut rather than spend money on extra tests and more qualified staff? CRT/I [aren't the only academic source](https://sci-hub.tw/10.1080/02783190609554382) of critique these programs receive.
I'd also contest your definition of equity in CRT/I as an overriding principle ('equality of outcomes by whatever means available' and implicitly, regardless of the consequences). CRT/I uses the principle of equity - that outcomes should be proportionate across social groups and that unequal outcomes must be accounted for. The vast majority of CRT/I scholarship explicitly focuses on 'leveling-up' outcomes, and where this focus is not explicit it is normally implicit (in that the paper would not otherwise make much sense, or the prospect of reducing everyone's outcomes to the lowest common denominator is a rhetorical tool).
‘people from oppressed classes have a truth unto themselves that cannot be taught but must be respected, and all opposing viewpoints must be shut down’: This is a misreading of CRT/I, and one that I suggest highlights its value. CRT/I asserts that everybody has a point of view and way of seeing the world that is affected by their various interlocking identities and experience. There are plenty of aspects of life were we generally accept the necessity and uniqueness of experience as a kind of knowledge - jobs, parenting, relationships, etc. Why should race, gender or class be different? However I'd argue that this assertion gets us closer to the truth. Accounting for bias in science and acknowledging how fundamental it is to people and instruments gets us better science, not worse, even if its harder. "all opposing viewpoints must be shutdown", seems to be a strawman: No reading of CRT/I demands this, in fact most of the literature consists of patient, often quantitative, critiques of systems (law, education, science, public health, etc). So if anything, CRT/I furthers the ideals you see it as threatening.
Equal opportunity does not imply equal outcome—even for a perfectly fair school. Quite the opposite! In fact, I’m glad I got rejected from several schools... their high bar helped guide me to something that worked better for me anyway.
I think this is exactly the wrong thinking about taxes. And it's abused by pundits and politicians by making people spend the same money many times in their head. I mean, you can't be simultaneously outraged that "your tax money" supports elite schools and abortion clinics and the military; you don't pay that much of a tax. In fact, an average taxpayer's contribution would amount to buying some office supplies for one, small government building.
Money is fungible, and by the time enough is collected to fund a school, there's no "my money" in there anymore, much like if you take a fistful of sand from your yard and throw it on a beach nearby, there is no more "your sand".
The opposite was recently litigated - that top universities were inequitable because they didnt sufficiently consider scholastic achievement:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/us/politics/yale-asian-am...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/01/harvard-ruli...
They don't want equal opportunity, they reject that something like that even exists as opportunity is always unequal. Only transformation of society to communism in the end will 'solve' those problems.
So yes, in their opinion all of this stuff is evil and bad and should be replaced with ... something better. Of course they couldn't really tell you how that would look like.
Born gifted in Govneevka, Kirov obl., pop. 20,000? Good luck.
Our (Romania's) education system was (is) the same, if you were GOOD at something there were plenty of paths that teachers would generally push you towards, special clubs for maths, languages, art (less common). Or schools who would try to group together highly skilled students.
System (after communism) has the same flaw, most rural areas have worse access to education, or better said, much worse quality of education.
https://www.amazon.de/Love-Math-Heart-Hidden-Reality/dp/B00N...
from someone, born in the system:
That is exactly right. The other people commenting to the contrary don't seem to know what they're talking about. Even in public schools it was common across the US until the late 1990s to have separate programs and classes (almost always referred to as "gifted" in some regard) for superior students. It wasn't viewed as unfair either, it was common and it was a point of pride to be in those classes, to be selected as a higher tier student.
Something changed in the last 20 years where treating students differently became considered unfair. The everybody gets a trophy syndrome took over.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ8Nr3_2724
Straight from the horses mouth.
First person) Every teacher who's using it basically is saying this is inspiring a closer and more engaged student body. So the people that are actually using it like it. And again in terms of the local control, you still have local control. So if you want higher standards, if that's really, if that is your genuine point, then you can go ahead and do it. You can do the higher standard. And the process was indeed totally transparent. And when [garbled] we'll move on to David and Bill.
Second person) Um, I'm not paid to be here either. I'm just an interested teacher who helped write the standards. And the reason why I helped write the standards and the reason why I am here today is that as a white male in society I'm given a lot of privilege that I didn't earn. And as a result ... [scattered boos from the audience] ... I think it's really important that all kids have an equal opportunity to learn how to read. I think I had a set of advantages as a result of who I was, not ???. And when I walk into places like Roberto Clemente high school on ??? side of Chicago, I think it's really important those kids learn how to read just as well as I had the opportunity to learn how to read. And ??? created an equitable education opportunity for all kids. I think this is actually the greatest lesson we can teach our kids.
Because the big breakthroughs and innovations in math and science are achieved by the elites and not by the mediocre masses.
This doesn't mean that we should neglect the mediocre masses (I'm one of them, by the way), they do good, important work. But they're are not sufficient.
Surely not the proletariat in modern America, where the vast majority are getting poorer year by year.
I'd like you to explicitly list in which ways I'm "objectively inferior".