On Saturday I delivered a speech on education in the United States to my Toastmasters club. It came off pretty much as I had rehearsed it – better than this video. I got laughs at the appropriate places.
Nevertheless, I got predictable pushback from the liberals. In response to my claim that the University is no longer teach the canon of Western literature, art, architecture or music because it was mostly done by white men, one guy got up and asked, “what about jazz?” Not really a relevant question – the issue is whether or not they are teaching the canon anymore. And I have to concede that they do teach Toni Morrison and Maia Angelou.
Nor did the naysayer answer my point about the investment value of an American education, that I got a much better return on my investment than universities students today. Instead, he made an unbacked assertion that American universities are great.
My speech evaluator, rather than addressing the merits of the speech, took me to task for attacking diversity. Even here in totally non-diverse Ukraine, and despite having no experience attending university in either United States or Western Europe, liberalism has an emotional appeal that defies rational analysis. I think we have to go the way of the Soviet Union or Argentina before people will realize that it doesn’t work.
Maybe they are waking up. The woman who lost her purse and iPhone to asylum-seekers on a motorbike in Barcelona asked me for a copy of the speech.
“Pretending to teach” has been going on for a long time. The high-priced Episcopal day schools my kids attended in the 80s and 90s pretended, from the fourth grade on, to teach French. My son Jack was subjected to it just about every year. It was not until his third year at Humboldt State University that he could carry on a stumbling conversation in the language.
I saw the same thing when I served as a substitute teacher for Washington area private schools. They almost always asked me to show movies, such as Finding Nemo in French and Spanish. They did not expect me to teach anything. It was also evident that they did not expect the kids to learn much. I asked the department head point-blank what their objective was. She said, verbatim, “to prepare the children to learn French or Spanish when they get to college.” They were openly pretending.
When I learned French back in the days of Sputnik, Mme Brunink was a hard taskmaster. Despite working diligently I did not get A’s in her 10th and 11th grade classes. However, ten years later when I got a chance to use it in Vietnam, I could speak French.
The Sunflower school that Eddie first attended here had the same feel as the Washington DC private school my kids attended. The teachers are nice, considerate, polite and undemanding. So far as I can tell they did a pretty good job of teaching him Ukrainian. I of course wasn’t worried about his English.
He had a reputation as being one of the best kids in the school for math. I had my doubts, but kept them to myself. The same Mr. Abramowitz who taught math taught them chess. I was in a better position to assess that.
The fact that I had been the grammar school chess champion meant just about nothing. Few kids were interested, and nobody taught me. I’m not very good. With a little instruction, Eddie should have been able to beat me. To this day he cannot.
It does not require genius to win chess games at my level. All it takes is fundamental knowledge. Straightforward tactics such as a fork, a discovered check, and forcing a stalemate. Every student of the game should know how to do a checkmate with a king and queen, a king and a rook, or a king and two bishops. They should at least have seen a mate with a king and two knights.
Every student of the game should know the first three or four moves of standard openings such as the Ruy Lopez and Kings Indian – just to name about the only ones I’ve heard of. If Eddie knew just that much he could let me get so tangled up that I would never have a chance. But the school never taught him! There was an absurd emphasis on the time clock, but they never taught him how to play chess.
By the fifth grade I knew it was time for Eddie to study someplace else. He took an exam for public school 208 which specializes in mathematics. And he failed! He didn’t know the math, and he wasn’t familiar with taking tests. Since this was during Covid, it made a lot of sense to homeschool him for the fifth grade. With both covert and a war going on, we repeated it in the sixth grade. He then passed the entrance exam for seventh grade at a more demanding school, Russanovsky Lycée, where they are pushing him hard, and he is thrilled.
We are through with schools where they pretend to teach. We have found one where they actually do. He is studying algebra, which I learned in the eighth grade rather than the seventh, geometry (10th) and physics (12th). He and I talk about his course work all the time.
Even the liberal Andrew Sullivan sees what a mockery the Ivy League has become. The congressional testimony of the presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn was such a disaster that the president of Penn had to resign. This is a step in the right direction, but the schools are still so obsessed with diversity that they still give a short shrift to trying to educate people. At $70,000 a year they should not be merely pretending to teach.
I have often scoffed at Gonzalo Lira, a smirking idiot reporting on the war that Russia started here in Ukraine. Ukraine has put him in prison. They would have been far better off to simply send him out of the country. At any rate, he has become a cause célèbre of people like Tucker Carlson who don’t like the war in any case.
Ukrainian prisons have a reputation for being unpleasant places. I don’t know if they have gone out of their way to make Lira’s life miserable, but they might have. The friends of Ukraine, such as the Democrats in the United States, have done themselves no favor with their mistreatment of Julian Assange and the January 6 defendants. It is easy for people to believe the worst. At any rate, Ukraine should barf up this hairball, get him out of here as quickly as possible, and get the focus back on real issues such as defending ourselves against Russia.
That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man is in the middle of reading Albion’s Seed, about the English populations who founded the United States. The author’s point is that the people from different corners of England had very different folkways, and the regional differences in the United States can be traced back to their English roots. Marriage and family, and the purpose of life were central questions in these people’s existence. This is not so true of us. I am going to explore the ramifications of this observation in my review.
Here's something for your liberal "friend" to watch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCcK_HlA4cM&t=1s
I was considering a move to Texas when my daughter graduates from High school, so I looked at the website of Texas A&M, the largest University in the US. They don't offer a course on Shakespeare, but they do have courses on West African and Nigerian writers. Enough said. We're not going to Texas.
At the university in my time, they offered an undergraduate and graduate course in both Shakespeare and Chaucer. I took all four courses, and I audited still another course in Shakespeare. I also studied French and had to pass a French exam to get my MA in English Lit. Years later, when I was traveling through the Loire countryside, I didn't even realize it but I was reading the signs in French. I could translate almost everything.
The daughter of a friend graduated from a California university. She told me that she was afraid to speak against the prevailing narrative. Anyone who revealed themselves to be contrary to the values of Woke was ostracized or worse. The daughter of another friend took a credential course in Waldorf schools where they were taught Critical Race Theory, which basically condemns anybody white. They were given a rainbow chart of the evils of white people and told to choose which category of white evil they belonged to. They were then instructed to use this chart in their early education classes in the Waldorf schools.
As to those who disagree with your observations on Western Education, I think the anti-Israeli protests on American college campuses is proof that the woke are idiots. 20% of them don't believe that the holocaust was real, and they worship at the feet of St. Greta of Climate Change, the new religion of science which has been corrupted by politics. A woke education is money down the rat hole. When questioned about the chant "from the river to the sea," they didn't know the river and they couldn't name the sea. They didn't realize that they were chanting in favor of the extinction of the Jews, a new holocaust. Genocide against the Jews.
By the way, it's the River Jordan and the sea is the Mediterranean. Some woke idiots thought it was the Nile and the sea was the Atlantic. That's how dumb they are. Their parents have instilled good self-esteem, and at the same time, no brains at all. They want safe spaces for themselves, but will attack anyone who is in opposition like ravenous wolves, true mob mentality.
I refer you to Konstantin Kissen who spoke at the Oxford Union recently against Woke. He also had a well-received speech at ARC, the new anti-WEF group which met in London. Both speeches are worth a listen. As for St. Greta of Climate Change, the goddess of the Woke, she is a stupid little girl who knows absolutely nothing. Her parents should be put on trial for child abuse. But that's simply the opinion of an old white man. Keep moving. Nothing to see here.