Movement Toward a Post-Literate Society

I've gone on in comments a bit about how many teens and twenty-somethings have trouble reading more than a few paragraphs or maybe a couple of pages and so university professors have, in general, adapted by giving shorter and shorter readings for classes.

Now the College Board has followed suit with the SAT and it looks like the ACT is making similar changes.*

The College Board notes on page 13 of its Digital SAT Suite of Assessments technical framework that two of the primary goals in changing the exam were to make it shorter and to give students more time per question. To make this happen in the new “Reading and Writing” section of the test, they shortened reading passages from 500-750 words all the way down to 25-150 words, or the length of a social-media post, with one question per passage. Their explanation is that this model “operates more efficiently when choices about what test content to deliver are made in small rather than larger units.”

...

Finally, the optional essay was eliminated completely.

The math section has been made easier over the last 15 years as well.

*Although the author of the article is Michael Torres, the policy director for the Classic Learning Test (CLT), which is trying to compete with the SAT and ACT, the SAT published the changes and defends them.

Woke Walmart

I was just talking about this here the other day, but the Washington Free Beacon goes into more detail. 

According to documents obtained initially by families who requested public records, Walmart has been facilitating public school teacher training from the Racial Equity Institute, which also does Walmart's own internal DEI training. Walmart, or foundations funded by Walmart or the Walton family, has also facilitated similar training for other organizations in Arkansas, like arts non-profits, business leader organizations, the University of Arkansas, etc.

One aspect of Walmart's influence that the article discusses is the impact of being the biggest philanthropic organization in an area. Everyone who wants to curry favor in the hopes of getting grants will take Walmart's positions into account.

Walmart also donates to both major political parties, giving about equally to Democrats and Republicans.

However, a couple of things I didn't know is that, despite Walmart's opposition, Arkansas legislators in 2021 banned transgender surgery for minors over Gov. Hutchinson's veto, and newly-elected Gov. Sanders signed an executive order banning critical race theory in Arkansas schools. So, their influence has limits.

Proper Child Rearing

I don't know how to embed twitter videos here, so here's a link to America's youngest Roman legionnaires. (H/t Ace's Overnight Thread on Twitter)

Karen Veith: Closing the Door on the Madison Metropolitan School District

A teacher with 16 years in the system explains in detail why she quit, primarily because the administration's policies and lack of leadership led to chaos in the school. There are a lot of stories out there like this one.

It's worth reading the whole thing if you want to understand public schools today.

Angelo Codevilla: Living With Politics as War

Codevilla's article at American Greatness argues that it's too late to make peace with the Left and that a counter-march through the institutions would be pointless. He argues for creating a strong separate conservative culture that would replace the Left-dominated institutions. He talks about boycotts, state nullification of federal laws, replacing universities, etc. It's a good article, although I don't know how far I agree with it. In the very long run, pushing for more balance at currently-Left-dominated institutions may be productive.

There are some specific recommendations he makes that I'd like to post about later, but it's a good read whether I get around to that or not.

More on "Toxic Masculinity"

In discussing the cartoon in Grim's post This Was An Insult?, both there and in his follow-up Another Look at Ideas on Male Physique, I think something missing is the current SJW assault on traditional masculinity, which they are now calling "toxic masculinity."

Over at PJ Media, Tom Knighton has an article on this topic, Colleges Ramp Up Assault on Masculinity for Spring Semester. He offers some details and links to attempts at colleges to tear down the old masculinity and build a new one. Here is one such:

Duke University’s “Men’s Project,” meanwhile, is looking for applicants for a “nine-week long discussion group” that will also “examine the ways we present -- or don’t present -- our masculinities, so we can better understand how masculinity exists on our campus -- often in toxic ways -- and begin the work of unlearning violence.”

“We want to explore, dissect, and construct an intersectional understanding of masculinity and maleness, as well as to create destabilized spaces for those with privilege,” a description of the program explains. “Duke is an environment where some are rarely made uncomfortable while others are made to bear the weight of their identities on a daily basis -- we aim to flip that paradigm.”

"destabilized spaces for those with privilege" -- there's an Orwellian euphemism for you. I wonder if it will be held in room 101.

ESR on Soviet Ideological Warfare against the US

In 2006, Eric S. Raymond discussed "ideological warfare" used against the United States by her enemies. I ran across this recently and it's an interesting article.

I disagree with his claim that Americans don't expect ideas to matter because what really matters is material prosperity. That is, we think crime, terrorism, etc., are the effects of economic problems, not ideology. That probably is the view of secularists, who became increasingly numerous from the late 19th century on, but not of all Americans. However, his point is to debunk the view that ideology and ideas don't have consequences, so I am happy he's on my side (ideas have consequences) overall.

The interesting part begins with:

By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists. All three put substantial effort into cultivating American proxies to influence U.S. domestic policy and foreign policy in favorable directions. Yes, the Nazis did this, through organizations like the “German-American Bund” that was outlawed when World War II went hot. Today, the Islamists are having some success at manipulating our politics through fairly transparent front organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

But it was the Soviet Union, in its day, that was the master of this game. They made dezinformatsiya (disinformation) a central weapon of their war against “the main adversary”, the U.S. They conducted memetic subversion against the U.S. on many levels at a scale that is only now becoming clear as historians burrow through their archives and ex-KGB officers sell their memoirs.


...

