welcome to the cultural revolution (aka what the FUCK is wrong with the florida legislature?)

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Ideally, the left would use these same tactics against conservative professors and challenge the dangerous hogwash that runs rampant in the field of economics. But of course the FBI did their best in the '60s and '70s to insure that there will never be an organized leftist student movement in the US, so I'm not holding my breath.

Here's a very interesting article about the movement for a post-autistic economics.
http://www.adbusters.org/metas/eco/truecosteconomics/post-autistic.html

Unfortunately, like most progressive movements this one has a terrible name. While the right wing crusades under banners like "educational freedom" or "student rights" the left comes up with the predictably cumbersome "post-autistic economics."

walter kranz (walterkranz), Thursday, 24 March 2005 20:27 (nineteen years ago) link

By the way, the driving force behind the whole right-wing student movement hasn't been mentioned yet. Google David Horowitz and his "Students for Academic Freedom" and "Academic Bill of Rights." This Florida story is just one facet of a war they've been waging for years.

walter kranz (walterkranz), Thursday, 24 March 2005 20:32 (nineteen years ago) link

don't forget lynne cheney, author of "Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It" (PDF link) .. more info on her "interests" here

Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, 24 March 2005 20:52 (nineteen years ago) link

Ed, I'm not referring at all to current dogma or hard science on global warming or its possible related effects. I'm primarily referring to predictions of global cooling in the 1970s. Same with the predictions of oil supply from that era, which focused on consumption of that era. Hindsight being 20/20, it's not that tough to find smart people making bold predictions or theory declarations that either never come true or are eventually disproven entirely. Perhaps my examples are unfair in their connection to the Intelligent Design bozos, but there are kooks in every crowd that draw intelligent audiences.

don weiner, Thursday, 24 March 2005 20:58 (nineteen years ago) link

Ideally, the left would use these same tactics against conservative professors and challenge the dangerous hogwash that runs rampant in the field of economics.

(i) i don't like the idea of left-wing (or moderate, or any label) "cultural revolutionists" running amok in the university.

(ii) what do you consider to be "dangerous hogwash" running amok in economics? milton friedman is NOT the only economist, you know (nor is he necessarily always wrong).

Eisbär (llamasfur), Thursday, 24 March 2005 21:05 (nineteen years ago) link

xpost, there's a clear difference between research that came to an incorrect conclusion and the intelligent designers.

Besides, global cooling is a measurable reality. Dust particles in the atmosphere have been keeping a lid on global warming for many years. In the 70s global cooling could have been an easy conclusion to make, with the greenhouse effect and greenhouse gas emissions not being fully understood.

Ed (dali), Thursday, 24 March 2005 21:12 (nineteen years ago) link

I actually find it quite heartening to hear of politicisation of campuses, as there was bugger all of that when I was at university.

Ed (dali), Thursday, 24 March 2005 21:15 (nineteen years ago) link

exactly. all different bits of a concerted, sustained and organized effort over time to promote your agenda on many fronts. they figured out how to work together and to start building infrastructure back in the early '70s. they got block grants from donors(Coors, Scaife, Olin, et al) to go out and develop, establish institutions with full-on media studios just down the hall for easy hook-up to any news channel or radio station, fellowships & professorships at universities to promote their moralities, et al.

Lakoff writes about how Grover Nordquist holds a weekly meeting with like six dozen leaders of different conservative factions. they meet, argue, debate, air grievances, figure out what each other is doing and how to organize this to best effect. they compromise with each other, which is easy, since each guy knows that if his stuff ain't at the forefront this week, it could be at the agreed-upon forefront next week, and they all know that each other wants effectively the same thing and sing the same tune, they only sing it in different keys.

it helps that conservative types tend to have a personality very much oriented towards a top-down, authoritarian. everything else is in service to reaffirming authority.

of course, as others and Lakoff have pointed out, the progressive side has does science on their side, which can be used to disprove the other side(handy for convincing other progressive-leaning folks of how the other side is wrong) as well as tools of analysis to figure out exactly what the other side has done to get where it is, and ways to go about using similar methods to further progressive causes.

heh. how does that line go? "They have the guns / but we have the music..."

(xpost)

note that their side REQUIRES culture war. (how do you say that in German, anyway? "kulturkampf?") they HAVE to have animosity, alienation, yelling & shouting on news shows instead of slightly quieter debate, demonification of the Other(just because they're the Other), a Manichean US/THEM viewpoint.

