Tag: education

The Retardery is Relentless

The average university student today cannot even read.

What I’m about to describe are the average students at Average State U.

Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.

I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read,2 and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.

Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn’t even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided.

They also lie about it. I wrote the textbook for a course I regularly teach. It’s a fairly popular textbook, so I’m assuming it is not terribly written. I did everything I could to make the writing lively and packed with my most engaging examples. The majority of students don’t read it. Oh, they will come to my office hours (occasionally) because they are bombing the course, and tell me that they have been doing the reading, but it’s obvious they are lying. The most charitable interpretation is that they looked at some of the words, didn’t understand anything, pretended that counted as reading, and returned to looking at TikTok.

This study says that 65% of college students reported that they skipped buying or renting a textbook because of cost. I believe they didn’t buy the books, but I’m skeptical that cost is the true reason, as opposed to just the excuse they offer. Yes, I know some texts, especially in the sciences, are expensive. However, the books I assign are low-priced. All texts combined for one of my courses is between $35-$100 and they still don’t buy them. Why buy what you aren’t going to read anyway? Just google it.

Even in upper-division courses that students supposedly take out of genuine interest they won’t read. I’m teaching Existentialism this semester. It is entirely primary texts—Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre. The reading ranges from accessible but challenging to extremely difficult but we’re making a go of it anyway (looking at you, Being and Nothingness). This is a close textual analysis course. My students come to class without the books, which they probably do not own and definitely did not read…

This is not an educational system problem, this is a societal problem. What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs.

Keep this in mind the next time you’re thinking of passing over a perfectly good candidate for a job because he doesn’t have a university degree. The reality is that not more than 10 percent of an average European population can benefit from a college education.

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Uneducation Factories

The God-Emperor 2.0 can’t just stop with banning the Department of Education. The entire public school system needs to go:

A new report has found that Illinois has 60 public schools at which zero students reported grade-level proficiency in either reading or math. Across the Prairie State, there are 23 schools, including 18 in Chicago, where no student demonstrated proficiency in either subject in 2022, according to an analysis of state data by Wirepoints. Another seven Illinois schools had zero proficiency in reading alone, and 30 had no students with proficiency in math alone, the study found.

Even calling these institutions “schools” is a misnomer. They’re Uneducation Factories. The children would be better off if they were just allowed to play all day, unsupervised, in the nearest park or field. More of them would learn how to read too.

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The End of the Department of Education

The latest rumor about the God-Emperor 2.0’s next executive order bodes well. This bodes very, very well for the state of education in the USA.

US President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order aimed at dismantling the Department of Education, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing sources familiar with the matter. The move, which is part of the Trump administration’s effort to overhaul US government agencies in a bid to eliminate wasteful state spending, has been expected since early February, when the White House revealed its intentions.

A draft of the order, reviewed by the outlet, instructs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Education Department” to the fullest extent allowed by law. The order could reportedly be issued on Thursday.

“The experiment of controlling American education through Federal programs and dollars – and the unaccountable bureaucrats those programs and dollars support – has failed our children, our teachers, and our families,” the WSJ cited the draft order as reading. The order justifies the department’s closure by stating that “since its founding in 1979, the Department of Education has spent more than $1 trillion without producing virtually any improvement in student reading and mathematics scores.”

The Department of Education, established in 1979 under President Carter, has been a complete and abject failure by every single possible metric. We can be optimistic that the elimination of Federal control will be a net positive, particularly if it is followed by Federal support for the elimination of all state and local restrictions on homeschooling.

Once the states and local schools discover that interference in the way of homeschooling parents will cost them their Federal funding, they’ll rapidly change their tune.

One proposal for a new law: all government programs with a budget over X must be established on the basis of a solid, unalterable metric which cannot be redefined, and, if it is not met, will trigger the immediate elimination of the program. Yes, of course the relevant bureaucrats and their allies in the media will fight tooth and nail to redefine and otherwise marginalize the metric, but their very efforts to do so will be an obvious signal that the program is unsuccessful and should be shut down.

Call it the Accountability in Government Act.

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This is Not a School Failure

This tragedy is a specific parental failure, not a general systemic one:

The parents of a 10-year-old boy who took his own life after being bullied at school for his glasses and teeth have filed a lawsuit that includes photos of his injuries. Sammy Teusch’s family moved to Greenfield, Indiana, in November 2022, where he was relentlessly bullied at Weston Elementary and later at Greenfield Intermediate

Sammy repeatedly sought help from teachers, but no action was taken

Sammy took his own life in May. His 13-year-old brother discovered his asphyxiated body at home

The lawsuit includes photos of injuries and a text message from a bully appearing to confess to driving Sammy to suicide. The parents accuse the school district of showing “callous indifference” and failing to protect Sammy despite their repeated pleas for intervention.

