Tag: education

Young white men are proving that the strategy works as the small liberal arts colleges are collapsing:

The financial struggles of New England liberal arts colleges have been in the news lately. “Marlboro planning to give campus and endowment to Emerson College” describes the end of 73 years of operation in Southern Vermont. “Can small liberal arts colleges survive the next decade?” (Christian Science Monitor)

A friend who has worked at the highest levels of college governance said that these bastions of righteousness in which white males are blamed for most things are having difficulty recruiting white males. Why does that matter? “Once the men stop attending,” he noted, “then women don’t want to enroll.”

Girls want to be where the boys are. And female-dominant activities and organizations lose status in both male and female eyes. These two truisms create a dynamic that prevents stasis, but also allow for a degree of predictability based on the current level of female involvement in any activity or organization.

It also helps explain why diversity is always destructive.

Asian immigrants are rapidly learning how the U.S. imperial system actually operates:

A Howard County, Maryland, school board voted Thursday to implement a busing initiative opposed by the vast majority of the public. Board members took one of the “no” voters into a back room after an initial vote failed. She changed her vote when she reemerged.

Board member Kirsten Coombs voted “no” after board member Jennifer Mallo motioned to move a swath of children out of their schools to try to balance poverty rates. It failed 4-3, and people clapped. “I move that we go into recess to consider the impact of the failure of that last motion,” Mallo said.

Coombs appeared to be crying when they came out of the back room and said the board should vote again “because otherwise the entire plan falls apart.”

The board redid the vote, with Coombs’ voice cracking as she said “yes.” The vote was part of a series taken by the board that, together, resulted in the large-scale moving of children to different schools based on their parents’ income, effective in 2020.

Residents of the center-left county are in shock that the board passed a busing plan will move about 5,300 children from their neighborhood schools to balance poverty, despite almost unanimous opposition in the testimony the board heard, and the school system’s own data showing no connection between equal demographics of schools and more equal performance of demographic groups.

Asian cultures have a strong tendency to take things at face value. That’s why Asian immigrants are so shocked when they discover that the Ivy League admissions offices are not genuinely meritocratic, that Hollywood entertainment does not reliably represent U.S. demographics, and that their elected representatives have absolutely no intention of representing the actual interests of their constituencies.

Ming Du wrote to Mallo: “It was a sad day, Ms. Mallo, a very sad day — you have completely repainted the image for the elected officials in a democratic society. I’ve never felt so belittled in front of a government official in America, and I was stunned to hear you rebuking your constituents, a scene I have not seen ever since I left the tyrannic China 26 years ago. … I thought America is different, until Nov 7, 2019.”

The U.S.A. is not any different than any other empire. The entire “land of the free” narrative is an unmitigated lie. The U.S.A. ceased to be a voluntary association in 1865, it ceased to be American in 1913, and it ceased to be European in 1965.

With 15 days left, the Junior Classics campaign is now at 1015 percent of goal. Are you tired of winning yet?

News of the availability of the 2020 Junior Classics is has observably spread as far as Australia and Hong Kong. If you are similarly interested in acquiring one of the greatest homeschooling assets ever printed, whether in digital, hardcover, or deluxe leather editions, you can do so here.
The campaign owner is aware that the campaign cannot be found by searching for it on Google or the crowdfunding site. That is by design, so there is no need to repeatedly inform us of that fact. If you wish to help spread the news about the , please feel free to post the animated GIF above with a direct link to the campaign attached. And thanks very much to the Classics backer who created the banner.
In other crowdfunding news, we are aware of about 500 AH Vol. I omnibuses that have not yet shipped due to a problem with the order formatting. We are in the process of fixing that with the printer, so if you have not yet received your omnibus, just sit tight, as this is just a minor procedural problem.
UPDATE: The Heirloom perk is intentionally priced higher than the sum of its parts because certain backers have requested a means of providing additional support to the project.
UPDATE: Both the leather and the case-laminated hardcover editions are printed on acid-free paper that meets the ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 standards for archival quality paper.

