West on the West

[Xenophon]

Kish you're obviously much more engaged in this than the rest of us so I appreciate your insight.

Do you have a feel for how large the push is for dismantling the whole system is? From my perspective and reading these folks make up the tiniest bit even if they are loud.

Most of the pushback I hear is more along the lines you suggest of needing to reframe the hsitrocial angle we view this from not ignore it entirely or throw it out. Undo the whitewashing of old and try to present a more accurate presentation of the past. And then couple that with highlighting that although Western thought has a ton of value it isn't the be all end all and that other cultures bot influenced the West and created whole other systems that have equal educational value.

This is at leas my take from engagement with my local college but I understand my window is narrow here.

[Moksha]

I would not be surprised if Classics only survives in more conservative private schools 30 years from now.

BYU shall be the beacon of hope for ancient Greek, Latin, and Reformed Egyptian!

[Kishkumen]

Kish you're obviously much more engaged in this than the rest of us so I appreciate your insight.

Do you have a feel for how large the push is for dismantling the whole system is? From my perspective and reading these folks make up the tiniest bit even if they are loud.

Most of the pushback I hear is more along the lines you suggest of needing to reframe the hsitrocial angle we view this from not ignore it entirely or throw it out. Undo the whitewashing of old and try to present a more accurate presentation of the past. And then couple that with highlighting that although Western thought has a ton of value it isn't the be all end all and that other cultures bot influenced the West and created whole other systems that have equal educational value.

This is at leas my take from engagement with my local college but I understand my window is narrow here.

I don't know that I am much more engaged with this than the rest of us. There are plenty of academics from different disciplines on this board. There are other Classicists on this board, and I doubt that we all agree in all of the particulars.

So, I think that the push to move to a greater emphasis on STEM is very strong and has already had a big impact on the Humanities. Then again, the internal political pressure within the Humanities and Social Sciences is also having a big impact too. I was talking to a history professor the other week, and he was really glum. From what I could gather, certain narrow ideas about diversity are tanking the history hiring in just about every area except American history, which is expanding because the university is expected to come up with solutions to present problems in the US, and past eras and foreign lands are seen as comparatively irrelevant.

I would like to think that you are right, and maybe I am being something of a chicken little here. Maybe the question is one of reframing the historical angle, but I have heard enough and seen enough to be deeply concerned that those with noble ideals and a great deal of zeal are being allowed to drive the agenda without really calculating the consequences of decisions that are made in order to "reframe."

I am going to admit to being a grumpy old guy at this point, but I think the idea that we need to reframe because other cultures are also great is really an incomplete conversation based on a knee-jerk reaction to prejudice and bias. Education in our country should be about cultivating decent human beings and functional, informed citizens even more than it should be about training skilled workers. Corporations can train skilled workers. They have no interest in cultivating informed citizens or a responsibility to teach people to be good citizens in a republic.

We do not become good citizens through vocational training or obscurantism. We do not become good citizens by knowing a lot about Japanese ink prints but almost nothing about our own system of government and its philosophical and historical foundations. A solid education in Western civilization is not about telling everyone that the West is the best. It is about educating people in the expertise that will help them hold onto, nurture, and advance the republic. Unfortunately, wrongheaded (on this point) people now consider Western civilization to be a politically incorrect term that only serves to advance white supremacism. Western civilization is an intellectual category that organizes information in a way that renders it intelligible. It should not be a rallying cry for those asserting superiority.

Are other civilizations unimportant, or lesser? No! Of course not. But that is the wrong question. Given the finite time you and I have to prepare to enter the ballot box, what kind of information would be crucial to know in order to make the best decisions for self-government? Would those pieces of information be about Chinese bureaucracy in the Tang Dynasty, gender fluidity in Spanish cinema, or the Federalist Papers? I should hope the answer to that question would be pretty self-evident. Knowing that other stuff is really cool, but it takes a back seat to knowing those things that help you vote wisely and hold your political leaders accountable.

