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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32806 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Hey! First time poster here. Please be critical.

I saw this article last week and am not sure how to think about it. https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-increase-equity-school-districts-eliminate-honors-classes-d5985dee

The TL;DR is that honors classes in this subset of all honors classes had a clear bias in terms of racial makeup relative to baseline. So they stopped offering honors classes.

On the one hand this seems super effective— with a strategy like this maybe in a generation or so when they start offering honors classes again there might be less bias.

On the other hand my intuition says that in general it’s okay to allow students to self-select (or students and whoever is telling them what to do) and decide how much schoolwork they want to do.

It seems relevant to the school-flavor culture war stuff.

Any links to previous threads on similar topics would be appreciated.

Curious to know more.

Edit: not bait, genuine curiosity. Got some good criticism about low-effort top-level-posting, would appreciate suggestions/pointers to excellent top-level posts.

Continued edit: Also curious what about this post codes it as bait? A few people saw it that way.

But in the US there’s an obsession - is it Puritan? Is it Anglo? - with the method. It’s not enough to do something, you have to do it and believe you didn’t do it, that the outcome was fair and inevitable and your intervention was merely repairing the order of things rather than - even for reasons of justice or peace or whatever - altering it.

This is an important point. It also speaks to one of the most destructive effects of the progressive purity spiral: they know some people might recite the catechisms of progressivism ("Black Lives Matter," "Transwomen are women," etc.) without really, truly believing in every article of the faith. And they don't want to let anyone get away with that - you have to actually believe! Hence the constant policing and "unpacking privilege" and the instant dogpiling on any good progressive who accidentally reveals doctrinal impurity.

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