Intolerance of Viewpoint Diversity at Colleges

From a NYT op-ed by Emma Camp, "I Came to College Eager to Debate. I Found Self-Censorship Instead."

“Viewpoint diversity is no longer considered a sacred, core value in higher education,” Samuel Abrams, a politics professor at Sarah Lawrence College, told me. He felt this firsthand. In 2018, after he published an Opinion essay in The Times criticizing what he viewed as a lack of ideological diversity among university administrators, his office door was vandalized. Student protesters demanded his tenure be reviewed. While their attempts were unsuccessful, Dr. Abrams remains dissatisfied with fellow faculty members’ reactions. In response to the incident, only 27 faculty members signed a statement supporting free expression — less than 10 percent of the college’s faculty.

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Education Schools as the Incubators of Wokeness

An excerpt from a recent article written by Peter Boghossian and Lyell Asher. The article is titled: "Ed Schools: Weak Academics & Woke Politics: "Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults."

So it's no surprise that the most blatant attempts at censorship and indoctrination on college campuses have come primarily from administrators trained in institutions—ed schools—which combine both of the characteristics I just mentioned. Low academic standards—can't debate, and high-octane political orthodoxy—won't debate.

. . .

[O]ut of the five studies he looked at, four of them showed that students pursuing education degrees had the absolute lowest scores. That was the finding of the Army Classification Test from 1946, the Selective Service test from 1951, the Project Talent tests from the 1970s, and the test for admission to graduate school (otherwise known as the GRE) in the early 2000s.

The only exception was the Scholastic Aptitude test of 2014. On that test, students who indicated a primary interest in education came in next to last place—14th out of 15. In addition to their weakness in academics, ed schools are just as notorious for their woke political orthodoxy.

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How to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 15: The Danger of Empathy: Exhibit A: The Coddling of Children

Chapter 15: The Danger of Empathy: Exhibit A: The Coddling of Children.

I’m back again to preach to you ad nauseum today, hypothetical newborn baby! I'm here once again to teach you some of the many Life Lessons I was forced to learn at the School of Hard Knocks. My intentions are honorable. I’m here to spare you some suffering, but based on today’s topic I am concerned that you might be better off leaning these lessons on your own, much as I did. BTW, you can find all fifteen lessons in one easy link.

You were born into a complex adaptive system. Yes, you do have exquisite powers of perception and memory but they are often no match for the complexity of your environment. Hence, the law of unintended consequences: You will often find that your well-intended actions will result in outcomes that are not the ones you intended or foresaw. The result will often be disappointing. We have a saying, “No good deed goes unpunished.” Sometimes, though, you do something and it turns out wildly better than you could ever have hoped. When that happens, you might be tempted to claim that you knew it all along, but that would often be an illustration of the “hindsight bias.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias

To illustrate how things can go unexpectedly awry, I will start by referring to the work of Paul Bloom, who wrote a 2016 book titled: Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. He defines “empathy” as follows: “Empathy is the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does." He further describes empathy as "a spotlight directing attention and aid to where it's needed."  According to Bloom, empathy is an emotion, not a good tool for moral decision-making. “Compassion,” on the other hand, is feeling concern or compassion for someone. Bloom contrasts empathy with "rational compassion," which can productively be used to “make decisions based on considerations of cost and benefits." Empathy, by contrast, has no such protective limitations, meaning that empathy often leads to ill-considered policies. [More . . . ]

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New Charter School Focuses on Free Speech and Individual Achievement

Twenty years ago, who would have ever thought that this type of curriculum would have been a new direction, controversial or necessary? FAIR reports:

Ian Rowe believes in teaching students four cardinal virtues: courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. These qualities make up the core curriculum at his forthcoming International Baccalaureate public charter high schools in the Bronx, set to open in 2022. A product of New York City’s public school system himself, Rowe is determined to give parents an option that promotes classic ideas about equality that many still believe can work.

“The schools will be grounded in the ideas of equality of opportunity, individual dignity and our common humanity,” says Rowe. “They're schools that will be dedicated to this idea of democratic discourse, our ability to debate across differences, where we won't reduce kids to individual, immutable characteristics. We won't reduce kids to just characteristics like race or gender, but instead treat each student as individual human beings with great capacities to achieve.”