The God-Emperor sets a few veterans free from the debt-vampires:

President Trump has announced a policy directive to the U.S. Department of Education to immediately facilitate the discharge of federal student loan debt for any veteran permanently disabled as part of their military service.

It’s a good start. The non-disabled vets should be next, followed by the unemployed. All student loan debt should be eventually discharged and all student loans should forbidden by state and federal law. They are intrinsically predatory and accomplish nothing except inflating the cost of higher education.

President Trump needs to get out in front of this issue in a big way. It is a definite election-winner:

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., will propose on Monday eliminating all $1.6 trillion of student debt held in the United States, a significant escalation of the policy fight in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary two days before the candidates’ first debate in Miami.

Sanders is proposing that the federal government pay to wipe clean the student debt held by 45 million Americans – including all private and graduate school debt – as part of a package that also would make public universities, community colleges and trade schools tuition-free.

Sanders is proposing to pay for these plans with a tax on Wall Street his campaign says will raise more than $2 trillion over 10 years, though some tax experts give lower revenue estimates.

Sanders will be joined Monday by Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who will introduce legislation in the House to eliminate all student debt in the United States, as well as Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., co-chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who has championed legislation to make public universities tuition-free.

Politics aside, eliminating student debt is the right thing to do. The power of the banks needs to be broken and this is the most effective way to begin doing that. Student loan debt is intrinsically predatory and cannot be justified, especially in light of the massive endowments of the elite universities.

The fact is that most people should not go to college. But if corporations are going to demand worthless pieces of paper for a job, then those worthless pieces of paper should be provided to everyone who wants one for free.

Remember, periodic debt forgiveness is straight out of the Bible and is even referenced in the Lord’s Prayer. Debtors must be forgiven, concerns about fairness notwithstanding.

Unauthorized Professor Rachel Fulton Brown defends the Middle Ages:

We medievalists all know the drill.

Somebody in public life says something disparaging about the Middle Ages, and we all leap in to insist that either:

  a) Europe in the Middle Ages was actually much more advanced/enlightened/sophisticated than the off-hand comment about people believing the world was flat suggests, or

  b) yes, absolutely, they’re right, medieval Christians were murderous thugs, barbarians of the first order who knew nothing of tolerance or diversity and probably ate babies for breakfast whenever they could get them.

Neither answer ever changes the public conversation one iota because everybody knows that whatever Charles Homer Haskins might try to insist about the real Renaissance happening in the twelfth century, there is no getting round the Albigensian Crusade and the massacres of the Jews in the Rhineland (the former called by the pope, the latter resisted by all the bishops and other leaders of the Church).

The more those of us who study the intellectual, institutional, and spiritual achievements of the period succeed in pointing to the great depth and complexity of the Christian tradition (including its criticisms of the very kinds of violence so often cited as paradigmatic of the Dark Ages), the more our colleagues who study the massacres and inquisitions reinforce the prevailing sense of the period as benighted and savage, and we are right back where we started, blaming Europe and its colonial offspring for all the woes in the world.

Our Enlightened and liberal predecessors would say we’ve been doing it wrong.

This is the blog attached to the coming Unauthorized course on medieval history, so if you’re interested in it, be sure to bookmark it.

The Great Enstupidation of the United States proceeds apace:

When Yale recently decided to relocate three-quarters of the books in its undergraduate library to create more study space, the students loudly protested. In a passionate op-ed in the Yale Daily News, one student accused the university librarian—who oversees 15 million books in Yale’s extensive library system—of failing to “understand the crucial relationship of books to education.” A sit-in, or rather a “browse-in,” was held in Bass Library to show the administration how college students still value the presence of books. Eventually the number of volumes that would remain was expanded, at the cost of reducing the number of proposed additional seats in a busy central location.

Little-noticed in this minor skirmish over the future of the library was a much bigger story about the changing relationship between college students and books. Buried in a slide deck about circulation statistics from Yale’s library was an unsettling fact: There has been a 64 percent decline in the number of books checked out by undergraduates from Bass Library over the past decade.

