Wednesday, November 20, 2024

Part I

---

Will Trump Disband the Department of Education? The Educational Establishment Is a Powerful Enemy

Just in recent days, USA Today ran a headline, “Biden’s Higher Education Policies at Risk.” At risk? You think. When you look at the two parties in the United States, and of course as we often say, you’re looking at two increasingly discernible moral worldviews. When you look at the issue of education and you look at the two parties, they’re in completely different territory. They both use the word education, but education has become a code word, which in this political context means if you get right down to it, they’re not even talking about the same thing. Now, they may be talking about the same people, which would be school children. They might be talking about some of the same buildings and some of the same school systems, but when they talk about education, here’s the worldview analysis that is needful: they’re not talking about the same thing.

The division on the question of education is as revealing and as important as almost any other issue. The only prior issue here would be those related to creation order, including the sanctity of human life and the sanctity of marriage and the family. But looking at education, you are looking at where the government has become increasingly involved and where at this point, conservatives are increasingly concerned about that government involvement. There’s a fight that at the political and the economic level has to do with the governance of the schools and frankly, who’s going to establish the policies. The bottom line is this, however, if you provide the funding, you effectively provide the strategies, and that has been the argument the Left has been using for the better part of the last several decades. The headline, as I said, was “Biden’s Higher Education Policies Are at Risk.”

Well, they’re not only at risk. President-elect, Donald Trump ran against those policies and the national media has been talking a good deal in recent days since Trump’s win about the fact that during the campaign he talked about dismantling and doing away with the Department of Education. Now, in an earlier edition of The Briefing, I pointed out that President Ronald Reagan ran on that platform in 1980, and that was just a few years after his predecessor, the one before him in office that would be President Jimmy Carter, established with the cooperation of Congress, the Department of Education. But even back in the 1970s, this was extremely controversial. Education had been something assigned to and under the power and supervision of the states and the development of a federal Department of Education threatened the role of the states. But at the same time, the federal government was expanding in power throughout many dimensions of our society, and eventually the progressives in this culture demanded federal input, if not supervision and control of the public schools as well.

In the aftermath of the election, headlines have been running all over the place suggesting that the Department of Education may now be threatened by the election of President-elect Donald Trump. And of course, that’s a very real prospect. Many of us have been hoping and hoping for that prospect, but President Trump cannot unilaterally dismantle a federal department. That would require congressional action. And at this point that’s going to be very difficult to come by. Even with Republican majorities, thin majorities in the House and in the Senate, thinnest of course in the House, you’re looking at the fact that it would be politically rather unlikely that Congress would cooperate with the White House in dismantling the federal department, but we also need to understand that dismantling the Department of Education as much as I believe that would be an advance, it wouldn’t solve the problem. And that’s because even if you change the structure, many of the same people and many of the same ideologies are going to be in place.

So let’s ask the big question, what happened? When you go back to local controlled schools, the era of local neighborhood community schools? There was much less controversy. That’s not to say there weren’t problems because when you talk about the schools, you talk about organizing this kind of activity with children, of course you’re going to have different expectations. You’re going to have a clash of different ideas. But that clash became particularly excruciating, particularly important when you come to the early decades of the 20th century when progressives, liberals in the society saw the schools as the natural factories for turning out the kind of citizen they wanted to produce, and that meant getting control of the minds of those children, and it meant eventually gaining control or influence over the hearts of those children.

One of the early progressives, John Dewey, famously or infamously said that one of the roles of the public schools should be to separate children from the prejudices of their parents. Just consider that, that is a direct subversion of parental authority and as a unbelieving, which is to say agnostic or atheist, secular humanist, and I’m not calling names here, he signed to the Humanist Manifesto. John Dewey saw, for instance, the Christian faith as one of the prejudices of parents from which children should be liberated by the public schools, and he said that right in the center of the 20th century. This is an old argument on the Left, this is an old ambition. And of course the left has also increased its control over the entire arena of public schools by at least influencing, and that’s a soft word, really controlling the process whereby teachers are certified and teachers are educated.

One of the ways the Left got control of much of education is by controlling, and sometimes this is a soft control, but nonetheless, it was a form of at least elitist coercion in which you had education schools begin to emulate the Eastern and the West Coast progressivist education schools. And before you know it, you’ve got an education curriculum in schools and universities in the heartland of the United States that basically were derived from the laboratories of the Left on both the East and the West coast. But quite honestly, it’s not so much geographic because institutions such as the University of Chicago were complicit in this as well. It’s more about the class structure, and it was the intellectual and the cultural elites who gained control and set the agenda of these institutions, and most parents were simply unaware that it was happening. And then you had the development of all the bureaucracies about education at virtually every level.

