Woke Factories

I was fortunate enough to attend an elite private high school, one of New York's eight Ivy Preparatory School League members. I received a solid education, got a bit of the "culture" of rigorous learning, made some friends, and moved on to an engineering degree, an MBA, and a couple different careers.

Beyond the normal academics, the school sought to inculcate certain values. Character, sportsmanship, loyalty, a touch of nondenominational faith, honesty, honor - all the according-to-Hoyle stuff you'd expect. I also learned some critical thinking skills, and while even forty-plus years ago it was clear that we had to play to teachers' expectations, you could achieve success in disagreeing with them, if your arguments were sound (and you did just the right amount of ass-kissing).

My classmates' backgrounds ranged far and wide, subject to the academic selectivity of the competitive admissions process, the demographics of the neighborhoods from which the school drew its enrollment, and the financial commitment required of parents (though more than a few received financial aid). At my recent 40th reunion, I did note that many of us were still very "Brooklyn" in our ways.

That was then.

Today, these schools and their equivalent are indoctrination factories for the scions of the 1%. A recent article in the New York Post tells the tale of a very brave student at one of these schools. Brave, in that he took a massive risk in speaking of the single-minded vision being taught to present-day students there. Critical thinking skills have been replaced by rote. There is one overriding message: that everything about our culture sucks, irredeemably, and that the soon-to-be-adults must fixate on a wholesale transformation of society. Dragging everyone beneath them along, no matter how much they object.

That these schools are a pipeline to their namesake Ivy League universities and equivalent is a bit part of the reason 1%ers send their kids there. It's part of the "two Americas" picture that's been so corrosive to national comity: the elites and insiders send their kids to the same high schools, so they can go to the same colleges, so that they can have the same ideas burned into their brains, so that they can continue to run our lives, no matter what we have to say about it.

Were they being taught the fundamentals of reading, writing, and 'rithmetic, higher level math, science, and a spectrum of what my college called "humanities and social sciences," all overlaid with actual critical thinking skills and respect for the marketplace of ideas, these prep schools and universities would be contributing productively to our society. Producing well-educated, well-rounded, and well-prepared young people ready to make their mark on society with quality insight, intellectual rigor, and open minds, should be a no-brainer, pun intended.

Their actual approach is grossly anti-intellectual. It teaches to conclusions, and treats those conclusions as axiomatic rather than deductive. That which is taught is to be regurgitated with fidelity, and defended dogmatically. On top of all this is a message that ideological conformity is necessary for the sort of success that is expected after attending such schools.

In college, there was a kid in my dorm who had "escaped," as he put it, the USSR. He explained that they were there taught the Communist Manifesto "by rote," meaning there was no discussion, no critical exploration of ideas, no questioning.

Sound familiar?

Jump ahead about a decade, to a conversation I had with another college acquaintance with whom I "hang" occasionally. We were walking down a Manhattan street, discussing a certain form of self-destructive behavior in a particular community, and he lamented "we're not allowed to have this conversation."

Sound familiar?

Making fact-based assertions that run contrary to social justice narratives is now considered colonizing or white-patriarchal, and therefore to be shunned. Read the cautionary tale of P. Jeffrey Brantingham, an anthropology professor and researcher at UCLA:

Jeff had developed simulation models of the geographic and temporal patterning of urban crime, and had created predictive software that he marketed to law enforcement agencies. In Spring 2018, the department’s Anthropology Graduate Students Association passed a resolution accusing Jeff’s research of, among other counter-revolutionary sins, “entrench[ing] and naturaliz[ing] the criminalization of Blackness in the United States” and calling for “referring” his research to UCLA’s Vice Chancellor for Research, presumably for some sort of investigation.

That Association should be reminded that a - facts and data don't care about woke narratives, and b - blacks are disproportionately more apt to be victims of crime, protection of individuals against criminal acts is a fundamental role of government, and helping those victims with real and useful tools should be considered a Good Thing.

Alas, objective truth has been defenestrated in favor of subjectivisms that are based race and gender ideologies and agendas. As if gravity discriminates based on skin color or other demographic markers.

The USSR, in a particularly bad bout of politics over reality, embraced Lysenkoism - an already-disproved assertion that crops could have their DNA altered by environmental influences. The idea appealed to Stalin, and thousands of scientists who publicly rejected it were "cancelled," Soviet style. That is - they weren't just fired, they were imprisoned or executed.

Sound familiar?

Our cancelers haven't resorted to prisons or worse, but they are quite enamored not only of job termination, but career and reputation ruin as punishments for diverging, even slightly, from the approved narratives.

Today, an Internet friend made mention of someone he knew who hated the Japanese. That person had fought in the Pacific Theater in WWII, and was starved in a prison camp. The story reminded me of a work acquaintance from the 1980s, who had a similar hatred born of a similar experience. I believe it safe to presume that most who fought there in that war have passed away, since veterans of that war would be in their 90s at this point. Not all who served learned such bigotries, but some did, and bigotries tend to endure. I mention this because I believe that social evolution relies in no small part on the "aging out" of prejudice and racism. How many slaveowners took their racism to the grave rather than 'seeing the light?'

Every new generation is shaped by what it's taught, how it's raised, and the cultural messaging it receives. If the elite schools and universities serving the current generation pump them full of rote, Lysenko-equivalent garbage, that garbage will continue to metastasize its way into our broader society. Already, we have cadres of young tyrants terrorizing corporations, news organizations, and media hubs from within. Some such have filtered up to the C-suites, and thus we have the ESG movement and stakeholder capitalism corroding the economy. The rote-woke ideologies being pumped into kids’ heads are “aging in” to our broader culture.

Lysenkoism starved millions of Russians to death, and starved even more Chinese when Mao adopted this politically useful but utterly wrong bit of "science" some years later.

Rejecting logic, reason, and evidence when they clash with political narratives isn't just an academic problem, with no impact on the world outside those ivy-covered walls. It's a mentality that is already eroding the nation's economic footing and reversing decades of cultural progress and increasing comity, to everyone’s detriment and to broad national harm.

The long-thinkers in Critical Theory circles have long hoped to induce a societal collapse via the fomenting of divisiveness, so that they can rebuild it into their socialist dream. We should be hoping for a collapse of their woke factories, so that a return to sanity, logic, facts-over-ideology, and Enlightenment values can begin.

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An afterword.

My school’s motto was Virtus victrix fortunae (Virtue is the victor over fate). This, to me, speaks to the aspiration that we are not bound by the circumstances of our birth or the boundaries of our present state - that if we embrace the education being offered, we can achieve greatness. There is terrible irony in the teaching of Critical Race Theory at such schools. CRT tells kids that they are forever tied to the shackles of their skin color, that they cannot rise above their fate. That’s not what any child should be taught, let alone those being primed to run the nation.

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Yours in liberty,

Peter.