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- (A) Education
- (B) Culture and Ideology
- (A) Culture and Ideology
- (B) Education
Over the past two centuries, global life quality has dramatically improved, to a large extent because of an incredible increase in energy, mostly from the harnessing of fossil fuels. That has made agriculture, industry and transportation vastly more productive. Average life spans have more than doubled, hunger has dramatically declined, and real income has increased tenfold. We risk all that progress if we just stop using fossil fuels. The world still gets four-fifths of its energy from fossil fuels, because renewable sources rarely provide good alternatives. Half the world’s population entirely depends on food grown with synthetic fertilizer produced almost entirely by...
By John Ellis - Our corrupt, radical universities feed every scourge from censorship and crime to antisemitism. America faces a formidable range of calamities: crime out of control, borders in chaos by design, children poorly educated while sexualized and politicized against parental opposition, unconstitutional censorship, a press that does government PR rather than oversight, our institutions and corporations debased in the name of “diversity, equity and inclusion”—and more. To these has been added an outbreak of virulent antisemitism. Every one of these degradations can be traced wholly or in large part to a single source: the corruption of higher education...
By Gary Saul Morson - Cruelty often thrives among the sophisticated. Dostoevsky recalls the French terror, when people were humiliated and murdered in the name of the highest principle.... during the Stalinist terrors millions were routinely tortured ... and that during the collectivization of agriculture, millions more were deliberately starved to death, with young Bolshevik idealists brought in to enforce the famine.... In the West, intellectuals justified such behavior because it was done in the name of socialism ...Dostoevsky adds that there is no need to resort to examples from the past because the same dynamic can occur in any...
By David Satter - The Bolshevik coup had two consequences. In countries where communism came to hold sway, it hollowed out society’s moral core, degrading the individual and turning him into a cog in the machinery of the state. Communists committed murder on such a scale as to all but eliminate the value of life and to destroy the individual conscience in survivors....The Bolshevik plague that began in Russia was the greatest catastrophe in human history… it …would kill millions and inflict a near-fatal wound on Western civilization… In the West, communism inverted society’s understanding of the source of its...
By Scott Yenor and Anna Miller - Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s antiwoke education agenda has drawn national attention, but equally important and far less noticed is how Mr. DeSantis advanced new educational standards. A pedagogical revolution is afoot in the Sunshine State, which could serve as a blueprint for states across the country. Florida’s education reformers understand that antiwoke rhetoric alone is insufficient. A vision for education excellence must displace underperforming K-12 institutions. Florida has passed universal education savings accounts, which give families access to public per pupil funds for tuition to private or classical schools, school supplies and home-schooling aid....
By Gary Saul Morson - How was such evil possible? ... but those who commit the greatest harm think of themselves as good. Before interrogators could torture prisoners they knew were innocent, they had to discover a justification for their actions. Shakespeare’s villains ...had no ideology,” nothing to compare with Marxism-Leninism’s “scientific” and infallible explanations of life and ethics. “Ideology—that is what . . . gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination . . . the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good . . . in his own and others’ eyes.” Read More
By Orrin Hatch - …Somewhere between the rise of cable news and social media, our shared sense of reality splintered. We live in an era of endless political narratives, in which the phrase “my truth” is supposed to be taken seriously. .. Americans today cannot agree on the existence of facts, let alone what the facts are…. This article is included to draw attention to the grave problem of the left’s domination of higher education and its profound influence on our culture, our politics, and our society in ways that threaten our future… Read More
By Tunku Varadarajan and Ilya Shipiro - … The threat to ‘dismantle existing structures’ is an idle one in English class. But in legal education it targets individual rights and equal treatment under the Constitution.… If you read critical legal studies, of which critical race theory is a subset, you’ll read about the need to ‘fundamentally dismantle existing structures,’ to ‘change the way social hierarchies operate.’ . . . The goal is to fundamentally change the way that American society operates”…. Read More
By John Ellis - Only a few years ago, several well-established features of the current political landscape were too absurd to be taken seriously. Defunding the police was a ridiculous idea; critical race theory would be a giant step backward in in race relations; leftist radicalism was a fringe element of the Democratic Party. Suddenly all have gone mainstream....Only a short while ago most Americans would have been appalled to find that almost half of voters were foolish enough to want a lawless society, accept the teaching of racial hatred to children, and embrace radical leftist ideology. Read More
By Sadanand Dhume - China leads the U.S. in research on 37 of 44 critical technologies, ,,.Given this challenge, you might imagine that America would re-emphasize the principles of objectivity and merit that made it the world’s leading scientific innovator. You would be mistaken. .... Ironically, scientists in communist China need to care less about ideology than their American counterparts. In the U.S., the National Institutes of Health requires some prospective researchers to demonstrate “a strong commitment to promoting diversity and inclusive excellence” in order to receive funding". Read More
By Gerard Baker - Jul 6, 2020- At the end of the 20th century, the U.S. had won World War II and the Cold War, liberated half the planet from history’s most dehumanizing ideologies, advanced a free-market capitalism that had led more humans out of poverty than any economic system ever devised, and given the world the richest bounty of… This article warns of how the effort to distort our history and the domination of the left in higher education.... Read More
By Matthew Spalding - Wherever this agenda is allowed to take root, free expression and academic integrity are doomed…The first object of government, Madison tells us,…is the protection of diversity in … different opinions, to be encouraged to preserve liberty. Equity is an ancient legal concept of justice …, developed over centuries of English common-law practice. …. Yet in true Orwellian fashion, they have been redefined.…Diversity is no longer a term to describe the breadth of our differences but a demand to grant privileges to purportedly oppressed identity groups. Equity assigns desirable positions based on race, sex and sexual orientation rather than...
