What the Left gets Right: Something is wrong with public education (part 2).

At the beginning of the month, I began the discussion of the woes of public education. The Left is right that something is very wrong in our public schools, and that a lot of what's wrong is having kids sitting in rows of desks asking for permission for every little thing by a teacher who, however well-meaning, cannot possibly attend to the different needs of all the kids. That's impossible even in special education (the very place designed to meet individual kids' needs) with the lack of resources, the level of teacher burnout, and the misuse of time focusing on ideology rather than actually useful learning (probably one source of teacher burnout that the Left hasn't yet considered even as it advocates for teachers - well, the "historically marginalized" ones, anyway).

The Radical Leftist's solution is to push the identity ideology already wreaking havoc on outcomes, relationships between students and the effectiveness of the learning environment as a whole. The simultaneous increase of the use of ideologically driven curriculum and mass shootings is not a coincidence, and the Nashville shooting at a Christian elementary school perpetrated by a transgender woman (armed with at least three guns) bears this out. The murder of seven people, three of whom were elementary school children, was largely met with either silence or social media posts basically excusing the shooter with "well, what do you expect when you push wounded animals into a corner?" That's the level of depravity we've hit as a society: identity-based defense of murder of children. I thought it couldn't get worse after Sandy Hook; but I was wrong. Now we have the Leftist social media army, which heretofore has screamed for all guns to be taken away, now excusing the use of guns to murder children because transgenderism. I wonder how trans people feel about being so fragilized by society's advocating that they be protected above - unarmed - CHILDREN.) Yet the Radical Left wants more ideology, not less.

The ideological manifesto Street Data takes aim at data itself, hoping to dismantle (they use the nicer-sounding word "reimagine") the very basis by which we do objective research, making assertions and stating opinions on every page that they present as conclusions for the case that we need to bend data to serve the needs of the most marginalized. Make no mistake, dear readers: this is another instance of the Radical Left's demand that we bend reality to assert the needs of whoever is deemed the most oppressed and victimized in society. They want to do away with objective reality altogether, claiming that it's oppressive and doesn't serve the needs of whoever they deem is the moment's most oppressed. That's why there are so many apologists for a murderer who happens to be transgender of children when these apologists were, up to the hate crime against Christians (which is fine? even though shootings at mosques, temples and places of non Christian worship are immediately decried?) in Nashville on March 27th demanding the confiscation of all guns in the country in increasingly self-righteous, illogical, and histrionic social media posts before the bodies have hit the ground in previous shootings.

Street Data doesn’t explicitly advocate for shootings or defend shooters like so many on the Radical Left seem to be fine with doing. But they do advocate for an “equalizing of power,” another nice word of saying students taking power from their teachers and, by extension, the adults around them in the name of “freedom” (even as the Radical Left has roundly mocked “freedom” when it’s advocated for in other forms, like the really, really important kind without which nothing we care about will happen). Street Data’s undertones are of unapologetic Marxist-style revolution, again dressed up nicely in words that bemoan compliance and lament conformity. Unfortunately, it’s worse even than that. And we’ll get to why in my next Musing in a couple weeks.