Yale’s experience is not at all unique—indeed, it is commonplace. University libraries across the country, and around the world, are seeing steady, and in many cases precipitous, declines in the use of the books on their shelves. The University of Virginia, one of our great public universities and an institution that openly shares detailed library circulation stats from the prior 20 years, is a good case study. College students at UVA checked out 238,000 books during the school year a decade ago; last year, that number had shrunk to just 60,000.

One can make a very good case for outlawing so-called “higher education” now, as the Christian university created to educate young men has now devolved into a worse-than-useless factory for transforming young women into barren SJW debt-slaves.

We are pleased to announce that medievalist professor Rachel Fulton Brown will be offering a Medieval History 101 course to Unauthorized subscribers. She has a few questions for prospective students.

The first question that I have is about format. What kind of format would make for a good course online?

What I do not want is to have these videos simply be lectures, the canonical professor-talks-while-the-students-doze lectures you get in the movies before the professor starts encouraging the students to stand on their desks.

I want, in fact, to make them real—in the sense of the kinds of discussion I would give my students at the University of Chicago.

Which means you are going to have to do a bit of homework. Don’t worry, it will be fun!

Here’s the format I would like to try. I know that those of you who have been following Vox are familiar with his blog. Professor Fulton Brown is a great fan of blogs! You can see several that I have designed for courses I have taught on animals in the Middle Ages, Mary and Mariology, medieval Christian mythology, and Tolkien: Medieval and Modern.

I use these course blogs as a place for students to talk about the readings they have done and the themes we have discussed in class. I am always encouraged at how much insight they are able to bring to our discussions, as well as stimulated by the questions they raise.

This is how I would like to use the blog for our online course.

I will post a short reading (about a page) a few days before our scheduled “class.” You will be invited to leave comments on the blog, whether asking questions about the text or suggesting themes you would like me to address. Your comments will help me gauge the level of familiarity that readers have with the text, as well as help me craft my comments on what I would like you to learn from it. Following the video “class,” you can return to the blog and leave additional comments. Our goal will be to build up a common understanding of how to study history beyond learning the relevant facts.

I will also post reading lists for those who want to delve further. There are thousands upon thousands of books already published on the history of Europe in the Middle Ages. My role as a teacher is to help you learn how to read and evaluate them.

All subscribers will have access to the history course, but it will also be possible to purchase access to it whether you are a non-subscriber or not. I was extremely amused when Prof. Brown sent me a picture of what she said would be the textbook – all eight volumes of the first edition of the Cambridge Medieval History series published from 1926 to 1936! Don’t worry, you won’t be required to acquire your own copy for the course.

Also in Unauthorized news, the fifth episode of Chuck Dixon on Comics is now available for subscribers.

Forget the issue of prayer in the public schools. Conservatives can’t even keep perverts, Planned Parenthood, and pedos out of them:

On Tuesday, April 23, 2019, Minnesota House Democrats voted in favor of including pornography and sexual perversions as part of the Minnesota House Education Omnibus Bill, HF2400.

The Minnesota Child Protection League (CPL) tried to warn parents and stakeholders to call their legislators to urge them to remove Comprehensive Sex Education (CSE) from the 258-page House Education Omnibus bill HF2400 before it was debated on last Tuesday. Of course, the bill was debated two days after Easter Sunday, when parents were distracted and just getting the kiddos back to school after the holiday.

Planned Parenthood will provide the CSE curriculum for Minnesota public schools and has lobbied hard for this legislation. The Guttmacher Institute, which was started in 1968 as a part of Planned Parenthood, is expected to be developing the state model policy, according to StopCSE.org, a website to educate parents on the harmful effects of CSE.

At the center of the CSE curriculum debate is a book called, “It’s Perfectly Normal” which is endorsed by Planned Parenthood and boasts of “more than one million copies in print”. The book contains explicit drawings of the male and female anatomy and covers such topics as vaginal, oral and anal sex, homosexuality and abortion which will be taught to elementary students as part of CSE. “It’s Perfectly Normal” was written in 1995 by Robie Harris, who was a member of Planned Parenthood’s National Board of Advocates. A new edition of the book states it is “updated for the 21st century” on the cover.

Notice the inevitable equalitarian propaganda in the “educational” pictures. The lesson, as always, is this: homeschool or die.