But when it comes to the federal level, education was a part of what was HEW, the Department of Health Education and Welfare, we’ve talked about that just recently. But the E was taken out, the education was assigned as a separate department under President Jimmy Carter at the insistence of the teacher unions pushing very much to the left, most importantly the NEA. But now you’re looking at the fact that headlines are saying that the Biden administration’s goals and education are threatened by the arrival of President Trump for a second term. And I can only say as a conservative that my fear is that President Trump on this issue will not be sufficiently disruptive. He needs to be a major league disrupter. It is quite encouraging that during the 2024 presidential campaign, President Trump made a big issue of opposition to woke indoctrination and woke teachings in the public schools.

So at least he put his finger on the problem and he also came to the right position. That is, it must be opposed, but the ever-expanding apparatus of the educational system is going to make that very, very difficult. If the president doesn’t lean in on these issues and lean in hard and explain the issues to the American people, the bureaucrats are simply going to win. The professional educators are still going to be in virtually unrivaled control, and that’s exactly what they want. And furthermore, as their own writings make clear, they believe they have an absolute right to total control of the schools because after all, who are parents and what do they know?

Part II

---

You Don’t Get Rid of Woke Ideas by Merely Changing Course Titles: Liberal Professors Don’t Give Up Easily

But I was very recently in Dallas, Texas, and I want to share with you a headline from the Dallas Morning News. It was just in the last several days. It was November the 16th. The headline on the front page is this, “UNT,” that’s the University of North Texas, “Courses Renamed.” Well, that sounds interesting. It also sounds like something that wouldn’t make the front page of the paper. Why would changing the titles of courses at the University of North Texas make the newspaper? Well, the subhead tells the story, “race equity erased from titles to comply with DEI ban faculty member says.” Okay. Marcelo Rodriguez is the staff writer. “At least 78 changes were made to UNT courses in attempts to comply with the state’s DEI ban according to internal communications reviewed by the Dallas Morning News.” But I ask again, why would this story make the front page of the Dallas Morning News? It is because it’s at the intersection of all of these issues. I can guarantee you that the Dallas newspaper does not think that the readers of that paper are very interested in course titles at the University of North Texas, period.

But they are interested in the controversy over DEI, that is diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. That is part of the empire of woke that President Trump was speaking about on the campaign trail and about, which many of us have been speaking for years now. But I want us to look closely at why this story made the paper and the paper tells us internal communications from the university that have been obtained by the paper, “faculty members fear the law, which bans diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and programs from public colleges and universities is leading to censorship of classes despite the exemptions for course instruction and research.” Well, the legislature in Texas and the state’s governor made news for adopting this law that disallowed the kind of DEI programs that are identified in this article. And so you have a staff member, a faculty member at the University of North Texas who is now leaking to the local newspaper the fact that this has led to changes in course titles and you can expect what the squeals represent.

They represent the fact that many in higher education, and especially faculty in many of these institutions say that the taxpayers of the state and the legislators of the state and the governor of the state have no business whatsoever inserting themselves into anything related to education. So far as most of these professional educators are concerned, you give us the money, you hand us the students, and then you back off and stay quiet. It’s none of your business. They’re ours now, both the students and the dollars. But I want to point to something else and that is that later in the article we read, “the course changes at the University of North Texas’s College of Education.” Hold on, wait just a minute. College of Education, did you get the link? Okay, let’s go back. “Included removing words such as race, gender, class, and equity from titles and descriptions. Bill Camp, faculty member in the College of Education emailed colleagues on October 28 alerting them of the changes made to graduate courses.”

Well, let me just come back and ask the question, is this really about changing vocabulary or is it about changing the worldview represented in these classes and taught from the podium? Is this indeed a change in packaging or is it a change in substance? I think the big danger is even as the howls are coming from the educational establishment, there’s really not even much of a threat to the substance of what is taught here to the worldview that is being incubated here. I think it is mostly about vocabulary that unfortunately can be changed without changing anything of the radical woke content of the educational product. Okay, now hold on because it gets even better or worse, but at least better for our understanding that we can be forewarned and forearmed. “In a statement, the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors” that’s the AAUP by the way, “urged the university’s administration to ‘end the censorship and restore its institutional commitment to academic freedom and shared governance.'”

Now, I just want to point out that again, this is about titles of a class. I wish it were about the substance of the class. There’s no indication that it’s really even about the substance it’s even about the title of the class, but even changing the title of the class, that’s too much for the American Association of the University professors, which by the way is basically a labor union for academics, which has taken predictably leftist and often radically leftist positions for decades now. And yet state legislators, they want to change the names of the titles of the classes. Do they understand where the real enemy is? With reference to the AAUP statement, the article continues. You’re going to love this, “academic freedom is the freedom from censorship by the institution and a faculty member’s teaching, research and expression.” The statement read, “Censoring content on course syllabi violates UNT’s policies and professional standards on academic freedom.”

