Category Archives: Big Education

In Defense Of The Brain

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It’s not news to anyone who’s been following the subject – education is in crisis.  

And the mainstream conservative response seems to be “let it burn!”   If you talk with a lot of mainstream conservatives, the kids should be heading straight out into apprenticeship programs and becoming electricians, HVAC techs, plumbers, truckers…

And I get it; the urge to chuck a mainstream education culture that has grown to hold most of “us” in contempt is tempting.  

But there’s a catch.  Someone’s gonna have to write the history books.  Someone’s gonna have to tell tomorrow’s cultural narrative what today’s cultural narrative was.   If politics is downstream of culture, and conservatives are doing the flooring and concrete finishing for the people that pass that information along, what do you think happens to culture in the future?

More of what is happeninbg tioday, that’s what.  

Which is what I thought when I read this piece by Joanne Jacobs, a Brit academic critic, about today’s woke fad of only teaching kids authors that are “relatable” to people today:

Speaking the language of care, some argue that children in poverty “should be shielded from the rigour of canonical texts, or complex scientific ideas, or abstract mathematics, he writes. “That Shakespeare is beyond them. That Bach is meaningless to them. That the laws of thermodynamics belong to someone else’s world.”

School “is meant to offer new worlds,” writes McCourt. “It is meant to take the child by the hand and lead them to places they never knew existed, places beyond their post code, places they have every right to belong.”

Remember – “education” and schooling are very different things. 

And it seems to me if you want to make a society decline and collapse, you take away its imagination.  What could do that faster than focusing on the here and now?

Payback

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Minnesota schools failed during the pandemic.  Some might say they collapsed. 

Governor Klink isn’t gonna let that happen again:

Aside from trying to deal with the deficit he created, he’s trying to pay back his cronies in the Teachers Unions. 

The Press Conference I’d Like To See: Take 2

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TAKE 2:  A couple of key paragraphs disappeared from this one on Friday, the first time I tried it…

SCENE:   A press conference at the Minnesota State University system.   Spokesperson Moonbeam BIRKENSTOCK stands nervously in front of a podium, facing a gaggle of barely-engaged press, and Mitch BERG of Shot in the Dark/AM1280/HotAir. 

BIRKENSTOCK:   So, with the changes in federal funding, it appears the Minnesota State University system is going to have to make unprecedented hikes to tuition:

BIRKENSTOCK: Any questions?

BERG:  Yes – wouldn’t that $18 billion in surplruses that the DFL wasted in 2023 and 2024 have come in handy for this?

BIRKENSTOCK:  No hablo ingles…

BERG:   Si no hubiéramos desperdiciado el excedente, ¿seguiría siendo un problema?

BIRKENSTOCK: No further questions.

BERG:  That was English.

(But Birkenstock has left the podium)

(And SCENE).

Schooled

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Joe Doakes, looking at Como Park through his rear-view mirror, emails:

Harvard is pushing back against President Trump’s demands for reform. President Obama praised them for resisting. He is joined by several Thoughtful Republicans Of Moderate Bona fides On Neither Extreme Side (TROMBONES, the new and more acceptable word for people formerly known as RINOs) who agree that yes, racial discrimination is bad, and viewpoint discrimination is bad, and antisemitism is bad, but is that any of the federal government’s business, particularly at their elite private Ivy League alma mater?

Harvard’s defenders have a point. But so does Trump.

The purpose of federal student loans is to help poor kids go to college. The purpose of federal research grants is to subsidize schools who can’t afford to hire good people. Why should grandma pay income tax on her Social Security to subsidize leftist hatred at a billion dollar private school?

Trump should announce that henceforth, student loans and research grants will be based on need – individual and institutional. Harvard can subsidize its own students and researchers to hate whomever they like on their own nickel.

Joe Doakes

I’d love to see schools fill out a FAFSA form and spend a few weeks waiting to see if they get qualified.

DOGE: Making Australia Australian Again

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I’ll admit it – two months of DOGE has made me a little inured to stories about outlandish things that the Federal Government spends our money on.  

Promoting DEI in Serbia?   Transgender comic books in Peru?  Yaaawn.   Get back to me when you’ve got something interesting.  