They NEED to feel themselves as put-upon, as the victims, of an immoral and vicious Culture(be it education, social, pop, or political), to feel righteous and that their efforts are Just & Good. Doesn't matter that they actually control the politics, or the media groups that put out the cultures, etc.

dammit, i really need to start that Lakoff thread when I get home. I have too much to type out in the limited breaks i get at the new job here.

kingfish, Thursday, 24 March 2005 21:17 (nineteen years ago) link

In the 70s global cooling could have been an easy conclusion to make, with the greenhouse effect and greenhouse gas emissions not being fully understood.

That's why I said that hindsight is 20/20. And that's what the intelligent design crowd will tell you about intelligent design--that their theories will be borne out with time i.e. as this design is more fully understood. 40 years from now, it's almost certain that our understanding of intelligent design (and shit, I really hate even typing that phrase) will be much better, as will global warming.

don weiner, Thursday, 24 March 2005 21:25 (nineteen years ago) link

(by that I mean that intelligent design will gain less legitimacy rather than more.)

don weiner, Thursday, 24 March 2005 21:26 (nineteen years ago) link

But where is the evidence that they use to back themselves up? Making an educated guess from available information is how science moves forward. I have never been shown any of this evidence that points to intelligent design, but I've seen plenty that points to not only evolution, but the random nature of the universe itself.

Ed (dali), Thursday, 24 March 2005 21:29 (nineteen years ago) link

in regards to a point upthread, Slacktivist talks about the literalism/originalism, in a post about Justice Scalia:

http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2005/03/the_scandal_of_.html

...For Scalia, as an originalist, the Constitution means what it says and it says what it means. That's a phrase borrowed from evangelical preachers, of course, who say the same thing about their reading of the "plain text" of the Bible.

Mark Noll describes this evangelical approach as "naive Baconianism." Here's Noll in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (the one book you should read if you want to understand American evangelical Christians):

Evangelicals make much of their ability to read the Bible in a "simple," "literal" or "natural" fashion -- that is, in a Baconian way. In actual fact, evangelical hermeneutics, as illustrated in creationism, is dictated by very specific assumptions that dominated Western intellectual life from roughly 1650 to 1850 (and in North America for a few decades more). Before and after that time, many Christians and other thinkers have recognized that no observations are "simple" and no texts yield to uncritically "literal" readings. ...

When evangelicals rely on a naive Baconianism, they align themselves with the worst features of the naive positivism that lingers among some of those who worship at the shrine of modern science. Thus, under the illusion of fostering a Baconian approach to Scripture, creationists seek to convince their audience that they are merely contemplating simple conclusions from the Bible, when they are really contemplating conclusions from the Bible shaped by their preunderstandings of how the Bible should be read.

There are, in other words, two problems with evangelicals' alleged "simple," "common-sense" approach to the text. First, such an approach doesn't work. Second, this isn't really what they're doing anyway. The supposedly literal approach begins with certain presuppositions (cultural, personal, psychological, economic) and then finds these very same presuppositions as obvious and self-evident in the plain meaning of the text. Thus the sacred word becomes a mirror and our exegesis begins to resemble Stuart Smalley's daily affirmations....

which actualy agrees with much of what Lakoff has written before.

kingfish, Thursday, 24 March 2005 21:52 (nineteen years ago) link

Just out of interest; do christians see the bible as the word of god in the same way muslims do the Koran? Is it all christians or just some? Surely the Bible is at somewhere between heresay, myth and manipulation.

Ed (dali), Thursday, 24 March 2005 21:56 (nineteen years ago) link

erm hearsay.

Ed (dali), Thursday, 24 March 2005 21:57 (nineteen years ago) link

and also out of interest, how do Jewish people view relevant books of the Bible?

don weiner, Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:00 (nineteen years ago) link

do all members of any really large group do something the same? any christian with strong conservative leanings probably does. the other ones, however, not so much.

this Christian doesn't, at least.

that's part of the kicker, too. it can be very difficult to talk about one's personal beliefs, thanks to the fact those most vocal about their beliefs(esp. in the last 30+ years) have mostly been total fucking assholes(having prosetlyzation as a central tenet of their beliefs hasn't helped).

so anybody talking about what they believe tend to get viewed with suspicion and outright scorn(hell, just check what happens on this board).

(xpost)

I think they're amused and appalled by what we've done with everything after the first 5 books.

