Now, math education itself has been deemed “racist.” A group of educators just released a document calling for a transformation of math education that focuses on “dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by visibilizing the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture with respect to math.”

Among the educators’ recommendations, which officials in some states are promoting, are calls to “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views,” “provide learning opportunities that use math as resistance,” and “encourage them to disrupt the disproportionate push-out of people of color in [STEM] fields.”

Beyond activism, these recommendations also argue that traditional approaches to math education promote racism and white supremacy, such as requiring students to show their work or prioritizing correct answers to math problems. The document claims that current math teaching is problematic because it focuses on “reinforcing objectivity and the idea that there is only one right way” while it “also reinforces paternalism.”

Prominent Professors Push Back

This week, some prominent university professors spoke out against these new woke math education recommendations. Princeton mathematics professor Sergiu Klainerman wrote a guest post on the topic at journalist Bari Weiss’s website. He says: “Attempts to ‘deconstruct’ mathematics, deny its objectivity, accuse it of racial bias, and infuse it with political ideology have become more and more common — perhaps, even, at your child’s elementary school.”  

Klainerman, who grew up in communist Romania, warns that this current classroom dogma is dangerous. He writes: “When it comes to education, I believe the woke ideology is even more harmful than old-fashioned communism.” 

Columbia University English professor John McWhorter also chimed in against this math education document and its recommendations. 

“This lovely pamphlet is teaching us that it is racist to expect black kids to master the precision of math,” he writes in a blog post. “To wit – its message, penned by people who consider themselves some of the most morally advanced souls in the history of the human species, is one that Strom Thurmond would have happily taken a swig of whiskey to.”

While the growing emphasis on critical theory in American classrooms has broader societal implications, including the devaluation of objectivity and individualism, the real victims of this educational approach are the students themselves. In one of his final articles before he died last December, economist Walter Williams decried the poor academic performance of students in large urban school districts. 

“In two city high schools,” Williams wrote of Detroit, “only one student tested proficient in math and none are proficient in English. Yet, the schools spent a full week learning about ‘systemic racism’ and ‘Black Lives Matter activism.’”

Public School Exodus

As this “woke” worldview continues to penetrate classrooms with mandatory curriculum standards, families who don’t agree with this ideology—or who simply want their children to learn basic academics—should have the opportunity to pursue alternatives to their assigned district school. Currently, 26 states have active school choice legislation that would enable funding to follow students, including adopting education savings accounts or tax-credit scholarship programs. Meanwhile, overall support for school choice policies has grown since last spring. 

The COVID-19 school shutdowns have put parents back in charge of their children’s learning in ways that were unimaginable pre-pandemic, with many parents leaving their district schools in droves. Indeed, the Associated Press reported a sharp decline in public school enrollment this academic year across the 33 states for which data were available. Millions of families have pursued private education options such as independent schooling and homeschooling that can offer more consistent, higher-quality in-person instruction than a district’s Zoom schooling or hybrid offerings. 

As the New York Times reported on Monday, fewer than half of K-12 students are currently attending full-time, in-person schooling and families are increasingly seeking other options. 

“Now many parents are beginning to rebel, frustrated with the pace of reopening and determined to take matters into their own hands,” the Times reports. “Some are making contingency plans to relocate, home-school or retreat to private education if their children’s routines continue to be disrupted this fall — a real possibility as some local school officials and teachers’ unions argue for aggressive virus mitigation measures to continue, potentially even after educators are vaccinated.”

The amplification of “woke” ideology in classrooms is likely to accelerate the current exodus from district schools. Parents have experienced a renewed sense of responsibility over their children’s education. Now they in many cases have had a front-row seat to what their children are actually learning through Zoom school, and hopefully will feel more empowered to push back against new critical theory curriculum standards—and choose education that values individualism over collectivism.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Image: woodleywonderworks on Flickr

The post Woke Educators Release Letter Declaring Objective Math a Form of ‘White Supremacy’ appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

It shouldn’t be any surprise that this turn of events was on the horizon. After all, social justice warriors have been viewing social issues in America through the lense of race since before ‘SJW’ became a trendy acronym. Identity politics, especially when focused on racial identity with an intersectional hierarchy reaffirming a perception that white men retain the highest privilege, has thus far proven to move people toward voluntary segregation in social life.

The NYU students are simply trying to reform the public university in the same image as that social structure. That’s just the kind of thinking a racist would gravitate to—more so when the already established philosophical structure would place them at the top of a social ladder, peering down on the other self-arranged classes which inadvertently view themselves as less-than through their own philosophical assertions. They would no longer need to force their views onto others when the views of others already mirror their own. It takes all the work out of beating people down when the people do it themselves, leaving a racist to just enjoy the fruits of others’ labor. History has shown that is what they want to do in the first place.