The work to dismantle our system of education is well advanced because people have forgotten why we educate and what the substance of an education should be. Having caved in to corporate or general business interests, we have hollowed out the concept of education and replaced it with vocational training with almost purely economic aims. So long as people are not "offended" by others, then the content of that education need only reflect fashionable views regarding diversity and, of course, achieve economic success. Ideology easily pressures business to do the profitable thing. We can't have serious conversations about the issues because offending people, i.e., making them uncomfortable, drives away business.

Honestly, I don't see a silver lining on this cloud. We are careening to incoherence . . . really mostly arrived at incoherence. Our educations are like our supermarkets, full of brightly colored googaws for us to enjoy for a price. Whether the things we buy serve a productive purpose or sustain well being is not at all important, so long as people are making money. We are ripe for tyranny because we have no clear idea of what liberty is after all. Our educational system is not arming us to avoid tyranny. Instead it is leaving us very vulnerable to it, if not leading us to ask for it. We are looking to throw in our lot with the tyrant who best reflects our own moral sensibilities. That tyrant may be a Democrat. That tyrant may be a Republican. What that person is not is someone who either understands the meaning of liberty or really wants others to exercise it in a meaningful way.

[Res Ipsa]

Well most Greek philosophers did own slaves. And if I remember right, you had to reach a certain proficiency in mathematics before you could move on to philosophy in ancient Greek society. I doubt such a program is going to work out for a place like Howard University, where the idea of right and wrong answers to a mathematical problem are viewed as an example of systemic white supremacy and evidence of anti black racial discrimination by the faculty.

CFR on the math issue, please.

[Kishkumen]

Western civilization is an intellectual category that organizes information in a way that renders it intelligible.

I want to say more about this in order to clarify. Categories help us understand things in their larger context. A term like Western civilization does not exist in distinction from Eastern civilization because there are eternal hypostases of civilizations but because we name things in order to place them in our world. If I happen to live in Thomasville, it would behoove me to learn the map of Thomasville, not the map of Gordonville, which is 1000 miles away from where I work, send my kids to school, and shop. That is the utility of Western civilization. Find yourself on the map. Learn about where you are because it will be very useful to you. Is it not useful to know other places? It is useful to know other places, but you should learn your own environment until you can navigate that, and then you can enjoy learning someone else's map too.

[Cultellus]

Great thread. Great thoughts, Kishkumen.

I agree with you. I see things similarly.

I think this is an example where the subject is unnecessarily politicized and polarized. I also think that the process of being a republic is more important than the outcome of any individual or unique issue. What you are describing with the departments, is sad. It seems that the process of the republic, the history of the republic and the foundation of an educated constituency is less relevant than someone’s immediate feelings or shame.

It is weird. Good luck.

[canpakes]

… (T)there are those on the left who do decry “Western” logic and other standard approaches to problem solving and the organization of knowledge as being inherently bad and, basically, everything they stand against (heteronormative, patriarchal, white supremacist). Now, I happen to agree that there are problems in these areas, but I do not agree that philosophy, science, and historical knowledge should be dismantled in order to embrace some other, allegedly more virtuous forms and methods.

I agree with that. A counterpoint to my earlier post is that while I appreciate the idea of using alternate processes to solve mathematical problems (especially from experience with my own difficulty with some of the usual methods, versus what I would hammer out via some weird alternate way, lol), the choice of wording within this doc verges on terrible, at times. The authors did themselves no favors in choosing rhetoric that seems guaranteed to get some folks’s hackles up.

What they’re trying to accomplish would have been better tolerated by the public if it were not presented as some sort of grudge match to resolve the history of imperialism and racism. It could just have easily been presented as enabling more culturally inclusive approaches without needing to strike any moral judgment on what was already in place.

[Kishkumen]

I agree with that. A counterpoint to my earlier post is that while I appreciate the idea of using alternate processes to solve mathematical problems (especially from experience with my own difficulty with some of the usual methods, versus what I would hammer out via some weird alternate way, lol), the choice of wording within this doc verges on terrible, at times. The authors did themselves no favors in choosing rhetoric that seems guaranteed to get some folks’s hackles up.

