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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.
This orthodoxy, opposed to your orthopraxy (incidentally, all of Judaism is more like it) might just be the downside of individualism. Americans are descendants of people who have chosen their own destiny (except, I suppose, ADOS), the can-do nation. If your religion is bullshit with nice Chestertonian fences, then that's a bummer – why not go for the one that also has tradition but isn't bullshit? Or maybe has cooler bullshit and more rad tradition to boot – with golden icons and UFOs and other bling? Really, why not have it all? Why cope? The ultra-Orthodox (or perhaps it'd be correct to say ultra-Orthopraxic) are cognizant of the fact that they will never receive more support than in their extreme corner of the tribe, nor will they have hope of such guarantees that the society around cares about the healthy perpetuation of their bloodline. Europeans you speak of are simply selected for conformity and brokenness. Americans are builders of globe-spanning business empires that solve problems you didn't even know you could have. They take spirituality to be a matter of finding good consultancy. Surely, if my enterprise works, at least one of those must work too!
But on the other hand, I reject the framing. Americans are simply victims of professional brainwashing; they correctly believe the required consultancies exist, and are oblivious to having been engineered this way by them.
For the masters of the cult, your cynical attitude of going through the motions to reap a modest benefit is quite a problem; it's at best a necessary cope when the mappings and keys are lost, and you can no longer afford or guide zealotry, but also cannot divorce it from sincerity. Such in the late age of a dying faith. How do you know what the benefit worth seeking, while discarding the mumbo-jumbo, even is? Common sense? But common sense is the product of what one feels to be the true religion, because it is not even questioned – its truth apparent viscerally, in senses of dread, cringe, exhilaration, craving, even apathy. American betters want Americans not to accept some mere redistribution, but to desire racial equity on the fundamental level of terminal values following from basic ontology. Their racial religion is fertile and young.
And of course plausible deniability helps in the long run.
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