The Miseducation of America’s Elites

 

This is the reason that we have the worst ruling class in history.

By normal American standards, they are quite wealthy. By the standards of Harvard-Westlake, they are average. These are two-career couples who credit their own success not to family connections or inherited wealth but to their own education. So it strikes them as something more than ironic that a school that costs more than $40,000 a year—a school with Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right hand, and Sarah Murdoch, wife of Lachlan and Rupert’s daughter-in-law, on its board—is teaching students that capitalism is evil.

For most parents, the demonization of capitalism is the least of it. They say that their children tell them they’re afraid to speak up in class. Most of all, they worry that the school’s new plan to become an “anti-racist institution”—unveiled this July, in a 20-page document—is making their kids fixate on race and attach importance to it in ways that strike them as grotesque.

“I grew up in L.A., and the Harvard School definitely struggled with diversity issues. The stories some have expressed since the summer seem totally legitimate,” says one of the fathers. He says he doesn’t have a problem with the school making greater efforts to redress past wrongs, including by bringing more minority voices into the curriculum. What he has a problem with is a movement that tells his children that America is a bad country and that they bear collective racial guilt.

“They are making my son feel like a racist because of the pigmentation of his skin,” one mother says. Another poses a question to the group: “How does focusing a spotlight on race fix how kids talk to one another? Why can’t they just all be One private school parent, born in a Communist nation, tells me: “I came to this country escaping the very same fear of retaliation that now my own child feels.” Another joked: “We need to feed our families. Oh, and pay $50,000 a year to have our children get indoctrinated.” A teacher in New York City put it most concisely: “To speak against this is to put all of your moral capital at risk.”

Parents who have spoken out against this ideology, even in private ways, say it hasn’t gone over well. “I had a conversation with a friend, and I asked him: ‘Is there anything about this movement we should question?’” said a father with children in two prep schools in Manhattan. “And he said: ‘Dude, that’s dangerous ground you’re on in our friendship.’ I’ve had enough of those conversations to know what happens.”

That fear is shared, deeply, by the children. For them, it’s not just the fear of getting a bad grade or getting turned down for a college recommendation, though that fear is potent. It’s the fear of social shaming. “If you publish my name, it would ruin my life. People would attack me for even questioning this ideology. I don’t even want people knowing I’m a capitalist,” a student at the Fieldston School in New York City told me, in a comment echoed by other students I spoke with. (Fieldston declined to comment for this article.) “The kids are scared of other kids,” says one Harvard-Westlake mother.

The atmosphere is making their children anxious, paranoid, and insecure—and closed off from even their close friends. “My son knew I was talking to you and he begged me not to,” another Harvard-Westlake mother told me. “He wants to go to a great university, and he told me that one bad statement from me will ruin us. This is the United States of America. Are you freaking kidding me?”Wolverines?” (Harvard-Westlake has declined to comment.)...

Baltimore: High School Student With 0.13 GPA Is Near The Top Half Of His Class

 These are your schools, run by today's school boards with teachers who are members of the teacher's union.

Math: less than 5% proficient, English less than 5% proficient 

This story is shocking on many levels. This week Fox 45 in Baltimore reported on a 17-year-old high school student who was just told that instead of graduating, he is being sent back to 9th grade. How is this possible? Well, it turns out the young man has only been to school about half the time and when he was there he failed almost every class he took:

His transcripts show he’s passed just three classes in four years, earning 2.5 credits, placing him in ninth grade…

As we dig deeper into her son’s records, we can see in his first three years at Augusta Fells, he failed 22 classes and was late or absent 272 days. But in those three years, only one teacher requested a parent conference…

In his four years at Augusta Fells, France’s son earned a GPA of 0.13. He only passed three classes, but his transcripts show his class rank is 62 out of 120. This means, nearly half his classmates, 58 of them, have a 0.13 grade point average or lower.