It’s bad enough that parents force their children to go to public schools, in which “callous indifference” is designed from the start. But to ignore the suffering of a child who is a square peg in the round hole, and expect the school to eliminate it, or even mitigate it, is a complete dereliction of parental duty. Especially when homeschooling the child is an easy and legal option.

Indiana homeschool families are not required to register with the state and do not have to do any testing or reporting.

If your child is being bullied at school, don’t hesitate to pull him or her out of school immediately and keep him out until the matter is well and truly sorted. And never, ever, rely upon the school authorities to do anything whatsoever to defend your child; even the kindest-hearted schoolteacher or school administrator has responsibilities that do not permit them to do much, if anything, to prevent one or more schoolchildren from bullying or otherwise preying upon another child.

Far too many parents are quite happy to abandon their own responsibilities in the false belief that the schools operate in loco parentis. They never have and they never will.

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The Mediocre Death Spiral

John Carter explains how the university system and academia is doomed now that it has become women’s work:

If you want your society to produce transcendent excellence in a given field, the only way to do so is to attach a competitive male status hierarchy to it. With status on the line, men will throw themselves into the arena, immersing themselves completely, devoting their every waking moment to mastering a skill or subject, making it their life’s purpose to push a discipline beyond its limits. Competitive pressures between the best of the best then raises performance to its apogee. Iron sharpens iron.

Conversely, if you want reliable mediocrity, then you want women’s work. Women don’t have the same sexual incentive to compete with one another in performance, and so, by and large, don’t (they compete in other ways). Their instinct is to perform to a perfectly acceptable standard, but not, in general, to push themselves to exceed it.

For men, the play-by-play events of a competitive environment are high drama. Not so for women. Women, as the old saying goes, don’t care about the struggles of the competitors: they just wait at the finish line and fuck the winner. The drama women tend to care about focuses more on the heroine’s struggle to distinguish winners from posers, to decide which winner she wants, and/or to stand out from the other girls so she can catch the eye of the winner. “I’m so torn … do I go with the musky barbarian warlord werewolf rapist, or the the aloof immortal billionaire vampire knight?” the heroine asks herself for three hundred pages. How he became an immortal billionaire vampire knight in the first place is of much less interest than whether or not he’s really interested in her.

Men are constantly on the lookout for arenas in which they can prove their worth, and thereby attract a mate or, more accurately, as many mates as possible. Across the myriad competitive arenas that men have invented, there is one common element shared by all of them, which both men and women are exquisitely sensitive to:

An arena cannot be dominated by women.

The reason for this is obvious. The purpose of the arena, from the male point of view, is to demonstrate his worth relative to other men. To enter an arena filled with women is to engage in a lose/lose proposition: if one does poorly, one has been beaten (up) by girls; if one does well, one has beaten (up) girls. Neither outcome is going to impress the girls. Or, for that matter, the guys.

For this reason, men who enter a social environment in which women predominate will tend to make a hasty exit. There is nothing for them there. This is not a social construct which can be corrected with sufficient nagging. It is hardwired into human sexual psychology. There is nothing that can be done about it, short of redesigning human beings from their genes on up. At which point you’re not talking about humans anymore.

You might make people pretend that men do not prefer to compete in male-dominated arenas; you might, through sufficient emotional abuse, give them bad consciences about their natural instincts; you will not, not ever, not even once, change those natural instincts. If you ignore those instincts, you will only awaken the Gods of the Copybook Headings.

This explains two related phenomena, both much deplored by feminists, who are in the business of ignoring human instinct.

  • The first is male flight: the tendency of male involvement in a given profession, occupation, institution, or industry to drop precipitously once a certain threshold of female involvement is surpassed.
  • The second is the low value assigned to women’s work.

Men are no more welcome in any field that becomes female-dominated than they are in the women’s bathroom. Any man who insists on entering such a field is regarded as a metaphorical transgender whose decision to compete with the female majority there is considered intrinsically unfair. Any man choosing to do so will be considered an interloper and opportunist by the women and as less of a man by the men.

As Carter lays out in considerable detail, this process is natural, inevitable, and absolutely unstoppable. We’ve witnessed it taking place in our lifetimes in several fields, and while academia is not something that most of us pay any attention to, we’ve seen it in books, we’ve seen it in comics, and we’ve seen it in video games. Once the women get involved in a field and start demanding mediocrity while simultaneously decrying excellence, the men start walking away. Competition is replaced by consensus, quality collapses, prestige vanishes, and eventually the entire field becomes a wasteland of posers and imposters pretending to be impressed with each other, producing nothing and selling to no one. Profitable productivity is replaced with political parasitism off financial hosts, and when the ability to parasitize is eventually lost, the entire field collapses.