What they’re trying to accomplish would have been better tolerated by the public if it were not presented as some sort of grudge match to resolve the history of imperialism and racism. It could just have easily been presented as enabling more culturally inclusive approaches without needing to strike any moral judgment on what was already in place.

Having now looked over the document, I think the point of it is to encourage non-white people to lay claim to their stake in the world of math. I think that is great, but what I do not care for so much is the creation of white supremacism as the big problem with non-white people and math. I venture to say that this is counterproductive. Stick it to the man and his math!

Ugh. Why not just tell the full story of math and show that math does not belong to one group of people? There are lots of non-white math geniuses. Indeed, I hardly think of white people when I think of contemporary math geniuses. If anything, white kids have a reputation for being abysmal at math. So, if there is a math crisis in this country, it is a lot more widespread than simply being a one-group problem.

That said, if I am a math teacher of a lot of non-white math students, you had better believe that I won't fill my class exclusively with images of white, heterosexual men and draw my biographies of great mathematicians from the same pool. I wouldn't do so if my class were almost exclusively white. Because that is not the story of math. That is not what math is about. Math is about the science of number and solving problems. That is a human thing, not a white or non-white thing.

So, while I really like and heartily endorse the positive side of this message, I also think that the negative side is pretty crappy. I don't think it is necessary to decry white supremacism in a math class, when that really does little to facilitate attaining the goals of learning math. I would leave teaching the history of white supremacism and its many evils to the history teachers, since that is where time is logically to be allotted to such conversations.

Honestly, a lot of what we see is the problem of self-selection in action. People are ignorant of the actual history of math, so they perpetuate the canned "histories" handed to them in classes taught by the same kinds of people for generations. They send their students out with the same faulty narrative where the next generation will teach it in turn. That narrative can and must be corrected, but it does little good to waste time on the idea of some conspiracy to deny the truth when it is more like the common narcissism of dominant groups.

Similarly, there are reasons that non-whites have not flourished in certain subjects, and it has everything to do with the real inequality in the educational system. Solve that inequality, and you don't need to teach about white supremacism. It is in the history class, the political science class, or the English class where the historical reasons for that inequality can be taught--that is where the lesson on white supremacism belongs, not in the math class. Not to the extent advocated here.

In Classics, which is currently grasping at straws to solve its diversity problems, I think the issue is often a very simple one. Non-white parents do not want their kids to spend hard-earned tuition dollars on an esoteric topic like Classics. They often want their kids to major in things that promise to raise their socio-economic prospects, whereas Classics students are usually drawn from people who have already achieved that status. I have a very difficult time talking Black students into becoming Classics majors. And I have tried every time the opportunity presented itself. Each time I tried, the student was very honest with me, and I will paraphrase what they tended to say: I am going into law or business; my family would not allow me to major in Classics because they want me to major in something practical.

These were really amazing, super-smart young people. They could have easily lit up the Classics world with their brilliance. But they chose not to for reasons I could hardly argue with. Self-selection. What is the point of telling people that they should not concern themselves with their economic self-betterment when they come from families that lack privilege and wealth?

So, I am not really impressed with the argument that non-white students are chased away by racist faculty or racist curriculum. I think they are warned off by concerned parents who want them to invest in something more practical and remunerative. That said, there is always room for improvement, and I am committed to doing what I can to emphasize the real diversity that exists in Classics. The extent to which it has been claimed by racists as a "white" topic is a problem. It is also inaccurate, since whiteness did not exist in Classical times.

[Cultellus]

I agree with that. A counterpoint to my earlier post is that while I appreciate the idea of using alternate processes to solve mathematical problems (especially from experience with my own difficulty with some of the usual methods, versus what I would hammer out via some weird alternate way, lol), the choice of wording within this doc verges on terrible, at times. The authors did themselves no favors in choosing rhetoric that seems guaranteed to get some folks’s hackles up.