So when I heard that there was a fracas about funding universities in Australia, a part of me thought of course there is.   Why would we not be funding universities in Oz?”

What I didn’t figure on was that there would be so much of it the risk of losing it would cause a national emergency down under.  The Trump administration is asking seven Australian universities, not to do without all that American aid money, but to justify the aid money they are getting, in terms of American nationional interest.  According to the Guardian:

The Trump administration told Australian university researchers a push to promote administration priorities and avoid “DEI, woke gender ideology and the green new deal” was behind a “temporary pause” of funding, according to a memo seen by Guardian Australia.

University sector sources say the US has severed research funding at six universities – Monash University, Australian National University (ANU) and the University of Melbourne, University of Sydney, University of New South Wales and University of Western Australia – since Donald Trump came to power, including some as early as January. ANU is the first university to publicly acknowledged it.

Which is, according to Sky News, an urgent enough matter that Australian PM Tony Albanese is being urged to drop everything and get on the case:

A memo sent by the US office of managament and budget to an Australian university project on January 27 and retrieved by The Guardian, declared financial assistance for the researchers was a waste of taxpayer money and explained federal spending priority would go towards “the will of the American people”.

“Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing Administration priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending ‘wokeness’ and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and Making America Healthy Again,” the memo said.

“The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.”

The cuts would leave a $600M hole in Australian research budgets. 

And if you guessed some Ozzie academics would refer to Americans wantintg American money to serve American interests as “foreign interference” – well, you’ve been paying attention this past four years (and you know that public unions are pretty much the same around the world):

The National Tertiary Education Union’s (NTEU) national president Alison Barnes slammed the missive, and said the Albanese government had to “guarantee Australian researchers would be protected.” “The federal government must push back on the Trump administration’s blatant foreign interference in our independent research in the strongest possible terms,” she said.

Not to mix my metaphors, but “the first three weeks of a new diet are the. hard part” seems appropriate under the circumstances.  

No, Seriously. Don’t Ever Change.

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Namecalling during the 2024 Presidential election turned out not to be a “wonder weapon” for the left.

Turns out bullying, castigating and defaming people doesn’t win them over.  

It’s a lesson most people learn by middle school.

The Minnesota left still hasn’t learned it, oddly enough:

VanDassor, a Highland Park Middle School teacher, was first elected president of SPFE in 2021. Her union is a champion of left-wing causes, including “restorative practices,” which are a “model for a healthy, racially equitable school culture.”

In her statement, she said that SPFE members “will continue to do what we have always done: care for and educate ALL of our students. Feed them. Keep OUR schools safe for them. Teach them the full history of our country.”

VanDassor asserted that “fascist regimes” always begin by “targeting the most vulnerable populations and by making it a crime to tell the truth.”

Hmm. Making it a crime to tell the truth, you say? Huh.

I’m hoping they never learn.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

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University of Kansas prof says that men who don’t vote for Harris/Klink should be…

Well, it’s all right here.  Go for it. 

Not that this is news, necessarily.

The University issued one of those “Oaaaaakaaaay, we’ll look into it, because hypothetically that’s not the kind of thing we approve of here, if it happened…” statements that says between the lines “our PR department is working overtime on this one…”

 

Outcomes

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Look – it’s not like there’s any reason at all, ever, that I’d vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.   I am not better off than I was four years ago, and likely either are you. 

But in addition to the whole “communist” thing, she appears to have been exactly the kind of soulless bureacratic bean-counter and image-polisher that I excoriated here. 

Kamala learned well from her Marxist parents; you gotta break some coconuts to make an omelet unburdened by the brat that has been. 

Or something like that. 

Not To Be Left Behind

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Hamline University in Saint Paul is an exquisitely expensive instution that seems to be not quite as prestigious as Saint Thomas, and always a couple of degrees behind Macalester in terms of the impeccability of their leftist orientation.

But they aren’t to be left behind.

Here’s their “pro-Palestine” neo-Brownshirt “encampment”, as a rainy night ended this morning.

So maybe we’ll have Hamline kids puking on their own lawns for a change this weekend.