Spencer’s move isn’t something that just came to him out of the blue. Since I first heard his name, I’ve seen how closely his own politics align with a leftist agenda. He has championed abortion from the beginning because, as he puts it, “the people who are having abortions are generally very often black or Hispanic or from very poor circumstances.” Leftists use a nearly identical justification for their support in maintaining the legality of and expanding access to abortion.

Spencer doesn’t call himself a white nationalist either. Instead he uses a cryptic term, ‘identitarian’, to explain his views. Identity politics on the Left, Identitarianism on the “alt-right.” Both leading to segregation of races and classes in one form or another. Sounds a little too coincidental. He also started showing his support for Universal Basic Income and National Healthcare, products of the Democrat agenda, while he was still heralding himself as a Trump supporter; even attempting to appeal to the President to give them serious consideration.

For the time being, it almost seems as though woke leftism and identitarian racism were fated to be together, given their myriad commonalities. Will it end in the destruction of either philosophy, or the marriage of the two into one fluid philosophy? Perhaps time will tell.

The Left’s continuing trend to infuse racism into their political ideology is arguably why alt-righters would feel a familiar vibe congruent to their own. Spencer has already shown this vibe is attractive enough to try to join the leftist ranks once again, encouraging others to follow.

The post Woke Leftism Attracts Racists appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

by Micah J. Fleck

The provocateur and author of the upcoming book “Dangerous” Milo Yiannopoulos has recently been reported as being the keynote speaker at this year’s CPAC.

According to Politico:

Controversial author and Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos will be the keynote speaker at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, which first reported the news, Yiannopoulos will focus his address on his “experiences in America battling feminists, Black Lives Matter, the media, professors and the entertainment industry.”

Yiannopoulos himself confirmed the news on his official Facebook page while citing the aforementioned Reporter article:

He was also quick to point out in a follow-up post that “Old-school conservatives are already mad. To say nothing of the Left.” In other words, Milo is fully aware of how against traditional conservatism he is by being an out and proud gay man. One of the more common criticisms often leveled at Yiannopoulos is that he’s just a self-hating homosexual who does the bidding of the old school conservative machine. But if he is truly not self-hating, and embraces the fact that he speaks for a new generation of pro-LGBT conservative youth, then he is… Well… “Dangerous.” Because he cannot be fit into a box and easily sized up by binary identity politics.

Having said that… CPAC just got a hell of a lot more interesting.

WATCH TLR’S LATEST VIDEO:

The post Report: Milo Yiannopoulos to Keynote CPAC appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

by Joey Clark

[dropcap size=big]A[/dropcap] year or so ago, I took to the airwaves and told my local radio audience about the tragic news transpiring in my family. Usually, the topic of our discussion has something to do with politics, so I decided to present my dilemma with a simple question: your mother or your country?

Though I love covering the political events of the day, discussing the ideas of liberty on air or at an “anarchist” meetup group every week, I told the audience I must be honest with them–that the problems facing the nation seemed trivial compared to the prospects of my mother’s illness. The horizon looked bleak for her, much bleaker than the country’s, I told them, and I would choose my mother over my country every time if both were ever in need of my service.

Though our radio family up until that point seemed to have only been bound together by our common political angst, after sharing my personal tribulations, we became something much more, discovering a latent love for one another that had been there all along. Calls of support flooded into the radio station. I was most touched by the folks who barely knew what to say. I remember hearing people cry for me and mom. Their outpouring was more than enough. It felt like a true community. Something electoral politics can only begin to emulate. And emulate badly.

Fast forward a year, and I am a very different person. 27 going on 55. And I find myself time and time again revisiting Charles Bukowski’s unsettling poem, “i wanted to overthrow the government but all i brought down was somebody’s wife,” in which the author describes meeting with so-called anarchists who claim they seek to overthrow the state and the church. But these malcontents never carry out the propaganda of the deed. They only sit and talk:

…but somewhere we missed: we were not men enough,

   large or small enough,

or we only wanted to talk or we were bored, so the anarchy

   fell through…

What happens next, well, the title of the poem speaks for itself. Instead of overthrowing the government, the speaker–who describes himself as a “tottering dynasty…always drunk as possible, well-read, starving, depressed”–overthrows the “personal government” of a rich Italian pharmacist by sleeping with the pharmacist’s wife:

…the pharmacist’s wife, she was nice,

she was tired of bombs under the pillow and hissing the Pope,

and she had a very nice figure, very good legs,

but I guess she felt as I: that the weakness was not Government

but Man, one at a time, that men were never as strong as

   their ideas

and that ideas were governments turned into men;

and so it began on a couch with a spilled martini

and it ended in the bedroom: desire, revolution,

nonsense ended, and the shades rattled in the wind,

rattled like sabers, cracked like cannon…

Each time I return to this unseemly tale, I am met by two reminders one ironic the other tragic.