What they’re trying to accomplish would have been better tolerated by the public if it were not presented as some sort of grudge match to resolve the history of imperialism and racism. It could just have easily been presented as enabling more culturally inclusive approaches without needing to strike any moral judgment on what was already in place.

Having now looked over the document, I think the point of it is to encourage non-white people to lay claim to their stake in the world of math. I think that is great, but what I do not care for so much is the creation of white supremacism as the big problem with non-white people and math. I venture to say that this is counterproductive. Stick it to the man and his math!

Ugh. Why not just tell the full story of math and show that math does not belong to one group of people? There are lots of non-white math geniuses. Indeed, I hardly think of white people when I think of contemporary math geniuses. If anything, white kids have a reputation for being abysmal at math. So, if there is a math crisis in this country, it is a lot more widespread than simply being a one-group problem.

That said, if I am a math teacher of a lot of non-white math students, you had better believe that I won't fill my class exclusively with images of white, heterosexual men and draw my biographies of great mathematicians from the same pool. I wouldn't do so if my class were almost exclusively white. Because that is not the story of math. That is not what math is about. Math is about the science of number and solving problems. That is a human thing, not a white or non-white thing.

So, while I really like and heartily endorse the positive side of this message, I also think that the negative side is pretty crappy. I don't think it is necessary to decry white supremacism in a math class, when that really does little to facilitate attaining the goals of learning math. I would leave teaching the history of white supremacism and its many evils to the history teachers, since that is where time is logically to be allotted to such conversations.

Honestly, a lot of what we see is the problem of self-selection in action. People are ignorant of the actual history of math, so they perpetuate the canned "histories" handed to them in classes taught by the same kinds of people for generations. They send their students out with the same faulty narrative where the next generation will teach it in turn. That narrative can and must be corrected, but it does little good to waste time on the idea of some conspiracy to deny the truth when it is more like the common narcissism of dominant groups.

Similarly, there are reasons that non-whites have not flourished in certain subjects, and it has everything to do with the real inequality in the educational system. Solve that inequality, and you don't need to teach about white supremacism. It is in the history class, the political science class, or the English class where the historical reasons for that inequality can be taught--that is where the lesson on white supremacism belongs, not in the math class. Not to the extent advocated here.

In Classics, which is currently grasping at straws to solve its diversity problems, I think the issue is often a very simple one. Non-white parents do not want their kids to spend hard-earned tuition dollars on an esoteric topic like Classics. They often want their kids to major in things that promise to raise their socio-economic prospects, whereas Classics students are usually drawn from people who have already achieved that status. I have a very difficult time talking Black students into becoming Classics majors. And I have tried every time the opportunity presented itself. Each time I tried, the student was very honest with me, and I will paraphrase what they tended to say: I am going into law or business; my family would not allow me to major in Classics because they want me to major in something practical.

These were really amazing, super-smart young people. They could have easily lit up the Classics world with their brilliance. But they chose not to for reasons I could hardly argue with. Self-selection. What is the point of telling people that they should not concern themselves with their economic self-betterment when they come from families that lack privilege and wealth?

So, I am not really impressed with the argument that non-white students are chased away by racist faculty or racist curriculum. I think they are warned off by concerned parents who want them to invest in something more practical and remunerative. That said, there is always room for improvement, and I am committed to doing what I can to emphasize the real diversity that exists in Classics. The extent to which it has been claimed by racists as a "white" topic is a problem. It is also inaccurate, since whiteness did not exist in Classical times.

Wow.

Wow. Wow.

Thank you. Great contribution. Thanks.

[ajax18]

What that person is not is someone who either understands the meaning of liberty or really wants others to exercise it in a meaningful way.

That's an interesting question Kishkumen. Ben Shapiro had a philosophical discussion about the question, "What is liberty?" on the Daily Wire last week. I was surprised to hear so much disagreement between coservatives on the issue. What exactly is liberty in your opinion?