On a different level, in the 1930s members of CPUSA (the Communist Party of the USA) got instructions from Moscow to promote non-representational art so that the US’s public spaces would become arid and ugly.

Americans hearing that last one tend to laugh. But the Soviets, following the lead of Marxist theoreticians like Antonio Gramsci, took very seriously the idea that by blighting the U.S.’s intellectual and esthetic life, they could sap Americans’ will to resist Communist ideology and an eventual Communist takeover. The explicit goal was to erode the confidence of America’s ruling class and create an ideological vacuum to be filled by Marxism-Leninism.

And they've been very successful. Below are some of the ideas Raymond identifies as promoted by Soviet disinformation programs.

What Happened to Civics Education?

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, recently had an article in Minding the Campus which explains in some detail how civics classes have been hijacked to undermine American-style democracy. Going under names like "the New Civics" and "service learning," it makes civics classes in particular and, wherever the SJWs can, any and every class from K-Ph.D. into courses in progressive propaganda and activism.

I've seen this myself, and agree that it is ubiquitous, though the power the SJWs have varies greatly from school to school and department to department. Schools of education are eaten up with it.

I highly recommend the whole article if you are interested in American education today. If you do, remember the name Paulo Freire; I'll come back to him in a future post.

Here's an excerpt from the report Wood discusses:

National Findings: Traditional civic literacy is in deep decay in America. The New Civics, a movement devoted to progressive activism, has taken over civics education. “Service-learning” and “civic engagement” are the most common labels this movement uses, but it also calls itself global civics, deliberative democracy, and intercultural learning. The New Civics movement is national, and it extends far beyond the universities. The New Civics redefines “civic activity” as “progressive activism.” The New Civics redefines “civic activity” as channeling government funds toward progressive nonprofits. The New Civics has worked to divert government funds to progressive causes since its founding in the 1960s.

The New Civics redefines “volunteerism” as labor for progressive organizations and administration of the welfare state. The new measures to require “civic engagement” will make this volunteerism compulsory.  The New Civics replaces traditional liberal arts education with vocational training for community activists. The New Civics shifts authority within the university from the faculty to administrators, especially in offices of civic engagement, diversity, and sustainability, as well as among student affairs professionals. The New Civics also shifts the emphasis of a university education from curricula, drafted by faculty, to “co-curricular activities,” run by non-academic administrators. The New Civics movement aims to take over the entire university. The New Civics advocates want to make “civic engagement” part of every class, every tenure decision, and every extracurricular activity.

Project Euler and Self-Directed Learning

Problem 2

Each new term in the Fibonacci sequence is generated by adding the previous two terms. By starting with 1 and 2, the first 10 terms will be:

1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, ...

By considering the terms in the Fibonacci sequence whose values do not exceed four million, find the sum of the even-valued terms.

Apropos of Tex's recent post on child-centered learning, I thought I'd add this.

Computer programming is a hobby of mine and something I am very interested in getting better at, but I was never good at math. Call me lazy, but the most difficult thing in math classes was keeping my eyes open; after missing the instruction, the problems were often impossible. (If it's impossible, it's not difficult, you see.) The textbooks were even more boring than the teachers, so they were no help, either.

In the last few years I've become increasingly interested in learning more math, but the problem is where to begin and how to approach it. I dread taking university math courses, an expensive cure for insomnia in my experience. Then I read James Somer's article, How I Failed, Failed and Finally Succeeded in Learning How to Code, where he introduces Colin Hughes, a British math teacher and the creator of Project Euler.

The core of Project Euler is a set of math problems designed to be solved by simple computer programs. Currently, there are more than 400 and Mr. Hughes adds a new one each weekend during the school year (he takes summers off). Interestingly, other than a simple explanation like the one above, he provides no instruction in math with the problem, but after you give the correct answer, it opens up a discussion thread for everyone who has solved the problem to share their solutions and comments with each other.

My route to solving these problems has generally been either to just start writing the program, if I immediately grasped the problem (like Problem 2 above), or if I didn't, to look up related math topics on Wikipedia, which has a surprisingly large number of helpful articles. I try to find a principle that will allow me to solve that type of problem (I avoid simply searching for  the problem itself; some unsporting types have posted their solutions publicly). After solving the problem, I go through a dozen or so solutions from others who have also solved it.

Hughes explains his method like this: "The problems range in difficulty and for many the experience is inductive chain learning. That is, by solving one problem it will expose you to a new concept that allows you to undertake a previously inaccessible problem. So the determined participant will slowly but surely work his/her way through every problem."

That seems to be how it's working for me. While the problems have gotten more difficult, I've become quicker to pick up on patterns in numbers and, when I don't understand a problem, I have a better idea of how to approach finding the answer. I've built up a better understanding of how numbers work together, a clearer understanding of some math concepts, an appreciation for different types of math (number theory, graph theory, combinatorics, etc.) and am solving the problems faster. I am, in fact, learning math.

My proudest achievement there so far has been solving problem 15. Wikipedia was entirely useless (I later found out that I was looking in the wrong articles), so I had to sit down with pen and paper and work through simpler versions of the problem until I found a pattern. Then I created my own formula to solve the problem, implemented it, and it worked. It took me nearly a week of spare time. Then I went into the discussion forum for that problem and found two vastly simpler ways to solve it, and of course I got a good laugh out of that. Then it was on to the next problem.