Open Letter To Campus Protesters And Their Faculty/Administration Simps

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Everything that needs to be said about you – those who deny the use of the institution for which the majority of the students, and the taxpayers, pay (and pay, and pay and pay and pay) was said almost six decades ago…

…by the best president of my lifetime (and yours, if you’re over 37 years old, whether you’re smart enough to know it or not).

A Modest But Emphatic Proposal

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It’s high time we stopped calling Ivy Leaguers like this Columbia spokesbeing:

…as “our best and brightest”.

By the way – at “Mitch Berg University”, students who infringe other students rights – Jewish, conservative, liberal, communist, I don’t care – by depriving them of the use of the campus they pay to attend will be blockaded into their “autonomous zones”; no water or food go in, no sewage comes out.

Only way out is through a checkpoint where they either make a videotaped apology and commit to pay restitution to the students they’ve adversely affected, or sign the acknowledgement on their expulsion paperwork.

The Kristallnacht Theme Park

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Harvard and MIT disgraced the nation’s “elite academia” last year.

Columbia says “hold my kombucha”:

Yep – progs standing in the door of the schoolhouse, trying to keep the race they hate out.

Is a single Democrat office-holder or leader anywhere going to condemn this?

“Columbia University’s Public Safety and the NYPD cannot guarantee Jewish students safety”.

Oh, I suspect the NYPD could do it, if there were any political will to do so.

The fact that there isn’t should make every American sick to their stomach.

Bonus question: as someone else put it (I wish I could claim credit) – if Trump was responsible for what happened in Charlottesville, why aren’t Biden and his boss responsible for this?

Saint Louis Park Schools Seeks Word Salad Chef

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Saint Louis Park Public Schools is looking for a new Assistant Superintendent.

But not just any Assistant Super. Nosirreebob.

This one is going to have some extra special administrator-fu (emphasis added):

The first sentence of the position’s summary says, “the Assistant Superintendent proactively supports the Superintendent to create and communicate anti-racist structures and systems, works to interrupt systems of oppression, and serves as a role model for culturally relevant pedagogy.”

The school district continues its summary of the position by saying the assistant superintendent must be “unwaveringly committed to anti-racist actions and use data to adapt and sustain their efforts towards racial equity to plan, direct, and coordinate action to achieve the mission and strategic objectives.”

The job description continues by saying the school district is seeking an assistant superintendent who can “examine the presence and role of ‘Whiteness’ in systems and structures,” and is “open to feedback regarding their own racial blind spots.”

The job will pay between $130-200K.

I think we finally found out what “fully funding education” means.

EdMinn’s Curious Self-Indictment

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Wait – didn’t the DFL in the Legislature spend most of April and May of last year doing the endzone happy dance celebrating having “fully funded” education?

I do believe they did.

So – what is up with this?

Now, when you asked a DFL legislator or an EdMN partisan what “Full Funding” meant, the “answers” should have come with a side of blue cheese for all the word salad. It was gibberish. And that was just the ones that didn’t ignore the question entirely.

As we see now, pretty much intentionally so.

Let’s Not Forget…

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…who the real victim in the Claudine Gay flap at Harvard (according to the university’s governing “Corportation”) actually is.

It’s Claudine Gay:

“And she’d have gotten away with it, if it wasn’t for those darn meddling pouncing conservativesI”!

And while Gay is gone, let’s remember that it’s not for the reason she should have been tossed:

And that’s the real atrocity, here.

UPDATE: The “community” is speaking:

My question: Is the AP proverbially “saying the quiet part out loud” – is plagiarism the new norm among “elite academics”?

Settler Projects

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Among the “setter projects” that Americans established as we (yes) conquered the North American continent, along with representative democracy, were universities.

And I’m thinking that those are among the “settler projects”…

…that actually need to be dismantled.

Or at least, it’s time for an actual honest-to-god McCarthy-style purge of Universities.

Inconvenient

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I wonder if the members of the DFL “coalition”…

…will start to put together for themselves how much of that “alliance” is built on social gaslighting and browbeating by their white, pronouned, “progressive” overseers. (and, naturally, their “leaders” bellying up to the trough for their graft paymetns)?

Junk Food For Thought

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One the current tropes among the populist right is that “college is useless, and you should send your kids to learn a trade”.