Lewis Black talks about this, about how conservatives get the Old Testament wrong becuase "...it's not your Book. Your Book is the other one."

kingfish, Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:05 (nineteen years ago) link

which translation is revered by american xtian fundamentalists, and yet it was commissioned by a homosexual english monarch (a point that i NEVER tire of pointing out).

Weirdness...I looked it up and all the sites in James' defence are Christian websites.

What we want? Sex with T.V. stars! What you want? Ian Riese-Moraine! (Eastern Ma, Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:06 (nineteen years ago) link

what I mean kingfish, are there Jewish people who are literalists about the first five or is that a domain inhabited only by the nutball Christians?

don weiner, Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:16 (nineteen years ago) link

"how do Jewish people view relevant books of the Bible?"

in my experience as a Jew, I'd say Judaism on the whole places much more weight on human agency than Christians do, as far as how they relate to texts. Judaism posits the Torah as being directly handed to the Jews by God - but only because of their "covenant" with God, as established by three patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Insofar as the Torah contains commandments, Judaism views these as being directly communicated by God through his "chosen people" here on earth (the three patriarchs, various prophets, Moses "the lawgiver", etc.). But the Torah also functions as a history of the Jewish people, and in that respect its treated like a family document handed down from one generation to the next - ie, this is what your folks were doing in the desert all these years - and as such it is implied that a "literal" reading is appropriate.

And maybe it's just me, but I've always felt that Judaism by and large placed a much higher premium on debate/interpretation/scholarship than any kind of fundie christianity. The importance of literacy, of "arguing" with God, of engaging with the text was always front and center in my religious education.

Shakey Mo Collier, Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:17 (nineteen years ago) link

(by that I mean that intelligent design will gain less legitimacy rather than more.)

-- don weiner (migg...), March 24th, 2005.

they already have, and that's the problem. the "Intelligent Design" bastards keep yakking, writing, and complaining away even though they lost the scientific debate in the 19th centry.

latebloomer: damn cheapskate satanists (latebloomer), Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:19 (nineteen years ago) link

(I'm sorry that was kind of a confused post)

I don't know of any Jews who argue against evolution on the basis of the Torah, if that's what you mean. They might argue that Moses really *did* part the Red Sea or that Lot's wife really *was* turned into a pillar of salt, but they're more prone to discuss these as evidence of God's singularly miraculous powers as opposed to proof of science's blasphemy.

x-post

Shakey Mo Collier, Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:20 (nineteen years ago) link

i'm willing to bet so. hell, perhaps some of them might even think they're MORE correct than the loony fundie ones, since their books are based on the original versions(or rather, copies of copies of copies of copies of the edited originals) in hebrew, greek, latin, etc.

kingfish, Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:20 (nineteen years ago) link

I say this is a good step made towards getting all the “leftist totalitarianism” crap away from being force on the next generation of students by "dictator professors."

I know from experience that there are plenty of professors where there is a lack of freedom of thought in their classes. Bad grades are given out just if you "disrespect other's points of view" even if the other peoples points of view are probably wrong. Truth can never be learned in these circumstances.

Using the court and lawsuits is probably the worst way to motivate this kind of progress. It'd be better to start at the roots. Too many leftists in acedemia are getting away with their theories without any strong analysis or confrontation.

A Nairn (moretap), Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:21 (nineteen years ago) link

I like how this thread is expanding- but I think the issue about this proposed law (and it seems it is going to spread to other states as similar initiatives will be proposed elsewhere) is not an ideological one ie. it would be just as bad if proposed by a leftwinger about left views being silenced as it is now being proposed by a rightwinger. This legislation is wrong for purely pedagogical reasons- it betrays an ignorance (possibly only a tactical or strategic cover of ignorance, which would be really dastardly) about how pedagogy works. Opposition to the Socratic method as "humiliating", insistence that "we fund your school so we ought to be able to tell you what you can and can't say in your classroom" is part and parcel of a consumer model of education, in which students are consumers with a right to "get what they paid for". This is an entertainment-based idea of what happens in school- I pay for experience X, now give it to me- rather than a genuinely *educational* framework. Students are presumably there because they want to learn something- in class discussion, that something that they are there to learn IS "how to argue" (at least in literature classes and philosophy classes as I took them at UC Berkeley and Oxford; I now teach at UC Berkeley). So being "forced" to justify one's argument in the context of a class discussion is not some brutal act of humiliation- it is part and parcel of what it means to educate someone. You give them the experience of having to make an argument, and when there are problems in their argument, you point them out, so that the next time they make an argument, they're better at it. This is elemental, basic stuff- it's the oxygen of the classroom, and it's a big part of what makes a good class compelling- when a teacher pushes a student to defend their case and they succeed in doing so, it's one of the things you hope for as a teacher. The idea that this is going to be compromised, and particularly in the name of "academic freedom", is appalling. (oh I guess I already said this, here I go again, sorry this has made me crazy)

