Doing It For The Kids

Apparently, the way to “help our black students develop positive racial identity” is to ensure that as many of them as possible leave academia sounding uneducated – indeed, unintelligent – and unable to write in an adult manner, and therefore have trouble finding employment, thus leading to plenty of exploitable resentment. I paraphrase, of course, though not by much.

Dr Asao Inoue, whose “research focusses on antiracist and social justice theory,” and whose scholarly insights include “destroy grading,” and “standards… are white supremacist,” has been mentioned here before. As when we learned that grading a student’s ability to convey their thoughts in writing - and to formulate thoughts by writing – is merely a manifestation of “white language supremacy,” an allegedly lethal phenomenon, and therefore to be abandoned in the name of, and I quote, “inclusive excellence.”

Rejecting “white racial habits of language” will, it seems, result in some kind of righteous emancipation, the particulars of which remain somewhat unclear. However, students sufficiently credulous to internalise this pernicious woo may find that their liberation - from being articulate and in possession of their thoughts - evaporates on contact with life beyond the campus. By which time, of course, those tuition cheques will have been cashed. 

Update, via the comments:

The assumptions on which this woo is piled are both perverse and laughably impractical. If the broader population regards being inarticulate and unable to write clearly and precisely as warning signs - say, in terms of employing university graduates – then that’s unlikely to change. People will make those kinds of judgments widely and for the foreseeable future. They are not generally wrong to do so. A job application littered with basic errors of spelling and grammar, and which has evidently not been proof-read, is sending a message. One that will be detected and responded to accordingly.

And encouraging university students, would-be intellectuals, to give potential employers the impression that no education has in fact taken place - and that they don’t much care whether they are clearly understood by anyone outside of their immediate social circle - doesn’t seem likely to achieve much of anything, beyond a cycle of failure and disaffection, and more self-flattering fantasies of racial persecution. It’s certainly an odd measure of “compassion,” a term of which pointed use is made. Stripped of woke pretensions, Dr Inoue is encouraging students to waste their time, and money, and prospects, by shouting at the rain.

Readers may wonder how the objections above, which are hardly esoteric, have apparently escaped Dr Inoue. Despite these problems being obvious, glaringly so, they don’t seem to figure in his thinking. It should also be fairly obvious that encouraging teenagers to displace responsibility – to regard almost any shortcoming or failure as someone else’s fault, as proof of “systemic racism” or “white supremacy” - is not an act of kindness or “compassion.” It just propagates a kind of moral neoteny.

And when teenagers are being told that they deserve a place at university, and deserve to be thought intelligent and rewarded accordingly, while feeling entitled to disregard customary standards and expectations of competence, as if learning even basic skills were somehow unnecessary - indeed, an affront - this is not a recipe for success or any sense of lasting personal achievement. The only people who seem to benefit are the ones being paid to peddle this corrosive woo. And so, a word that comes to mind is parasite.

Should readers assume that Dr Inoue is some one-off aberration, feel free to think again. 

Comments

[Alex]

Never been into science fiction, so I haven't read Asimov's books of that genre, but one of my favorite books is his Guide to Science (1972 edition); I'd say that most of my knowledge of the history of science comes from there. So when I found that there was an updated edition (1984), I checked it out of the library, figuring that there'd be so much interesting detail added in the intervening twelve years. What a pity! Few if any updates on scientific discoveries, and instead shot through with lots of handwringing doomsaying "the-earth-is-in-peril-because-of" darn near everything: nukes, global warming (or cooling, I don't recall), acid rain, overpopulation, and heck if I remember what else.

[pst314]

(What I vaguely recall is being told that the still later Foundation novels involved some reassessing of the whole idea of a benevolent technocracy. But that is very vague from many years ago: I tried reading the 4th Foundation volume and gave up in boredom.)

[pst314]

What a pity! Few if any updates on scientific discoveries, and instead shot through with lots of handwringing doomsaying

That's a terrible shame, especially considering Asimov's well justified reputation as the great explainer.

[John Lewis]

Having first read and enjoyed the (original) Foundation trilogy when aged about 12 I decided on a nostalgic re-read last year on account of unexpected free time. For me at least they really haven’t aged well and the level of smugness was notable.

[pst314]

And I had my doubts about the viability of the robot thing.

I'll come right out and say that it's pretty much bullshit, but it served the purpose he intended, which was to write stories about robots that were *not* Frankenstein monster stories.

Addendum: Scientists and engineers tended to have very naive ideas back then about robotics and AI, greatly underestimating the difficulty and complexity of all sorts of things.