In other words, you can’t even tell us what vocabulary to use as legislators related to eliminating DEI categories because after all, we’re the faculty, so we’re in control of everything that happens right down to the letters, the words, the punctuation marks, back off. Just to make my point later in the article, we are told with reference to one instructor, “Her course, Race, Gender, and Class and Education was changed to Critical Inquiry in Education, which she says doesn’t make sense for the course she teaches. The class is mostly made up of seasoned teachers training to be principals and school administrators who learn about the research on race, gender, and class, such as why boys who are Black or overrepresented in special education classes.” Well, you’ll notice that it points to a very real sad phenomenon, but it’s in the context of an ideology the professor insists must even be reflected in the name of the class. So once again, we understand that this is just the educational establishment, in this case, teachers in a public university saying, back off, you don’t have any business here.

I want to make the point that even as the terminology isn’t just the domain of professors, the fact is that changing the name isn’t going to change the substance and the real problem in so many of our educational institutions, it’s just the basic worldview, the basic orthodoxy, and I use that word intentionally, the secular radical orthodoxies that are in place in most universities teaching in programs such as this, regardless of what they call the course, this is in most cases what they’re teaching.

Part III

---

‘They’re the Meanest, Dumbest, Most Bigoted Group of Fascists’: Editor-in-chief of Scientific American Resigns After Comments About Trump Voters

But hey, while we’re on the theme of education and these woke issues, there are a couple of other stories I have to tell you about. One of them is the resignation of the editor-in-chief of Scientific American. That’s advertised as America’s oldest, continuously published magazine, and of course, Scientific American is considered to be at least quasi-academic. It’s about the subject of science, it’s written mostly by academics or those related to academic institutions, but just in recent days, it has been announced as CNN reports, “Laura Hellmuth is resigning as editor-in-chief of Scientific American Magazine following an expletive-filled rant about Donald Trump voters.”

Yeah, that’s exactly what CNN reports. “Posting on Bluesky, an X rival, Hellmuth said Thursday that she’s, ‘decided to leave Scientific American after an exciting 4.5 years as editor-in-chief,’ CNN says, without mentioning her previous comments.” CNN continues to report, “In a series of now deleted posts on the same platform she called Trump voters, ‘the meanest, dumbest, most bigoted group and fascist,’ following the former president’s re-election last week. Her comments went viral on X and were criticized on the increasingly right-wing platform.” Okay, so evidently it turns out that she thought she could release this kind of statement as the editor of Scientific American and at the same time bolster her scientific and academic and journalistic credentials, and evidently she may have thought that until the moment when she had to resign.

The president of Scientific American responded to the editor’s resignation by saying,” We thank Laura for her four years leading Scientific American during which time the magazine won major science communications awards and saw the establishment of a reimagined digital newsroom. We wish her well for the future.” But a closer look at the story reveals the fact that it’s more interesting than you might think. For example, Scientific American has twice, exactly twice in its history, has endorsed one of the two parties nominees for President of the United States. I’ll just give you a hint. In 2024, it wasn’t Donald Trump. In an official editorial released on September the 16th of this year, just in light of the upcoming election, the editors of Scientific American pointed to what they depicted as two different futures for the United States under the two different candidates, and then the editor said, “Only one of these futures will improve the fate of this country and the world. That is why for only the second time in our magazine’s 179-year history, the editors of Scientific American are endorsing a candidate for president. That person is Kamala Harris.”

You can register your shock and surprise right now.

Part IV

---

Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, the Great Terms of Oppression and Patriarchy? Now They’re Targeting Names of Seasons

But I told you this was a twofer. The second issue of my concern along these lines comes with reference to the periodical Nature. Again, one of the most influential scientific periodicals in the world. It recently ran a piece by Melissa Hart and Negin Nazarian, and it’s about the seasons. I mean seasons like winter, spring, summer, fall. On October the 17th of this year, Nature published a piece by Melissa Hart and Negin Nazarian, which begins with these words, “Stop using summer, winter, and the rest when inviting researchers to events. It’s a small step, but it’s necessary and inclusive.” Oh, it continues, “Hello from the Southern Hemisphere where the days are getting longer and the temperatures are rising. Yet despite the clear signs of spring here, we find ourselves inundated with invitations to events this peak of fall or autumn or newsletters announcing workshops that will run this coming winter. It leaves us wondering, are we invited at all to this season different than our own?”

They go on to call this a curious oversight, but they also say that it persists in basically discrimination. A persistence, “in relying on region specific seasonal markers.” What is even more baffling is that this takes place in our fields of weather and climate science with little regard for how different things might be outside the Northern Hemisphere. “We’ve even come across a number of ‘global’ analyses that assume that June, July and August are summer months for the entire world. You think this kind of mistake would’ve been caught early on, but no, it still happens.” Well, I’m not going to deny that it could be confusing in different parts of the world to have summer and winter and fall and spring simply referred to as if they coincide everywhere at the same time on planet Earth.