This is probably a good time to start developing alternative credentials based on objective standards. They will be increasingly in demand as the value of academic credentials continue to collapse. Apprentice systems and guilds are also likely to become more important, as the need to demonstrate an actual ability to do the work required replaces paper certificates of implied potential capability.

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Banning Christian History

It’s only a “trigger warning” at this point, but we all know that an academic ban on teaching Christian history, and eventually, Christian literature, is coming eventually.

They are the acclaimed works of medieval literature that tell the story of a religious pilgrimage to one of the most important cathedrals in all of Christendom. But to the astonishment of critics, a leading university has slapped a trigger warning on Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales – because they contain ‘expressions of Christian faith’.

Nottingham University has now been accused of ‘demeaning education’ for warning students about the religious elements of Chaucer’s stories – saying that anyone studying one of the most famous works in English literature would hardly have to have the Christian references pointed out.

The Mail on Sunday has obtained details of the notice issued to students studying a module called Chaucer and His Contemporaries under Freedom of Information laws. It alerts them to incidences of violence, mental illness and expressions of Christian faith in the works of Chaucer and fellow medieval writers William Langland, John Gower, and Thomas Hoccleve.

It was obviously a mistake for the universities, which were historically Christian institutions, to permit secular membership in the first place. First the enemies of Christ infiltrate, then they subvert, and eventually, they ban. It’s rather astonishing that so many Christians can’t recognize this historical process at work despite observing it happen again and again in their schools, in their companies, and even in their churches.

This is why the Catholic Church had so many inquisitions in the first place, to root out the false believers who they knew were intent on subverting the various institutions. As I pointed out 18 years ago, tolerance is “the Sin of Jeroboam”.

Anyhow, it may be time for Castalia Library to contemplate the need for a third series, something akin to Library and History, only specifically devoted to Christian History and Classics. That, or at least putting THE CANTERBURY TALES and PILGRIM’S PROGRESS in the production queue. If you’re a subscriber, or someone who would be interested in subscribing to that, let us know in the discussion on SG.

In other Castalia Library news, we’ve got most of the Library titles now prepared as ebooks, all of which will be made available for free to subscribers as soon as we can figure the best way to do so in an economical manner given the size of the files. We may consider putting them up for sale on Amazon for non-subscribers as well, but that’s not a priority at the moment.

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The Terrifying Decline

A university professor laments the precipitous decline he has observed in the ability of his students:

I work as a professor for a uni on the east coast of the USA. What strikes me the most is the decline in student writing and comprehension skills that is among the worst I’ve ever encountered. These are SHARP declines; I recently assigned a reading exam and I had numerous students inquire if it’s open book (?!), and I had to tell them that no, it isn’t…

My students don’t read. They expect to be able to submit assignments more than once. They were shocked at essay grades and asked if they could resubmit for higher grades. I told them, also, no. They were very surprised.

To all K-12 teachers who have gone through unfair admin demanding for higher grades, who have suffered parents screaming and yelling at them because their student didn’t perform well on an exam: I’m sorry. I work on the university level so that I wouldn’t have to deal with parents and I don’t. If students fail– and they do– I simply don’t care. At all. I don’t feel a pang of disappointment when they perform at a lower level and I keep the standard high because I expect them to rise to the occasion. What’s mind-boggling is that students DON’T EVEN TRY. At this, I also don’t care– I don’t get paid that great– but it still saddens me. Students used to be determined and the standard of learning used to be much higher. I’m sorry if you were punished for keeping your standards high. None of this is fair and the students are suffering tremendously for it.

If there were any chance of salvaging the USA as a means of organizing heritage America, this might be lamented. But there isn’t, so this is a very positive thing for those who are propagating heritage America, as the intellectual capabilities of the ruling elite and the invaders who prop them up are in a steep decline.

Political collapse and balkanization is inevitable, so it is paramount for heritage Americans to ensure that their descendants are a) numerous and b) well-educated. This is the way that America will survive and eventually thrive again, stronger and wiser than before.

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Tell Me You’re Low Status

Without actually telling me you’re low status. The Educated Hillbilly attempts to psychoanalyze a bitter success:

Imagine knowing you’re better than everyone else & having to share a school bus with them. A lunch table. A class room. The rage builds for 18 years.