First is the irony of having Bukowski–notorious male pig par excellence–remind me of a phrase associated with 1960’s second-wave feminism: the personal is political. Yet, maybe the apparent irony isn’t that deep here. Sex, in every sense of the word, is certainly a political phenomenon; it is at least driven just as much by the pursuit of power over others than any procreative or unifying impulse. We can thank feminists for this insight. And Bukowski’s suggestion, “that the weakness was not Government but Man,” is an eerily similar idea to the one Carol Hanisch expressed in 2006 when she revisited her famous feminist essay “The Personal Is Political”:

“Political struggle or debate is the key to good political theory. A theory is just a bunch of words— sometimes interesting to think about, but just words, nevertheless—until it is tested in real life. Many a theory has delivered surprises, both positive and negative, when an attempt has been made to put it into practice.”

Of course, Hanisch has different goals and genuine hopes for her political project, whereas the misanthropic Bukowski sees politics as an entropic cycle of “desire, revolution, nonsense ended,” but the common ground here is the rightful recognition of seeing politics fundamentally as a matter of personal power relations, sexual or otherwise, bound to surprise our best intentions at reforming our lives and world.    

This bring me to the second reminder: the profound personal tragedies of my past year. The horizon I mention before was quite bleak, and as I return to the poem, it’s as though I am arriving to the scene of a crime at my childhood home only to discover, as the poem says, the overthrow of my own “personal government.”  

Nothing of monetary value has been taken–it’s not that type of burglary–what has been pilfered is the priceless sense of dominion and direction over my little plot on this planet. The turmoil of my past few months was somewhat self-inflicted, but moreover, it was the product of forces beyond my control enough to make even the most ardent individualist question the very concept of “free will.”  

No one slept with my wife because, well, I don’t have a wife (thank the gods). And I am sad to report I didn’t get the chance to corrupt any marriages in 2015. No, my government was brought down by a much more lethal and disorienting foe than sex: brain cancer. And unlike Camus’ Meursault, I know the exact day my walls came tumbling down. July 8, 2015. The day mom died.

I must admit my mother’s passing ransacked my worldview, and slowly but surely, I have been putting the pieces of my life back together again. Besides the expected melancholy, I am most troubled by the feeling that my moral compass has been atrophied a bit. She was almost an external conscience to me. As I said at her funeral, “How can a portrait ever know all the secrets of its creator?”

It can’t. And once the creator is gone so soon and so unexpectedly, continuing through self-portrait is a necessary but arduous task.

Well-intentioned friends and family members as well as kind-hearted strangers shared their theories on how to carry on in the face of death. For this I am grateful. But what they offered were just that–theories.

And much like theories of government, theories on how to deal with death eventually face the test of action and all the surprises found therein. Sometimes you find, indeed, you are not as strong as your ideas, that your pain can overwhelm your best intentions and that all the diversions in the world are not enough to scratch your itch.

But, I’m here to happily report I did find some solace. The scabs don’t itch too much anymore. I return to the great world of ideas and keep finding treasure troves, but more importantly, I am resolved to act in the moment–to dream awake and enjoy it through the good and bad. I took time in the mornings to play with a puppy who I swear is much wiser than I (he’s a fox red labrador retriever I have subsequently named the red and fuzzy big booty buddha.) I rekindled relationships of old and embarked on new friendships. I threw my tattered and torn heart into a spectacularly failed love affair, and though immensely painful in the end, I am the wiser for it.

I also, once and for all, change my perspective on politics. I no longer have the option to choose between “your mother or your country.” All have now, at least between the two, is my country. But I must say, I no longer identify the country via the national government. Nor do I say the personal is the political.

No, the personal trumps the political.

More than any idea about how the human race should be governed, the pith of our lives is found via the personal connections we weave voluntarily to form the complex tapestry of true community–a community so complex it can’t be planned in advance.

Much like an economy, our culture is more a product of spontaneous human action than of conscious human design, i.e. culture is emergent, polycentric, and subject to constantly competing interpretations of the self, the other, and the world at large. Culture is something we absorb as much as we affect, and in many ways, culture is immune to regimentation and central planning.  A true community then, one fostered in positive peace and free exchange, does not demand obedience to authority but a spontaneous, enthusiastic love we cannot begin to fully understand.

So as we “choose” our country in 2016 and renew our faith in one another, remember what that really means. To choose a country is not to elect a new President or Congress. We are not called upon to force a particular ethnic-socio-religious vision of what it means to be an American on our fellows through the power of the national government. The character of a people–at least a free people–is not fashioned top-down in halls of power, but in each individual beating heart, as we form our personal bonds through this journey into the beautiful unknown.

And hopefully, guided by a mind intimate with the heart’s desire, we will find emancipation through critical self-reflection upon our own personal existence and engagement with our communities that surround us, discovering the depths of our unique individuality in tandem with our search for what we hold in common while remembering, “that the weakness was not Government but Man, one at a time.”

The post The Personal Overthrows the Political: How Death, Sex, and Self-Discovery Changed My Views appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.