There’s a truck loaded with cinder blocks full of truth in there – for many 18 year olds, a year or two spent learning how to weld, be an electrician or mechanic or tool and die maker would be a much faster path to self-reliance than four years at college racking up debts while learning little or nothing that one needs to succeed in the world.

Now, let’s be clear, here – I don’t think college needs to be a longer more expensive trade school; there can be value to learning a “liberal art”, something traditionally intended to teach one to think rather than strictly to design, build or fix something…

…provided that that that education actually teaches how to think.

We’ll come back to that.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, my father was a great teacher. He taught. high school speech, writing and literature, and college-level education classes. He was one of the two best teachers I ever had. He also used to agree, at least hypothetically, with the likes of Mike Rowe – the ideal education, he said, was spending a few months or years learning a trade, and then going on to some other course of more abstract study after one could pay the bills.

This, of course, may have been a little idealistic projection from a man who, on good day, knew which end of a screwdriver to hit the nail with. He was and remains a brilliant teacher – and one of the least handy people I’ve ever met, myself included.

When I was in high school. and college, I had not the slightest interest in going to trade school – not out of any sense of college being “above it all” or “better” – I was every bit as peripatetic back then as I am today, and if could have squeezed in learning how to machine metal or be an electrician, I would have.

But to my Dad’s point, I also figured I already had a trade; I’d started in radio when I was 15, and had learned a lot. I figured my fallback would be working at some station, somewhere. It wasn’t the dumbest idea, at a time when radio was a tough but viable way to make a living. It’s not advice I’d give a kid today, but that was then.

With the “trade” part figured out? I sought a life living in my head; I majored in English and minored in History and German. I also majored in Computer Science almost long enough to get the minor, but I hated it, and didn’t touch a computer for seven years after I graduated – but that’s another story. And for me, at least, the promise of a “liberal arts” education was fulfilled; I learned how to think, and when the opportunity to jam a bunch of different facets from my background together into a new career fell into my path, I was able to jump on it.

Of course, I’m not sure colleges today teach critical thinking the way Dr. Blake did.

But I come here not to wallow in nostalgia, but to weaponize it.

While I don’t disagree in the least with my Dad, or Mike Rowe, I also think this is a lousy time for conservatives who are so inclined to completely abandon the academy, if only because it’s people from Harvard and Penn and MIT who will write the histories and the textbooks and play an inordinate role in defining our culture…

…and if you see the people who are driving our system toward collapse and calamity today, that should be pretty terrifying. Because just as Califonria-style government followed Californians who fled to Colorado, a society run by the products of our crypto-Maoist university system – the judges, politicians and culture-definers of tomorrow – will follow you into your shop van or plumbing business.

Big Left has been ‘marching through the institutions” for over fifty years; they’re not going to be set back to square one by a season of scrutiny. But it’s an opportunity. And the future of a free society demands that some young conservatives, and the older ones that still control some levers of power (if only their checkbooks) take a shot at that tackle, before the current wave of barbarism completely rewrites the definition of “freedom” for a few more generations.

Fake News?

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Someone claiming to be MN State Senator Grant Hauschild posted this on TWitter yesterday:

This must be a Russian hoax. Hauschild,and the rest of the DFL caucus in the legislature, to say nothing of the Flanagan/Klink Administration, spent the whole first half of summer high-fiving each other over “fully funding education” (in between selfies of grinning legislators stuffing donuts and corn dogs in each others mouths).

Now, they never, not once, explained what that meant.

For that matter, the term has vanished from the DFL’s chanting points since about Bastille Day.

Weird.

Things I Didn’t Have On My Bingo Card For Today…

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…or ever: Ryan Winkler is right.

And the Minnesota Federation of Teachers has gone full Brownshirt.

Notice that the “Resolution” says nothing about the Hamas Charter’s call for the extermination of the Jews “from the river to the sea”.

Weird.

Also – BDS is not “peaceful”. It’s just an unarmed form of belligerency.

Erin Maye Quade Props Up The Overton Window With Berg’s 24th Law

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Senator Erin May Quade assumes DFL voters aren’t that bright, critical or well-informed.