Drew Daniel (Drew Daniel), Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:21 (nineteen years ago) link

It's not that there should be the right to let whatever truth you believe be accepted. It's that there should be the right to not let professors force whatever they happen to believe.

A Nairn (moretap), Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:23 (nineteen years ago) link

Actual examples please then A Nairn

Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:28 (nineteen years ago) link

i.e. A womens studies professor gave a bad grade to a friend who wrote a paper complaining that textbook was wrong to compare the "submission of wives to their husbands" to the jews under Hitler and blacks under whites as slaves. She said he wasn't respecting their views. I mean the hypocracy there is obvious. Where was her respect of the Christian views of women being the weaker vessel and submission to husbands. There are too many fundamentals that academia bases things on that are directly contradictor to other things.

A Nairn (moretap), Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:29 (nineteen years ago) link

or trying to say you believe creationism in an evolution class. I've had a teacher say "I can't even understand where you can get that kind of idea. It is so obvious that evolution is an accurate theory." Where is the freedom of contradictor theories in that class?

A Nairn (moretap), Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:31 (nineteen years ago) link

Me being a weak student can't argue the much less popular theory of creationism. Since then I've read some books which have agrued it well, but there must be so many students that are forced into these other beliefs.

A Nairn (moretap), Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:33 (nineteen years ago) link

I shouldn't try to speak for all academics but, whether we're talking about class discussion or student papers, many students are rather inarticulate in how they put forward their views, and when they are criticized for that, they assume that it's just a covert or dishonest form of disagreeing with the content of their views. Personally, I have given very bad grades to papers whose ideas I was entirely sympathetic with, and I have given A grades to papers that expressed views that I found reprehensible (I had a brilliant pre-law student write a defense of Nike's use of sweatshops that was impeccably argued, for example). Graduate education typically does involve a subtle amount of pressure to adhere more or less to the theoretical position of your graduate dissertation committee's advisor(s)- but you are encouraged to shop around and everybody knows this going into it. Undergraduate education is largely powered by grad student labour, and grad students in the US are, by and large, left leaning. But I just don't buy the idea that therefore grad students are "forcing you to think like they do"- we ARE forcing our students to think about certain ideas, but (hopefully) not forcing them to think one way or another, dogmatically, about those issues. Good teachers don't do that, and bad laws won't fix that either.

Drew Daniel (Drew Daniel), Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:36 (nineteen years ago) link

People who hold harder to understand and believe views have a much harder time trying to present those views to others. By natural elimination the easier to understand more striat forward views push the difficult ones out (i.e. creationism is being pushed out)

A Nairn (moretap), Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:38 (nineteen years ago) link

"i'm willing to bet so. hell, perhaps some of them might even think they're MORE correct than the loony fundie ones"

I'm just saying I've never come across it or witnessed it. There may very well be some analogous school of thought within, say, the Lubavitchers or some other Orthodox radical offshoots, but I've never encountered it. I will say that, on the whole, Judaism has done a better job of preserving its texts and ensuring continued, rigorous scholarly anlaysis of said texts than Christianity. I'm willing to bet most fundies couldn't even tell you what century the book of John was written in.

x-post

Shakey Mo Collier, Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:38 (nineteen years ago) link

"Good teachers don't do that, and bad laws won't fix that either."

yeah, I agree with this, but there is not many places for a student to turn when facing bad teachers.

A Nairn (moretap), Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:42 (nineteen years ago) link

hey drew, do you know any of the rockridge guys?

kingfish, Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:42 (nineteen years ago) link

A. Nairn I can barely understand any of your posts there's so many spelling and grammatical errors. Maybe that's what your teachers are taking you to task for - being inarticulate.

Tho I find your idea that creationism is more complex (and therefore, harder to argue) than evolution really funny.

Shakey Mo Collier, Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:45 (nineteen years ago) link

I not writing about my speling and typing and ability to argue. I'm writing about persecution I've faced. When I take my time, I've written some really good papers in that past. That is not what i'm doing now. so stop being such a leftist totalitarianism dictator.