This idea has never made any sense to me. What sort of person is angry about their own perceived self-superiority? I’ve never seen a woman who knows she is prettier than everyone else being angry about it. She’s perhaps a little standoffish due to being preemptively labelled a bitch or worse by all the women on the mere basis of her appearance, but she isn’t angry. I’ve never known anyone who is genuinely smarter than everyone else being angry about having to put up with the relentless retardery that is necessitated by human contact, it’s just a quotidian reality that has to be endured with stoicism lest one slip into existential despair.

What athlete is angry about being forced to compete on the athletic field with his sporting inferiors? Isn’t that the whole point of winning? So, who imagines that intrinsic superiority is a source of anger?

The answer, of course, is the gamma male. Now, this is not to say that the Educated Hillbilly is a gamma male now, but the evidence suggests that he may have been in his youth. Perhaps he has graduated to delta, perhaps he is still a gamma, it really makes no difference because this isn’t about him, but rather, his diagnosis of the Columbia professor.

Now, I was fortunate in my choice to attend an elite Ivy League reject school rather than an Ivy, which is why I a) actually had a good time in college and b) remain capable of meeting people without informing them of where I received my university education in the first thirty seconds of conversation. While in retrospect I would have done better to attend either a) Stanford or b) Arizona State, it was a reasonable, if suboptimal, decision. However, even at an Ivy reject school, there was a fair amount of the “ex nihilo” population, most of whom had one chip or another on their shoulder about their backgrounds, and all of whom were varying degrees of bitter about not getting into their top choice of schools. Some, like my freshman year roommate, were defensively proud of their deprived backgrounds, others went in the opposite direction and began speaking like characters out of Monte Python and dressing like characters out of PG Wodehouse.

The professoressa in question was clearly more inclined to the latter, although not so much so that she invented a new and more impressive family history for herself in preference to the real one. Instead, she tries to ingratiate herself into her new and preferred surroundings by expressing her disdain for her humble background in a way that will no more impress the New York Brahmins than a pencil-neck dork talking down Aaron Rodgers will impress the jocks.

What drives this woman is not anger, but rather insecurity, combined with a very reasonable feeling of betrayal. First, her insecurity about her own superiority; if she was that confident in it, she wouldn’t have feared her potential inability to escape her original surroundings or being mistaken in any way for being one of those inferior beings. Second, her well-placed insecurity about her place in her new surroundings; she will never be a high-status WASP, Jew, or media celebrity, no matter how many academic credentials she collects.

A credential is piece of paper that aspirational failures are awarded as participation trophies in lieu of genuine accomplishments.

All of her complaints and ever-more-elaborate fictions serve no purpose except to remind her betters that she is not, and never will be, one of them. She would have done much better to never, ever, speak of her unfortunate roots; then she might, possibly, have had a chance of passing, at least among those who met her later in life. The Great Gatsby addresses this very subject; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s entire life and his literary career were shaped by his love-hate relationship with his Midwestern background and his failure to graduate from Princeton.

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No Honor in the US Military

One can’t complain they haven’t made it very clear that the US Army officer corps is no long concerned with duty, honor, or least of all, country.

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point has made the decision to remove the “Duty, Honor, Country” motto from its mission statement.

As we have done nine times in the past century, we have updated our mission statement to now include the Army values [of] loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, integrity and personal courage,” Army Col. Terence Kelley, a West Point spokesman, told Fox News. Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth and Army Chief of Staff Randy George both approved the change, according to Gilland.

“Our updated mission statement focuses on the mission essential tasks of Build, Educate, Train, and Inspire the Corps of Cadets to be commissioned leaders of character, with the explicit purpose of being committed to the Army Values and Ready for a lifetime of service,” Gilland explained.

Evil always tells you what it’s going to do, then tries to convince you that it doesn’t really mean what it just told you. Believe them when they tell you what they are, and what they stand for.

And it’s the third word that is the real target…

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Don’t Say Gay at Harvard

Harvard finally jettisons its plagiarist president:

After weeks of mounting evidence that Harvard President Claudine Gay essentially plagiarized her way to the top, Gay announced on Tuesday that she is resigning Tuesday afternoon, the Harvard Crimson reports.

Gay’s resignation — just six months and two days into the presidency — comes amid growing allegations of plagiarism and lasting doubts over her ability to respond to antisemitism on campus after her disastrous congressional testimony Dec. 5.

Gay weathered scandal after scandal over her brief tenure, facing national backlash for her administration’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly work.

It’s fascinating to observe how repeated incidents of plagiarism weren’t enough to unseat her, but as soon as it became clear that she was plagiarizing her antisemitism, it was evident that she had to go.

Elite academia is a particularly clownish joke, even for Clown World. It has been for decades, but now they’ve got retards who can’t even rite gud in the place of what had become the traditional foreign midwit.

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