She was commenting about the GOP Debate from Wednesday:

Now, if you haven’t been in a coma or getting your news from the Strib for the past 20 years, you know:

  • It’s families of color that use most vouchers, because they want them, because public schools most often fail their kids, and b)
  • it’s the Left that’s re-segregating society – including with public schools.

Maye Quade is counting on reaching “voters” know don’t know and wouldn’t care if they did.

DFLiars: Flimmed And Flammed

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Wait just a doggone minute.

I read this earlier today:

Now, wasn’t it just 2-3 months ago that Ken Martin, Governor Klink and Co-Governor Flanigan, the brodudes in the MNDFL Communications office and the chattering hamsters of the DFL Legislative caucuses telling us they’d “fully funded” education?

Why yes.. It was:

And yet they never actually defining what “full funding” meant…

…oh. Yeah. Now it makes sense.

Best Of Hands

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This is National Education Association primo Becky Pringle, speaking to the Red Guards in Shanghai in 1961.

Just kidding. She’s speaking – er, “Speaking” – to a teachers convention.

She walked on her applause for a solid minute. That’s just bizarre.

OK – so it’s poll time. Who does Pringle most resemble:

A: The austere Italian political wonk:

B: Dwight Schrute

C: Noted animal rights activist and social benefits champion:

Votes in the commlents.

Your Private Catholic University Dollars At Work

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University of Saint Thomas, as a matter of policy, apparently doesn’t tell young women if their assigned dorm roommate is is a bio-male who identifies as female:

This, according to [UST Housing Director Zoe] Chang, is done as discreetly as possible in order to avoid upsetting parents. The video, OMG said in an email, documents the “mountain of rule changes and preferential treatment provided to trans students when it comes to their housing accommodations.”

The video:

If progressive policies are so unambiguously good, why do they have to lie about all of them?

Contempt

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It was probably 15 years ago that I wound up running into a young Assistant US Attorney at a social event.

We got to talking – as I am wont to do with, well, people.

What quickly became evident in talking with him – early 30s, graduate of an Ivy League law school after having been a legacy Ivy League undergrad – was the sheer contempt he had for the people outside the federal “criminal justice” system he met.

Example: we got to talking about gun control. He was a Hillary guy. And he went to a demo the ATF put on for federal “criminal justice” employees, where they learned some basic firearm safety, and got to test-fire some of the guns the Feds used. And with that, he did in fact consider himself to be one of the class that should have the right to keep and bear arms (not that he would). The rest of the plebs, naturally,, should be disarmed forthwith.

Now bear in mind this AUSA wasn’t working on organized crime. Or even “crime” as most of us would understand it. His bailiwick was various abstruse import regulations. Not cocaine or fentanyl, mind you; things like wood, food and alcohol, livestock, furniture.

So that’s right – he oozed with sneering contempt for otherwise honest people who ran afoul of abstruse import regulations.

And he didn’t seem to be all that unusual among federal “criminal justice” employees.

Of course, I ran head-on into the contempt another tranche of government employees – the public school system – feels for the peasantry, first-hand, around that same time.

My own struggles with the Saint Paul school system were at a time when the big dumb consultant idea was “zero tolerance” for even the faintest most ethereal hint of “violence”.

Dumb as that could be – and outmoded as it has apparently become, given the evaporation of safety in Saint Paul schools – it was a fart in the breeze compared to the contempt shoveled at parents since the dawn of “woke” education.

I figured – correctly – that Saint Paul and Minneapolis would be pretty hopeless.

But – Little Falls (via Gary at LIberty & Proosperity Blog)

“My name is Cassie Fredregill, a local resident of Little Falls. As my 10-year-old daughter came home from school one day, she told me that there was going to be a class on sexting. As any concerned parent, I reached out to her teacher to confirm what my daughter told me and asked what this class was going to be about.” The thought of a 10-year-old getting taught about sexting is utterly repulsive…

…Cassie wondered why she hadn’t received paperwork that permitted her to opt her daughter out of the class.

In response?

The school district barred her from parent teacher conferences.

She was not happy (jump to 5:25):

Point being, a distressing number of schools are starting to see parents as the enemy – and themselves as a class of aristocrats who shouldn’t have to be troubled by them.

I’ll have Ms. Fredregill on my show on Saturday.