The Nightmare Of The Woke & The Elimination Of Standards

Here's the news from the Great White-Supremacist-No-More North:

The Vancouver School Board is cutting honours programs for secondary school students effective this fall.

Honours math and science will be cut, and honours English has already been discontinued.

Eric Hamber secondary and Magee secondary are the last two schools to offer honours math and science, as conversations about cancelling honours programs began more than five years ago.

In an emailed statement to CBC News, a school board spokesperson said honours courses create inequities for students.

"By phasing out these courses, all students will have access to an inclusive model of education, and all students will be able to participate in the curriculum fulsomely," the statement reads.

Fulsomely? Fulsomely in a program stripped down to the bare essentials of, I assume, critical race theory and sodomy appreciation courses? That kind of fulsomely?

Well, they did cancel English first.

I love, too, how that English can no longer be studied, the word inequities has lost all shades of its original meaning. It used to be defined as something like gross injustices, or even atrocities. It now means "the state in which some do better than others." A more banal word you could not imagine. But to equalitarians, inequality of any kind is hateful, and so inequities has become a curse word.

The honors courses did not, as should be plain even to an Education major, create "inequities". Students did. As did their parents and other suchlike things. Again, there could be nothing more boring than to tell any man in touch with Reality that "some people are smarter and work harder than others."

Yet educationists and Experts in Canada, that hotbed of racism, have decided that, no, it's the courses themselves that are causing some students to do better at math. They don't say how. Perhaps some sort of tachyon-like particle that reaches back from the Land Of The Better and causes some kids to recall the law of cosines with greater ease.

They also don't say who these moves are for, but if I were to give you just one guess, you'd nail it.

Here's Oregon, not too distant from the Canuks, but with them wholly in spirit (quoting a tweet): "The Oregon legislature passed SB 744 to get rid of math, reading, and proficiency standards for high schools so we can be more 'equitable.'"

The gentleman who tweeted that also said, "Bills like this are destroying society. Instead of dismantling meritocracy and undermining excellence, we should be creating educational opportunities to help the least advantaged flourish."

His first sentence is true, his second is false. We should not eliminate standards, for that brings only death and destruction. What must be removed are expectations that all can be above average.

Here's Uncle Fred with some other anecdotes, now well familiar to us:

Consider: Math curricula are being dumbed down because blacks do poorly at math, English grammar instruction eliminated because blacks can’t or won’t learn it, entrance exams for the elite and demanding high schools eliminated because blacks don’t pass them, SATs dropped because blacks score poorly on them, promotion exams in police departments eliminated because blacks don’t pass them. Entrance requirements at medical school are lowered because not enough blacks pass them, AP courses in high school eliminated because too few blacks get into them.

There's two things in any of these noted "inequities": the difference in performance of blacks with everybody else, but also the implicit agreement that the things named are important and worthy.

Math is an excellent example. Some of us are indeed better at it than others, and it's also needed for many functions, such as building rocket ships. Yet only a tiny fraction will ever go on, or will be needed to go on, to perform these functions.

Besides elementary training to filter out the apt from the inept, and the subsequent intense training of the able and desirous, math education isn't needed.

It's the false idea that because a thing is valuable, all must participate, and because of the false idea that there are no differences in peoples, we have the false conclusion that all must advance equally.

Because all shouldn't participate and can't advance, and because of these false beliefs, resentment is generated. The solution the woke hit upon is to devalue and eliminate math (and other intellectual achievements). So it's decided math is needed, which is true. For most. But not for all.

The only way out of the Nightmare of the Woke is to abandon the false belief that all are equal. Which isn't too likely.

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