By Jerry A. Coyne and Anna I. Krylov - The crux of our argument is simple: Science that doesn’t prioritize merit doesn’t work, and substituting ideological dogma for quality is a shortcut to disaster. In some ways this new species of Lysenkoism is more pernicious than the old, because it affects all science—chemistry, physics, life sciences, medicine and math—not merely biology and agriculture. The government isn’t the only entity pushing it, either. “Progressive” scientists promote it, too, along with professional societies, funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health and Energy Department, scientific journals and university administrators. When applying for openings as a university scientist today, job...
By Fred Siegel - But there was another "rights" movement, largely overlooked, that has also had a profound effect on American life. The looming public-pension crisis that threatens to bankrupt city, county and state governments had its origins in those same years when public employees, already protected by civil-service rules, gained the right to bargain collectively. Read More
By Arthur Milikh - Summer 2021 Issue, National Affairs - From the birth of the modern conservative movement, dissidents concerned with civic and liberal education have tried almost everything to reshape America’s universities: … This article outlines the many grave problems of American higher education (with suggestions about how to correct them) and explains how its domination by the left is changing our culture, our politics, and our society in ways that threaten our future… Read More
By Michael B. Poliakoff - What these books have in common is an intense commitment to the liberal democracy that gives us the right to participate in it, indeed to criticize it. And, with that, the absolute obligation to instill the values and principles of our free society. Dr. Haass and President Daniels call not only for better K-12 civic education, but, like past president of Harvard University Derek Bok, for a required college course on American history and government....Those in our nation who do not understand the blessing of freedom and the price past generations paid for it are likely...
By Wilfred M. McClay and Kathleen O'Toole - Parents are appalled by the reduction of American history to an endless exercise in identity politics and moral accusation. They fear that the study of the American past — rather than providing the young with a sense of something larger than themselves — has become something deeply negative: a way of separating us from our past and a weapon used to sow shame and resentment, and even hatred and despair, in the hearts of tomorrow’s citizens. This is a recipe for disaster. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Good, honest...
By Gerard Baker - The larger truth is that the people who control America’s leading cultural institutions and now its government have been eagerly manufacturing ideological rope for the Chinese hangman….The intellectual movement to which they subscribe has been the force behind the planned destruction—of the principal pillars of America’s authority in the world: the idea that the greatest nation on the planet was founded on universal ideals of human freedom and dignity. …How can a nation prevail in a global ideological struggle when its leaders believe its values are intrinsically evil? … Read More
By Lamar Alexander, Arne Duncan, John King, Rod Paige, Richard Riley and Margaret Spellings - …the world’s oldest constitutional democracy is in grave danger. We stand at a crossroads, called to protect this democracy. …A key part of our task is to reinvigorate teaching and learning of American history and civics in our nation’s schools. A constitutional democracy requires a citizenry that has a desire to participate, and an understanding of how to do so constructively… Read More
By Andrew A. Michta - … ‘Death to America!” is a common refrain from antifa rioters …. Extremism becomes more entrenched in American politics with each passing day. These acts of violence encapsulate five decades of neo-Marxist indoctrination in American schools,… Neo-Marxists on the street and in institutions want to erase their opponents and deconstruct the country… Read More
By John M. Ellis - Colleges need to be accredited; state universities answer to governing boards. Accrediting agencies and governing boards are created through a political process. What if voters were to insist that those agencies demand answers to some elementary questions? …How can a department of political science that excludes half the spectrum of viable political ideas be competent to offer degrees in the field? How can a history curriculum be taught competently when only one extremist attitude to social and political questions is present in a department? …How can these extraordinary deficiencies deserve either accreditation, or support by...
By Christopher F. Rufo - Critical race theory is the latest battleground in the culture war. … key concepts, including “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” … have become ubiquitous in America’s elite institutions. Progressive politicians have sought to implement “antiracist” policies to reduce racial disparities, such as minorities-only income… Read More
By Christopher F. Rufo - Longer article - Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it—and of those who have, many don’t understand it. It’s time for this to change. We need to know what it is so we can know how to fight it. Read More
By Robert Pondiscio - Students’ personal choices matter. And so do the choices made by the education reform movement, which is steadfastly unwilling to address or even acknowledge the role that family structure and stability plays in students’ life outcomes. If a child in poverty graduates from high school, finds full-time employment, gets married, and has children, in that order, Rowe tirelessly pointed out—the chance they will remain in poverty as an adult drops to a mere 2 percent. “There is no public policy that comes even close to those kinds of results,” ... Read More