Category Archives: Race

Math Ability: Is It The Kids Or The Method Of Teaching Them?

America, Conservatism, Education, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Kids, Race, Science

To continue the math-related conversation begun in “U.S. Kids Can’t Read, Write Or Do Math, But Are No. 1 In Critical Race Theory,” here are more warnings from The Economist:

The writer says that, “Conservatives typically campaign for classical math: a focus on algorithms (a set of rules to be followed), memorizing (of times tables and algorithmic processes) and teacher-led instruction. Pupils in these classrooms focus on the basics, exploring concepts after obtaining traditional skills …”

“…Progressives,” he argues, “typically favor a conceptual approach to math based on problem-solving and gaining number-sense, with less emphasis on algorithms and memorizing.”

Irrespective, the achievement situation on the ground is as follows:

In 2018, American 15-year-olds ranked 25th in the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. American adults ranked fourth-from-last in numeracy when compared with other rich countries. As many as 30% of American adults are comfortable only with simple maths: basic arithmetic, counting, sorting and similar tasks. American employers are desperate for science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills: nuclear engineers, software developers and machinists are in short supply. And while pupils’ maths scores are bad enough now, they could be getting worse. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a national exam, 13-year-old pupils’ scores dropped five points in 2020 compared with their peers’ in 2012. The status quo does not add up. But teachers and academics cannot agree on where to go next.

This is not purely about “the conceptual approach to math,” versus an emphasis on “algorithms and memorizing,” as the writer frames it.

However important, more than the methods of teaching math, American failures are about the kind of kids America has and the philosophy undergirding their education—a highly variegated population educated under the philosophy of egalitarianism. Not everyone can learn math, yet this is the premise of American education.

Yes, “highly ranked mathematical nations” such as Singapore, China and Japan have the best math in the world and are NOT teaching by progressive methodology.

But the East Asian nations are relatively homogeneous and have kids with the good potential (IQ). Although important, the statistically significant variance is to be found, I would wager, in the kind of population, more than in the method of teaching, however important.

I hate to say it, but as far as raw human capital goes, America is fast becoming a bit of a shithole.

MORE: “America’s maths wars:How teaching multiplication tables became another victim of the political divide.”

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It’s Democratic And It’s Tyrannical

China, COVID-19, Democracy, Individual Rights, Private Property, Race, Racism, South-Africa, The State, The West

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“The Australian State is to seize the savings, homes, driver’s licenses of people with unpaid COVID fines,” reports the New American.

Get caught too far from home, outside your permitted bubble, and you get a ticket. Get caught spending more than the permitted 1 hour outside, get a ticket. Get caught without a mask, even by yourself — and yep, ticket. Enter a closed quarantine zone (park, venue, etc.) and you get a ticket. Tickets were being handed out by police on the street as well as during random checkpoints on the roadways.

Democracy is a tyranny of the majority where minority rights are forfeit. Boycott Australia, and shut the hell up about China and their Uyghurs. AUSTRALIA IS US. As goes the Anglosphere—so go we.

Once democracy reaches its ripe, raw stage—also called “mature democracy” by promoters of this form of tyranny—it shows its true colors. Polite disagreement is no longer an option. Was not Socrates forced by the masses to drink the Hemlock because he rejected democracy?

From my “How Democracy Made Us Dumb“:

The Athenian philosophers disdained democracy. Deeply so. They held that democracy “distrusts ability and has a reverence for numbers over knowledge.” (Will Durant, “The Story of Philosophy,” New York, New York, 1961, p. 10.)

Certainly, among the ancients who mattered, there was a keen contempt for “a mob-led, passion-ridden democracy.” The complaint among Athenians who occupied themselves with thinking and debating was that “there would be chaos where there is no thought,” and that “it was a base superstition that numbers give wisdom. On the contrary, it is universally seen that men in crowds are more foolish, violent and cruel than men separate and alone.” (p. 11)

Underground already then, because so subversive—anti-democratic thinking was the aristocratic gospel in Athens. Socrates (born in 470 B.C.) was the intellectual leader against democracy and for the even-then hated aristocratic philosophy. Socrates’ acolytes, young and brilliant, questioned the “specious replacement of the old virtues by unsocial intelligence.”