How the German Press lies to its readers

From Politico:

More thoughtful observers see a problem deeper than political bias behind the coverage of Cologne and the broader refugee crisis: a press corps that has shifted from dispassionate observer to political actor. Instead of just reporting and analyzing events, some influential journalists, especially those who work for the public broadcasting networks, consider it their professional duty to serve as a counterweight to the populist rhetoric fueling the country’s right-wing revival, critics say.

“Cologne has helped blow the top off,” said Roland Tichy, a veteran German editor who now runs an eponymous opinion site of conservative commentary.

...

Even before Cologne, many Germans worried the media weren’t telling them everything. In a poll conducted by the respected Allensbach institute in December, 53 percent of respondents said they didn’t believe the media presented an accurate picture of the refugees’ qualifications for employment or other details.

A majority of Germans still trust the media, but more than 40 percent described the reporting on refugees as “one-sided.”

“There’s suspicion that they believe they don’t have to report on such assaults, especially involving migrants and foreigners, for fear of unsettling the public” — Hans-Peter Friedrich.

The most virulent strain of that distrust can be seen on Germany’s streets, during the regular marches by the anti-foreigner Pegida group. Even before the recent wave of refugees began arriving, right-wing marchers revived a slur popular during the Nazi-era – Lügenpresse, or lying press. A number of journalists have even been assaulted at the rallies.

While Germany’s printed press offers a multitude of opinions and views, the public broadcasting sector, once similarly diverse, has veered left in recent years, critics say.

“The public stations have evolved into Social Democratic/Green mainstream broadcasters,” Tichy said. “There’s no denying it.”

Hans-Peter Friedrich, a former interior minister under Angela Merkel, accused the public broadcasters of operating a “cartel of silence.”

“There’s suspicion that they believe they don’t have to report on such assaults, especially involving migrants and foreigners, for fear of unsettling the public,” he said.

Following Friedrich’s critique, a freelance reporter for German public broadcaster WDR told a Dutch radio program that she and her colleagues were obliged to toe the government’s line on the refugee crisis. “We’re a public broadcaster and are therefore expected to approach the problem in a more positive way,” Claudia Zimmermann, the reporter, said.

WDR, the local broadcaster in the Cologne region, vigorously denied Zimmermann’s characterization. The station said it “follows the highest journalistic standards,” including on the refugees.

Zimmermann has since retracted, saying she was nervous during the interview and had spoken “nonsense.”

The cautious approach to news, what one commentator recently called “nanny journalism,” is a vestige of the effort to reprogram Germans after World War II from Nazi sympathizers into peace-loving democrats.

This is how they view their job; they'll tell you what to think and how to think it.

“The public broadcasting contract remains and remains intact: to impart values, promote opinion- and decision-making in society and to ensure the functioning of democracy,” she said.

For the broadcasters’ detractors, Cologne represents the latest example of months of tendentious coverage. One common complaint is news reports on the refugees often picture families and women, even though single young men make up the vast majority of those arriving.

Another is that the broadcasters downplay or conceal events that might rouse the public’s emotions. The alleged gang rape of two teenage girls in southwest Germany on New Year’s Eve by four Syrian refugees was not reported by any of the main news programs, for example, despite the parallels to the attacks in Cologne and other cities.

SWR, the regional public channel, reported on the rapes but was quick to add: “The nationality of the suspects played an ‘insignificant role’ in the crime, investigators and prosecutors said.”

Such reporting has fueled criticism that the broadcasters soft pedal any hint of criminal behavior among refugees. It also earned them a new moniker: “Willkommens Broadcaster” — a play on the so-called “Willkommenskultur,” or culture of welcome that swept Germany in the early days of the refugee crisis.

This kind of censorship and propaganda will not work well in an era when news gets disseminated by the Internet. They are exposed as liars. But the "lying press" is aided by an educational establishment that indoctrinates children so that the press and the schools reinforce each other. It's the primary reason that so many people still believe the propaganda put out by the media.

Glenn Reynolds remarks (sarcastically):  

Good thing we never see anything like that from our own press.