A Nairn (moretap), Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:49 (nineteen years ago) link

I could direct you towards some books that are opposed to the standards of academia that are well written and argued.

A Nairn (moretap), Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:51 (nineteen years ago) link

My high-school self would probably cringe to hear my now-self say this, but I think if you're a student you need a little more humility than to think your views or ideas should be given equal weight with the teacher's. Otherwise people would be signing up to take YOUR class. I have known plenty of people like this and they are always the most annoying people in the class and would be dead if looks could kill. I'm not surprised that they feel "castigated" by their teachers, they're castigated by everyone, everyone who wants to actually learn the subject matter of the class rather than whatever the precocious genius-in-waiting has dreamed up to catch the teacher out on. Whether it's creationism or their own theory about the phallocentrism of Hamlet these fuckers are universally loathed but they don't go after their fellow students because it wouldn't make them feel righteous and put upon to do that, just lame.

Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:52 (nineteen years ago) link

haha - now *I'M* persecuting you by pointing out that your posts are largely incomprehensible? CLASSIC.

Shakey Mo Collier, Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:53 (nineteen years ago) link

nice, haha

A Nairn (moretap), Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:55 (nineteen years ago) link

(ii) what do you consider to be "dangerous hogwash" running amok in economics? milton friedman is NOT the only economist, you know (nor is he necessarily always wrong).

The article I linked to above outlines the situation much better than I can paraphrase here. Simply put, much of the current US economic policy is driven by ideas like supply side economics and slavish devotion to the mythical "free market." Economics is not a science and yet some of these theories which in real world practice have proven to be disasterous are taught as though they are scientific laws. For example, the article I linked above discussed the Harvard intro Econ class which has been taught by one man for 18 years, is based completely on conservative ideology, and is the only economics class that many Harvard graduates end up taking.


(i) i don't like the idea of left-wing (or moderate, or any label) "cultural revolutionists" running amok in the university.

So as the right continues to attack actual science, the left shouldn't challenge their pseudo-scientific economic dogma and church of the free market? I see the war against science and reason being driven primarily by right wing economics (with religion merely serving as a useful tool) and I don't think that recognizing and attempting to change this has anything to do with a "cultural revolution." Of course I'm not confident that anything will really change, particularly since the left will continue to be labelled communists, as you have done.

walter kranz (walterkranz), Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:56 (nineteen years ago) link

this one kid at my high school asked the biology teacher not about writing an essay on creationism during a test on Darwin, but whether he could write about his own theory of evolution. poor guy got "persecuted," heh.

hstencil (hstencil), Thursday, 24 March 2005 22:57 (nineteen years ago) link

are you trying to be funny, anairn? "stop being such a leftist totalitarianism dictator"?

and drew: while i generally agree pretty strongly w/ everything you've posted, (a) you may want to be a bit more clear when defending socratic method -- it isn't the end-all and be-all of classroom teaching (ask any law student!), and in the hands of an AWFUL professor it can easily devolve into pointless "hide-the-ball" BS; and (b) whenever students have used the "i'm paying for this!" line, my experience has been that this has been used to criticize the overall administration of the university and not so much the content of classroom instruction.

Eisbär (llamasfur), Thursday, 24 March 2005 23:00 (nineteen years ago) link

But I just don't buy the idea that therefore grad students are "forcing you to think like they do"- we ARE forcing our students to think about certain ideas, but (hopefully) not forcing them to think one way or another, dogmatically, about those issues.

The problem is that you're forcing them to think at all which is totally incompatible with their concept of faith.

walter kranz (walterkranz), Thursday, 24 March 2005 23:01 (nineteen years ago) link

on the face of it, to me the theory that there is an intelligence guiding biological development on earth does not seem all that incompatible with science. If someone wants to argue that God's method of developing life on earth involved the laws of evolution, that seems perfectly reasonable to me. There's nothing in evolutionary theory that gets at the fundamentals of *how* life and its ensuing evolution got started. You wanna stick God there at the beginning = okay, fine. But "intelligent design" theory, as far as I've been exposed to it, seems to feel the need to go beyond this premise in order to reinforce a strictly literalist interpretation of events "recorded" in the Old Testament, which strikes me as being incredibly stupid. You don't draw a conclusion and then find evidence to support it, you look at the evidence and then draw a conclusion. In this respect, "intelligent design"'s whole intellectual approach is fundamentally flawed.

