Dumbing down education with woke ideology
Citizens and businesses are fleeing mismanaged one-party, public union-rule cities that suffer from progressive policies. They seek communities that can provide a higher quality of education.
One of the signs of years of woke indoctrinated and dumbed-down education is how many people cannot make a coherent argument. They effortlessly parrot slogans and vent their ginned-up anger against voices they’ve been taught are evil. What’s missing is critical thinking and reason. Their opinions are not even their own; they are political constructs built after many years of indoctrination by leftist ideologues in academia.
Anything with “critical theory” attached to it is the opposite of critical thinking – for example, critical race, gender, or feminist theories. It’s a socio-political construct, a linguistic sleight-of-hand used to convince people to vote for policies that replace equality of opportunity with equality of outcome. A sneaky way to help socialists in government transform our country from free enterprise capitalism to big government socialism.
Meritocracy is replaced with mediocrity and the government uses the law to massively redistribute wealth. It's the only way the Left can achieve its goals of social and economic [equity] justice, which is based on identity politics. Used to gin up support for redistribution policies, the critical theory hustlers get rich in the process. The problem with critical theory is that it fails to see itself as just one of many voices; it wants to dominate the conversation rather than broaden it.
People are fleeing entrenched Democratic Party [one-party, public union rule] cities/states because of the indoctrination in public schools. Families want great schools and environments where streets are safe and clean. They seek communities that can provide a higher quality of education for their children. Many are heading to Florida, Tennessee, and Texas, leaving Democratic one-party ruled states like Illinois, California, and New York.
Parents do not want their children indoctrinated and they blame poor local and state policies, formulated by teachers’ unions working with woke progressive officials. They are responsible for public schools pushing woke ideology onto students.
High crime, drug use, and homelessness rates in states like California, New York, and Illinois can be attributed to lax policies that allow criminals back on the streets and enable drug use.
My friend Dr. Paul Dempsey argues that scraping the LSAT for law school applicants dumbs down the legal profession, replacing equality of opportunity with equality of outcome. In a letter to the WSJ, he makes a persuasive case for celebrating, not diluting, our different skills. His key points correlate to the broader reasons why citizens and businesses are fleeing poorly mismanaged one-party, public union-rule cities that suffer from progressive liberal policies.
A decade ago, the political philosopher Allan Bloom wrote “The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.” Bloom argued that the crisis in contemporary American education has led to a tragic narrowing of intellectual curiosity in our university students. Young people need to reason as gazelles need to run. For both, sooner or later, it’s a matter of survival.
Letter to the Editor / Dr. Paul Dempsey
Responding to: “Panel Votes to Scrap LSAT For Law School Applicants” By Erin Mulvaney/ Nov. 19-20 WSJ page A3 /
For a quarter century, I taught law at Universities in the US and abroad. We who teach law recognize that students have different abilities, as reflected in their LSAT scores and course examinations. Blind grading helps assure that success is based on meritocracy, irrespective of privilege, or politically correct-inspired racial bias. That process also significantly enhances the likelihood that those who enter the legal profession are competent to represent clients proficiently.
Now the young men and women in the ABA who grew up on Participation Trophies have decreed that law schools eliminate the LSAT or any other “valid and reliable admission test” as a qualification for admission, despite decades of data that show the LSAT as a useful predictor of success in law school. A poor LSAT score denies admission to some applicants who are unlikely to graduate, or if they graduate, are unlikely to pass the bar exam, sparing them three years of expensive futility. A strong LSAT score has enabled some Asian Americans to prove racially motivated admission denial.
What’s next? Removal of the requirement of successful completion of a four-year undergraduate degree as a requirement of admission? Removal of course exams? Elimination of the State bar examination as a prerequisite for the practice of law? At a time when the rule of law is imperiled, is it really necessary to dumb down the legal profession to replace equality of opportunity with equality of outcome?
Once again, the Woke cancel culture proves George Orwell correct, when he observed, “Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
Professor Dr. Paul Stephen Dempsey
Tomlinson Professor Emeritus of Air & Space Law / Director Emeritus, Institute of Air & Space Law, McGill University, Montreal, Canada / You may download my scholarship at http://ssrn.com/author=372699