Fr Z on defunding academia

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Oh, come on. 😒

Academia has its problems, but Fr. Z is a little over the top.
 
You’re going to see a lot about monitoring schools and colleges for being “unamerican” over the next few months. Teachers and college lecturers (notably unionized teachers) will be framed as the enemy within. It’s Trump’s planned strategy for 2020.

Characteristic 10 and 11.
 
Is it inaccurate? There is something messed up when taxpayers will provide a Pell Grant and subsidized loans to pay for academic programs that would never be approved for an ROTC cadet/midshipman. Why are the taxpayers paying for Grievance Studies?
 
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Fr Z may not be 100% right, but he is not completely wrong either.
 
From the article by Fr. Z:

" Schools – academia – are supposed to teach children and young people how to learn and how to think. Learning “stuff” is secondary to those two goals.

Instead, schools have been doing exactly the opposite. They are making young people stupid. They don’t teach student how to think or learn. Instead, they teach them how to emote and uncritically accept. Those in charge of schools have dumbed down curricula, injected social re-engineering and leftist propaganda into class rooms. The result is that schools – public and CATHOLIC – have churned out wave after wave of drifting, minimally informed dupes, ready to get suckered into backing whatever loudmouthed leftist organizer comes along. This is what we see in the streets today."
 
There is a lot of truth to what Father says. While I can see the eyeroll at his term “rants”, he has deliberately chosen that —and did so years ago, well before Pope Francis, well before Donald Trump, well before the current ‘protests’- as a kind of joking, “Now I will get on my soapbox”. Of course in the halcyon days 10 years or so ago, he didn’t foresee the current climate where people are so eager to jump onto trigger words and depersonalize one and label them deplorable on the one hand and anarchist on the other.

It’s kind of sad that we let ourselves be so caught up in whether a word or a phrase or a concept is something we can label as being ‘left or right’, progressive or conservative, Trumpian or ‘normal’, all more or less equating to our personal judgment of what is ‘good or bad’, and so eagerly either sneeringly dismiss, or uncritically accept, statements, articles, blogs, etc depending on how it fits into our personal worldview.

Time was when we would look at such things, read them with as little ‘personal worldview’ as we possibly could, striving to do so impartially, and then ponder to ourselves as to what we could ‘take away’ from the discussion.

Now we don’t take anything ‘away’, we insist on either cropping and lopping it into the worldview we already have, whether it fits or not. . .or else discarding it with loathing.

And we’re all the poorer for such things.
 
mythbuster1 said:
Why are the taxpayers paying for Grievance Studies?
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It’s not just the US - by far!

And, well said, mentioning “grievance studies”. The perpetrators of the hoax really hit the nail on the head with that. Sometimes the right words are all you need to encapsulate an amorphous movement. The best thing about the “grievance studies” hoax was the it was not perpetrated by the right, but by people you’d normally associate with the left (ie. left leaning academics).

A good article, by the perpetrators of the hoax.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/co...s/news-story/674aefae465e3b26b9690f2997510d33
For a long time, my colleagues and I had been trying to raise with leftist academics a problem of corrupted scholarship in women’s studies, queer studies and other “grievance studies” based on identity politics and postmodernism.

…
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We set ourselves to the task of writing grievance studies papers, and we got seven accepted for publication because our papers were indistinguishable from genuine ones that influence social justice activism, politics and culture today.
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Just a reminder that the target wasn’t the school system or the fringe of leftist politics, but the universities and their much vaunted “peer review” process which has become accepted as the gold standard of “evidence” in social debate. So, when someone argues “Studies have shown… blah…blah…” or “the academic consensus is” then this is the quality of evidence they are citing.

We had it recently in a thread in CAF where a poster, in good conscience apparently, cited the “academic consensus” that LGBT parenting has no adverse effect on chidren.
Recently, more and more evidence has begun to come out that parents in same-sex relationships who are parenting a child, presents no harmful benefits in comparison to opposite-sex parenting couples. An example article is this:

https://www.psychology.org.au/getmedia/47196902-158d-4cbb-86e6-2f3f1c71ffd1/LGBT-families-literature-review.pdf.pdf

Quote:
“Rarely is there as much consensus in any area of social science as in the case of gay parenting, which is why the American Academy of Pediatrics and all of the major professional organizations with expertise in child welfare have issued reports and resolutions in support of gay and lesbian parental rights”
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in CAF Thread * How should a Catholic respond to growing evidence against church teachings on LGBT parenting?*
 
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JimG said:
“Instead, schools have been doing exactly the opposite. They are making young people stupid. They don’t teach student how to think or learn. Instead, they teach them how to emote and uncritically accept.”
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That’s quite a generalization. And he doesn’t provide any evidence to support it.
 
FrankFletcher said:
That’s quite a generalization. And he doesn’t provide any evidence to support it.
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Having worked in education for a long time, I can assure your that students are not taught to think. They are not allowed to think or discuss.
Talk to someone who is hiring the latest crop of the “educated” work force.
 
Adamek said:
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FrankFletcher:
That’s quite a generalization. And he doesn’t provide any evidence to support it.
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Having worked in education for a long time, I can assure your that students are not taught to think. They are not allowed to think or discuss.
Talk to someone who is hiring the latest crop of the “educated” work force.
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That would be me. Plenty of talented, educated folks out there ready and able to work. Since my experience doesn’t match with the claims you’ve made, can you provide the evidence that this priest does not?
 
Most college professors try to teach both: critical thinking and “stuff.” The focus today is on critical thinking, maybe a little too much. I am happy if my students just learn to think rationally, never mind the critical aspect. But learning information is also important. Only writers of books about critical thinking and learning how to learn claim that you don’t need a knowledge base to think critically. In real life, you do.
 
I just put a ‘like’ on several contributions from people who have worked in education, although they are contradicting each other, because reports from those out in the field are most helpful. Thankyou all!

My own views of this are based more on what I’ve seen of the tertiary academia rather than school.

My favourite statement on the state of academia is this, from Jordan Peterson.

People don’t understand how radical and transgressive the universities have actually become. … [the gender issue] is a screen for an all out assault… [0:50]
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