Shakey Mo Collier, Thursday, 24 March 2005 23:12 (nineteen years ago) link

xpost to Eisbar

Sure, the "guess what I'm thinking" gambit is bad because it's dishonest- I try to be careful about asking rhetorical questions, though I admit to asking questions of the "did anybody notice anything odd about that third paragraph?" sort from time to time. Pushing people to defend their positions does make them better at arguing- but also, let me point out that classes in which X amount of historical or legal information needs to get covered aren't the time/place for a long knock down, drag out "debate" on an issue. Sometimes you just want to do justice to the course material, esp. when there's a lot of it (as I assume happens all the time in case law or topical law classes). I do find that the huffy "I pay YOU, so you'd better make me feel good about myself" dynamic has intruded from time to time. Honestly, I have no problem with the consumer model being invoked when the issue is a debate about services/tuition/class size- it is appropriate there. But it's not appropriate as a stick with which to coerce your instructor into changing your grade, for example. Presumably what is being paid for is the chance to be assessed in a competitive, meritocratic environment. That's the part where irrirtated faculty ask questions like . . . if everybody already knows everything then why are they in school in the first place? But then again, so many people are only in college because their parents want them to be. I find that sad, when I see smart, bored kids wasting my time and their money.

Drew Daniel (Drew Daniel), Thursday, 24 March 2005 23:13 (nineteen years ago) link

haha so i read usa today grabbing a chzburger at wendy's just now. funny vaguely on-topic bullets: a horowitz editorial blasting academia and 'what's happenening on america's campuses'. my fave, by far, though: a classic usa today mcgraph on 'who is america's spiritual leader?'. billy graham just edged out the pope for number one. number three? president bush! whatta country!

j blount (papa la bas), Thursday, 24 March 2005 23:15 (nineteen years ago) link

"You don't draw a conclusion and then find evidence to support it, you look at the evidence and then draw a conclusion."

where are you getting this process from? What if you were to already know the conclusion as told by GOD?

A Nairn (moretap), Thursday, 24 March 2005 23:16 (nineteen years ago) link

There's a certain amount of disingenuity going on here, I think. In the case of evolution etc this is a horrible, ugly thing they're proposing, but in the humanities of course academics try and recruit you to their point of view, their point of view is something that they've spent years of reading arriving at, it would be mad if they didn't. This is obv obv totally different from marking people down/"persecuting" them for disagreeing, which seems like something only a terrible prof wld do, and I've never encountered. But it's a real, true thing.

And academia is a hugely leftist preserve, not become "all the smart people are leftists" but because the whole idea of devoting yr whole megasmart and potentially lucrative life to study and pedagogy is some sense a leftist idea. So I can do some degree understand the impulse that this comes from, because right now if you're a rightist parent with a smart kid in the states your kid's college tutors probably will push vaguely leftist ideas on that kid, to some extent?

Gravel Puzzleworth (Gregory Henry), Thursday, 24 March 2005 23:18 (nineteen years ago) link

book recommendations:

Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey
Darwin's Black Box by Michael Behe

A Nairn (moretap), Thursday, 24 March 2005 23:23 (nineteen years ago) link

If instead of saying we're teaching our kids the TRUTH we said "we're teaching our kids productive methods for generating applicable knowledge of the world" we'd be in much better shape.

This is so completely...what's the word...OTMFM. Teaching people how to think rather than what to think -- how to approach the world critically, how to recognize received wisdom and subject it to the same scrutiny as brand-new information, how to deal with "information" period, in all its forms.

For what it's worth, my mom's a middle-school science teacher at a small, mostly progressive private school, and she has one creationist student in her class this year. After some tactful discussions with the parents, sympathizing with their right to believe whatever they want, she told them their daughter was just going to have to deal with discussion of evolution because that was a core part of the subject matter. Mom even kind of pushed it with a multiple choice test in which students had to select the right definition of "evolution." The girl circled the right answer, and then wrote next to it in big letters, "STUPID!" But at least she got it right.

gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Saturday, 26 March 2005 06:28 (nineteen years ago) link

heh:

http://www.badmovies.org/movies/plannine/plannine7.jpg

"Y'see?! Y'see?! STUPID!"

kingfish van pickles (Kingfish), Saturday, 26 March 2005 07:14 (nineteen years ago) link

seven months pass...
salut je vous aimes tous

junior, Thursday, 27 October 2005 18:59 (eighteen years ago) link


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