ANOTHER EDUCATIONAL BREAKTHROUGH; THE EXCITEMENT BUILDS – OVERNIGHT;  The state of California, where criminals control whole sections of cities, has come up with the latest, brilliant, educational idea.  Read about it.   Tell your friends.    From American Greatness: 

Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento City, and San Diego Unified school districts have found a novel way to improve academic results—they’re getting rid of D and F grades. One imagines this will improve results immediately. On paper.

Reporting from San Francisco, KRON 4 News, writing in semi-literate English, informs us, “If a student fails a test or doesn’t complete their homework, they’ll be able to retake the test and get more time to turn in assignments.” 

The assistant principal at Fremont High School in Oakland, speaking in semi-literate English, told KRON, “Right now, we have a system where we give a million points for a million pieces of paper that students turn in, without much attention to what they’re actually learning.” 

I don’t think anyone will dispute that schools are not paying much attention to what kids are learning. But banning Ds and Fs won’t help students as much as it will help teachers and principals in these districts look less awful by comparison, or else make comparisons with schools that retain a full grading system impossible. The real goal is to rescue teachers’ unions and professional administrators from what they’re doing to the kids. 

To take a random example from the English readers on my desk, a seventh grader of a century ago, learning, no doubt, in a one-room schoolhouse with just enough funding for these text books, would have read Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Keats, Poe, Ruskin, Sir Walter Scott, Longfellow, Kipling, Thoreau, Whitman, Washington, Lincoln and Marcus Aurelius, to cite just a small subsection of the included authors. Selections range from stories and poems to nature study, science, and history. These authors have long since gone the way of the D and F grades: Better to eliminate challenging material than create the impression students are failing. Which really means—better to eliminate material than create the impression that teachers are failing to teach their students.

For all their supposed erudition, leftists have always had trouble with symbolism. That is, they tend not to understand that a concept may represent another concept, rather than being the thing itself. They think that by getting rid of bad grades, they can get rid of what the bad grades represent – failure, ignorance, and laziness, on the part of students and teachers both.

Just as they think that by getting rid of terms like “fat,” they can make people healthier and more “body-positive.” Or that by replacing “fireman” and “policeman” with “firefighter” and “police officer” they can end male dominance in these dangerous professions. Or that they can make a man into a woman just by changing what he calls himself—and that it’s a triumph when one of these “women” joins a girl’s swim team and smashes all previous records by a gigantic margin. 

COMMENT:  Read the rest.  It's well worth it.  Many years ago an outstanding young black woman, an activist in the civil rights movement, complained to me about the status of that crusade.  "Our movement," she said, "isn't about what you can get away with, and that's what it's become."  And indeed, that's what it seems to be today.

Ditto education.  We're bombarded with new "concepts," "narratives," and "symbolisms," but it seems the general trend is downward, toward gimmicks and tricks and excuses, and not real nourishment of the mind. That is held to be an obsolete notion, or the theme of the "oppressor."

December 15, 2021