The proof of the foolish, violent and cruel nature of the crowds is that the crowds, not the judges, insisted on making Socrates the first martyr of philosophy. He drank the poison at the behest of the people.

No wonder Plato, Socrates’ most gifted student, harbored such scorn for democracy and hatred for the mob—so extreme that it led this controversial genius to resolve that democracy must be destroyed, to be replaced by his planned society; “the rule of the wisest and the best, who would have to be discovered and enabled.”

Despite the terrible prognosis I’ve given South Africa, it is no surprise that, being a mature democracy to South Africa’s infant democratic dispensation—America is now worse than South Africa for its Orwellian, systemic anti-Whiteness.

“White AT & T Corporation employees who are unwilling to admit to being complicit in white privilege and systemic racism can be penalized in their performance reviews.”

MORE Democracy.

‘Democrats Are The Real Racists’: An Original, 2013 Mercer Meme

Argument, Communism, Democrats, Ethics, Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com, Morality, Old Right, Race

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In my experience over two decades, our side, the Right, often flouts the traditional, honor system of citing sources and crediting originators. Especially when it comes to marginalized, utterly-independent originators: Who’s gonna defend Mercer if I borrow those shiny ideas of hers?

Well, as the great sage Rabbi Hillel said,

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, then when?

There are ways less elegant to express how I feel about weak men without honor or a backbone. But do yourself a favor: Don’t mess with me. I’m done with those who do.

In any event, this tendency was documented in painful, but necessary, detail in “The Moral Writer’s First Commandment: Cite Your Sources!“, and in “Citing Sources: Jewish Morality (‘Mussar & Middot’) Demands Acknowledging Those Who Went Before, Intellectually.”

When every other American commentator was kibitzing about Critical Race Theory as Marxism—including the voluble writers on Darren Beattie’s site, Revolver News—yours truly, as is her wont, had dug in her heels since 2019, insisting that CRT was ALL anti-whiteness, and nothing more, not Marxism. But the anti-whiteness of American politics has been a theme that has informed my work since 2011.

In the latter post, I chronicle Darren Beattie’s contempt-oozing snark of a tweet about myself—this woman, as he put it—daring to assert that she was an originator of the anti-white impetus of Critical race Theory; that I was indeed first to this take on Critical Race Theory as unadulterated anti-whiteness, and that any other claims were lies.

But in our immoral politics and anti-intellectual life, Beattie, a popular young cub (who worked for Trump) trumps an unaffiliated, tenured paleolibertarian thinker and theorist with little influence. (That’s why I will no longer vote for these envenomed, disrespectful assholes. When all is said and done, they don’t give a damn about us little guys and gals.)

2. “Democrats Are The Real Racists” is a meme that originated in Mercer and is now popular across the Internet.

In “GOP Tit-For-Tat Twits,” (08.02.13 @ 10:52 pm) I wrote:

But Republicans are as dazed and confused as the rival gang, reducing wrong-doing to these PC “isms,” and partaking in the silly tit-for-tat: “No, you’re a sexist, I’m not. No, Democrats are racists; we’re the party of Lincoln.” Blah-blah. Pathetic.

The meme or idea was further fleshed out in a column, “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fem, I Smell The Blood Of A Racist” (May 16, 2014):

Why have serious libertarians succumbed to a tit-for-tat spat? Are libertarians as dazed and confused as Republicans? The latter have certainly dignified the rival gang’s Stalinist show-trial tactics, with more holier-than-thou racial one-upmanship: “Democrats are the real racists; Republicans are the party of Lincoln, the liberator of blacks. We’re against abortion and welfare because we love blacks. … Blah, blah, blah.”

SOURCES:

“The Moral Writer’s First Commandment: Cite Your Sources!”

“Citing Sources: Jewish Morality (‘Mussar & Middot’) Demands Acknowledging Those Who Went Before, Intellectually

“GOP Tit-For-Tat Twits”

“Fee-Fi-Fo-Fem, I Smell The Blood Of A Racist”