Academic Stupidity And Brainwashing

Townhall ^ | Walter E. Williams Walter E. Williams | Posted: Sep 11, 2019 12:01 AM

[Red Badger]

Just when we thought colleges could not spout loonier ideas, we have a new one from American University. They hired a professor to teach other professors to grade students based on their "labor" rather than their writing ability. The professor that American University hired to teach that nonsense is Asao B. Inoue, who is a professor at the University of Washington in Tacoma in interdisciplinary arts and sciences. He is also the director of the university's writing center. Inoue believes that a person's writing ability should not be assessed, in order to promote "anti-racist" objectives. Inoue taught American University's faculty members that their previous practices of grading writing promoted white language supremacy. Inoue thinks that students should be graded on the effort they put into a project.

The idea to bring such a professor to American University, where parents and students fork over $48,459 a year in tuition charges, could not have been something thought up by saner members of its academic community. Instead, it was probably the result of deep thinking by the university's diversity and campus life officials. Inoue's views are not simply extreme but possibly hostile to the academic mission of most universities. Forgiving and ignoring a students' writing ability would mostly affect black students. White students' speaking and writing would be judged against the King's English, defined as standard, pure or correct English grammar. CARTOONS | Michael Ramirez View Cartoon

Professor Noam Chomsky, called the father of modern linguistics, formulated the generative theory of language. According to his theory, the most basic form of language is a set of syntactic rules that is universal for all humans and that underlies the grammar of all human languages. We analyze and interpret our environment with words and sentences in a structured language. Oral and written language provides a set of rules that enables us to organize thoughts and construct logical meaning with our thoughts.

Not holding students accountable to proper grammar does a disservice to those students who overall show poor writing abilities. When or if these students graduate from college, they are not going to be evaluated in their careers by Inoue's tailored standards. They will be judged according to their objective abilities, and it probably follows that if they fail to meet those objective standards, the standards themselves will be labeled as racist.

There's another very dangerous bit of academic nonsense happening, this time at the K-12 level of education. One America News Network anchor interviewed Mary Clare Amselem, education specialist at the Heritage Foundation, about the California Department of Education's proposed ethnic studies curriculum. The proposed ethnic studies curriculum would teach children that capitalism and father figures are racist.

The Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum also includes gross anti-Israel bias and teaches about a Palestinian-led anti-Israel initiative called Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. The curriculum also has students study issues of police brutality and asks teachers to find incidents of bias by police in their own communities. According to an article by Shelby Talcott in The Stream, California's proposed curriculum called for students to study lawmakers such as Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and Democratic Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, both of whom have supported the BDS movement and have been accused of anti-Semitic rhetoric. Recommended Wow: Speaker at 9/11 Ceremony in New York Calls Out Ilhan Omar Cortney O'Brien

The proposed ethnic studies proposal has been removed from the California Department of Education website. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said, "While I am relieved that California made the obvious decision to revisit this wholly misguided proposal, we need to know why and how a blatantly anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, factually inaccurate curriculum made its way through the ranks of California's Department of Education." He added, "This was not simply an oversight -- the California Department of Education's attempt to institutionalize anti-Semitism is not only discriminatory and intolerant, it's dangerous."

Brainwashing our youngsters is a serious matter. The people responsible for the California Department of Education's proposal ought to be summarily fired.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

Walter E. Williams's Latest Book American Contempt for Liberty is available on Amazon

[Chewbarkah]

American University is applying the Marxist Theory of Value to student writing: “value” arises from the amount of labor spent on some endeavor or product, without reference to quality, utility, etc., and certainly not what someone would be willing to pay for it. 10 hours writing childish claptrap has the same value as 10 hours writing the Declaration of Independence. Time spent making unsalable buggywhips is worth as much as time spent making a product in high demand. American University must either fire whoever hired the consultant and supported this idiocy, or close.

[gundog]

Ping.

[Grampa Dave]

Thanks, these opeds will go into my reading stack.

[Grampa Dave]

“The cream rises to the top.

Natural selection is still at work.”

The liberals don’t realize this as they dumb down their public highschools and their colleges.

If we had a program that aborted unborn liberals and dumbed down the schools/colleges for those not aborted, we would be called evil/white racists.

[Hieronymus]

I will say that good writing requires a great deal of labor, though somewhat less later on if good habits are drilled into one and one works to maintain them.

A good deal of work up front pays off in the end, and thus my regard for your Dad and Mr. K.

[nicollo]

Any teacher stuck under this idiotic regime of writer intent over product can quickly get around it by insisting upon clarity and concision, which rules of grammar promote.

Don’t grade them on “standard usage,” grade them on delivery of ideas, which non-standard language can achieve but not generally, especially from Ritalin and THC-infused little brains.