Rowe's program seeks meaningful progress in the ability of students to survive in the real world:

“I think a lot of [these debates are] a massive distraction from some fundamental issues facing kids of all races in our country,” said Rowe. “It's still the case that less than 40 percent of all kids in our country are reading at grade level. This is a massive literacy crisis. Things like Critical Race Theory and DEI have nothing to do with improving outcomes for children and take attention away from important factors like family structure, having school choice, the ability for parents to choose great schools, really empowered curricula that's rigorous in nature, the science of reading. You know, these are the factors that really determine whether or not kids are going to be successful.”

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How to Be a Human Animal: Chapter 6: Your Job is to Play and that Should Never Stop Being Your Job

Chapter 6: Your Job is to Play and it Should Never Stop Being Your Job

Because you were just born yesterday, you probably have some questions about what to DO here on Planet Earth. First of all, eat, pee and poop. Over and over. Nonstop. This will allow you to grow up so that you can feed and change the diapers of other babies.

Another job is that you’ll need to be cute so that others will bring you food and clean up your scatological messes. You’ll quickly figure this out.

Here’s another job for you and it’s rather hysterical. You’ll quickly learn how to train adults to talk in “baby talk.” Truly hilarious. Fully adult tax-payer citizens who talk in somber and earnest voices most of the day. You—little you--will have the power, using sheer cuteness, to cause them to talk in little high pitched voices, saying things like “poopie” and claiming that they “wuv” you. Enjoy it while it lasts. You will have zero responsibilities for only a couple years and then you’ll need to start fending for yourself by coming up with a more clever schtick.

In addition to being cute, your job is to play. Play is your best way to creatively explore your world. Essentially, you’ll be doing lots and lots of experiments, including physics experiments (What if I drop this apple sauce on the floor?) and social psychology experiments (What will happen if I poop on this white living room carpet?). This will be your main job. Try hundreds and thousands of things and see what happens. Figure out the patterns. When something interesting happens, use your hippocampus to pack it away for future reference. For a couple years no one will blame you for anything you do, so play to your heart’s content. Have lots and lots of fun.

Beware that your parents might soon try to groom you to be a super-child so that they can claim to their friends that they are extremely good parents. This comes with the territory and there’s no way to get around some of some of these performance obligations. I would urge you, though, to keep playing as often as possible and for as long as possible. Some parents try to turn you into an academic superstar even when you are 2 or 3. Resist this! Lots of research shows that you are much better off playing on your own terms, including this article, which contains this quote:

"If this study doesn't put the nail in the coffin of academic training to little children, it's hard to imagine what will," says psychologist Peter Gray.

Here’s a longer excerpt:

Gray believes these outcomes were predictable. When kids are pushed into academics before they are ready, he says, it disrupts the natural unfolding of curiosity, mastery, and joy. It's like being forced to take poker lessons before mastering Go Fish. Kids feel lost, bored, and dumb. They may decide they hate school, or that the only way to escape is by acting out.

Compare that to plain old playing, where kids discover how to make things happen, try out new ideas, and make friends. This requires learning "self-management," i.e., the ability to hold yourself together enough that other kids want to play with you. Those are real lessons—some of life's biggest, in fact. There's time for academics later.

But that’s just the beginning of the struggle. As you get to be a teenager and then an adult, please please please keep playing. Don’t let your inner child whither and die! I’ve seen countless adults who have forgotten how to play. They forget how to make believe. They don’t know how to creatively pretend. They’ve long ago forgot how to giggle. They are uncomfortable making their own music and art. They start calling these things “wastes of time.”

Beware of those serious adults. They think that their job is to look proper, but here’s the sad truth: To the extent that adults no longer engage in play, they die. You can see it in their dull eyes, eyes that formerly sparkled. It is well established that adults need to play in order to maintain their mental health. That is the conclusion of psychologist Barrett Brown. Brown encourages the audience that they should not set aside time to play. Rather, they (including adults) should infuse every moment of their lives with play. He argues that play is just important for humans as is asleep and dreaming.

Over time, adults who don't play ossify into hard lumps of properness. They worry about the craziest things instead of playing. Mostly, they worry about having money to buy things to impress their friends. Some of them will never have enough, so there will never be a time to pause this bizarro form of hunting and gathering.

So here’s my advice. 1. Start playing. 2. The entire world is your playroom. 3. Never stop playing.

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