Of course, we understand they do not, but there are those who are arguing that even the names of the months and the seasons that we celebrate and the seasons that pass with the weather changes, these are all just by their vocabulary remnants of Western oppressive patriarchy. When it comes to describing weather, and remember, this is addressed to meteorologists and other weather specialists, when it comes to naming the seasons. Well, wait just a minute. Don’t name the seasons. “Avoiding naming seasons for events or communication. ‘This might not be an issue when inviting researchers from a single country, but it’s crucial if you’re trying to attract an international audience.'” Listen to the second point. “Provide specific dates and months. ‘Even saying Summer Northern Hemisphere implies the Euro-American centric approach.'” “The simple use of a month instead removes any confusion.” Seriously mentioning, just January removes any confusion. Is that a warm January in the Southern Hemisphere or a cold January in the Northern Hemisphere?

It does seem like it’d just be a lot more honest to say winter in the Northern Hemisphere or summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and just go on and use the words because after all, they’re the words human beings in different languages use. It’s not just when it comes to the passing of the seasons, a Euro-American-centric approach. Now, I want to be clear looking at these particular news stories, they’re not the most important happenings in the world, but they’re the kind of thing that will pass under the radar and the average citizens simply will not know about them. I want to credit the Wall Street Journal for pointing to that particular article in Nature because quite frankly, of its stupidity.

Part V

---

‘We Have Faith, Just Not in God’: An Obituary That Comes with an Absolutely Candid Display of Atheism—Tragically Enough

But speaking of larger issues at stake, I want to mention yet another recent obituary than New York Times. This one is Kenneth Bronstein, 85, identified as “an engineer who revived a fraternity of atheists.” Sam Roberts writes the obituary, “Kenneth Bronstein recalled the first meeting of NYC,” that’s New York City, “atheists that he organized. It was sad he told the Washington Post in 2004, 10 guys in a room all arguing with each other.” The next paragraph says this, “mobilizing atheists can be akin to organizing a meeting of anarchists, or he once said, like herding cats, ‘They might fracture divided among freethinkers, secular humanists and anti-theists, worse still,'” he added, “The problem with being an atheist is that atheists, unlike a growing number of religions and ethnic groups, don’t even get a holiday.” Now, get this. There’s something really important here, something vital in the next sentence. “Still, Mr. Bronstein never wavered. We have faith, he said, just not faith in God.” Now, I want to state that that is an amazingly honest statement.

People who have say an atheistic worldview or claim an atheistic worldview, they do not have no faith. They have faith in something or someone other than God because you can’t operate as a human being without certain presuppositions and certain taken for granted realities. The atheists, and especially in its modern form of scientific and materialistic atheism, they want to claim that they have faith in something like modern science or they have faith in their own intellectual perception, or they have faith in this authority or that authority, but trust me, they have faith because without something that operates at the level of an intellectual consent, an intellectual assent, some kind of intellectual presupposition without something that might be well described as faith, you can’t operate. This man was honest about this. Remember, he said, “We have faith, just not in God.”

Now, the New York Times also tells us that Mr. Bronstein who died on October the 18th was “absolutely certain that he would not go to heaven or hell.” Now, again, I just want to state that that may be a very honest statement, but the fact that he was certain he would go to neither heaven nor hell does not mean that he will not go to either heaven or hell. And biblically, it is the latter that is very much defined, and I say that with genuine sadness. The article is interesting in the larger cultural picture of the fact that atheist organizations often implode in various forms of atheism or freethinking or agnosticism or unbelief, and it’s very hard to organize these groups because after all, what exactly would be an atheist creed other than I do not believe in? Then fill in the blank. One of the other problems in being an atheist, it’s an intellectual quandary.

It’s something of an intellectual trap, is that you find yourself evidently having to use what can only be described as say, theological concepts, and then you try to use them in a secular way. For instance, the New York Times tells us, “One of Mr. Bronstein’s favorite sayings was, ‘How you live today has the potential to impact all eternity.'” Well, what exactly does impact all eternity mean if you are an atheist? The current cosmological argument in the dominant school of materialistic science says that the world will eventually dissipate into non-being. Well, so much for eternity. Or you could say that Mr. Bronstein may have been speaking with some sentimentalism, but then again, how would an atheist claiming to operate on the basis of sheer rationality claim refuge in something like sentimentalism? It is clear, however, that Mr. Bronstein did seek at least self-consciously to be consistent in his atheism.

The New York Times obituary ends with this. These are the closing words. “Even when he sneezed and someone said, God bless you, he’d reply, no, thanks.” In that light, sadly enough, I think the most important thing I can do to bring this to a close is to say to listeners, to The Briefing, God bless you.