[burtness]

By CRT are you referring to Critical Race Theory? I'm sceptical that its both that influential, or that any good faith reading of CRT supports sacrificing accelerated programs. In particular CRT in education if anything pushes against reliance on standardized testing scores.

[TimTheTinker]

Yes, that’s what I meant (and I for intersectionality). Agreed that CRT/I would oppose standardized tests, but that’s only because CRT/I at its core opposes anything objective. And the philosophy of CRT/I has already made significant inroads in American culture.

Witness all the accelerated programs that have been shut down, the many recent attacks on objective standards—all in the name of “equity” (which does not mean equality of value, treatment, or opportunity—it means creating equal outcomes by whatever means is available —consider the implications carefully).

Universities are being forced to grapple with these ideas, with the core question being “does our university still value the pursuit of truth, critical thinking, and free inquiry above all else, or will we acknowledge that ‘people from oppressed classes have a truth unto themselves that cannot be taught but must be respected, and all opposing viewpoints must be shut down’?”

If this movement hasn’t yet affected you, it will soon. It’s ripping apart social groups all over the place.

(I can give examples of all I’ve described in the morning if you’re interested. I’m just tapping this out before bed.)

[droopyEyelids]

Yeah please share the examples!

What you write sounds plausible, but it also mirrors a lot of what we hear from the right that is at times overstated.

I'd love to hear a set of sober examples- I don't have any connection to early education anymore and I'm really curious.

[fastball]

As someone that has been spending a lot of time around Higher Education over the past 7 years or so, I personally cannot think of a single University I have interacted that isn't making many of their decisions under the influence of the ideas described above.

This is in the US/UK.

[red_admiral]

In the UK at least, the way I read the situation is that most of the Russell Group pays their bills off the fees they can charge international students - and compared to the income this gets us from China, other countries are a rounding error.

The problem is, these students are not coming here to learn how we're all equal, they're paying for a degree that proves they're very much not equal to about a billion people back home (compare the median wage in China with the cost of a one-year MSc in the UK for example).

That's also why most of our Covid-19 planning is around how do we deal with the income loss if 50% fewer international students enrol next year, the options seem to be government bailout or bust.

So there may be an unspoken rule in some places that you don't criticise the latest theories on diversity, but there's an even more unspoken rule that you don't publicly apply them to the situation in Tibet or Urumqi.

It will be extremely interesting to see how these two pressures interact over the coming decade.

[david12345]

It reminds me of a great bit from Yes Prime Minister: "Coffee at the University" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WW7mhtp5a5E

[selimthegrim]

The part later in that episode where the PM shows up to the high table is pretty classic too.

[collyw]

Johnathan Haidt has some good talks on youtube about this sort of stuff. I think he mentioned Chicago University being one that is pushing for "truth" over "social justice".

[TimTheTinker]

Sorry these are coming a whole day later. Here we go:

New York City has (or had?) an active effort in place to cancel/dismantle "gifted" programs in primary and secondary education. Here's the PDF released by their committed last August: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/1c478c_f14e1d13df45444c883bbf... . There are lots of other examples of this phenomenon around the country... I doubt I need to come up with more examples now.

Notably, the University of Chicago came firmly down on the side of free inquiry: http://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/documents/re...

An excellent, charitable, clear-minded discussion on critical theory in general: https://youtu.be/p6DnHxuuXI4

Here's a good introduction to many of the practical, everyday consequences of CRT/I's influence in American culture. It's an interview with Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay (this is part 1, and I think there are 3 or 4 parts in total): https://youtu.be/YDFL3xwEEG8

-- that last one in particular, if you watch the whole thing, is chock full of great examples.

Hope that's helpful. That's all I was able to find in the time I had.

[red_admiral]

The thing is, if you accept the basic "liberal arts" idea of education that it's about creating a common culture, then a lot of the ideas coming from the social justice side of things actually make some sense. From the "liberal" point of view, one of the purposes of English lit class and education in general is to create a common background that people in professional settings can use in conversation - I can use my favourite Shakespearean metaphor to argue a point and I know that you, as an educated colleague, will understand what I mean. I could talk about CRT/I and say "something wicked this way comes" if I wanted to, and you could hopefully decode that. Otherwise I'd have the Herculean task of having to keep a database of which of my colleagues understand which kinds of analogies, or reduce all my communication to the lowest common denominator. For example, I'm assuming here that the expressions "Herculean" and "lowest common denominator" (as a figure of speech) mean something to readers on HN.

If you accept this point of view - and lots of educators past and present have done so, including white male ones - then the student slogan "Why is my curriculum white?" makes sense. Would a stock of common background knowledge (for want of a better word) be that much less effective if it included slightly less Hemingway and Twain and slightly more contributions from more diverse authors? So the argument goes, if (to simplofy a lot) white kids learn about white culture at home and black kids learn about black culture, but the test to get a good job includes the "culture fit" part of can we hold a conversation based on the kinds of analogies and forms of speech you learn at college, then it's (1) unfair if the thing you learn at college just happens to be "white culture" and (2) even more so if a more diverse college education would serve _exactly the same purpose_.

The million dollar question is whether (2) is true. I personally think it mostly is for "arts", mainly because there are different cultures with different languages even within "the west" and several of them seem to work about equally well.

But here's the rub: science doesn't work like that.

There's a philosophical argument that Twain _created_ Huck Finn, but Newton only _discovered_ the laws of motion - if Twain hadn't lived then we might have equally good literature, but it would not be the same. But if Newton hadn't lived, someone else would have discovered F=ma and the like by now, and the formula would be exactly the same.

My main worry is that if the US tries to turn science/tech into liberal arts and China doesn't, then we're creating a new kind of inequality: in a generation or two they will wipe the floor with us. But I'm happy to listen to any argument from the SJ/CRT/I side that doesn't imply us handing over our place in the world to a power who very much believes that all races are not equal.

[DeathArrow]

SJ/CRT movement is devouring itself. The more and more it will affect sciences, technology and other critical economic areas, the more US economy will suffer. That will mean US will be less capable on exporting those ideologies into other countries.

Meanwhile, countries which no such handicap will rise economically and be able to export more of their own ideologies.

[nickik]

That assumes that universities matter for the economy. And that is not really all that clear.

Soviet Union had great schools, doesn't mean their economy was doing well.

The US is still doing well even when its school system and even university system have not really been that great overall.

[iateanapple]

> Would a stock of common background knowledge (for want of a better word) be that much less effective if it included slightly less Hemingway and Twain and slightly more contributions from more diverse authors?

In practice it hasn’t worked out that way.

Instead it has:

1) Created a cultural barrier between the average Joe and the “liberal elite”.

It turns out that Twain etc are approachable to the average high school diploma American in a way the replacements texts are not.

2) Created a clear divide between minorities who study at elite US universities and the rest of us.

For example there is a level of alienation between Chinese tech workers who went to college in the US vs other Chinese tech workers here.

3) Created a group of “liberal elite” who think they can speak on behalf of, and even lead, other cultural groups when what they have learned isn’t representative of those cultures at all.

[burtness]

Its hard to take these assertions seriously while they are so vague, especially as they seem to be respins of the idea that education, and higher education in particular, is taking liberalism/anti-racism/feminism "too far".

My understanding is that you're saying there is a causal link between admission programs being shutdown and CRT/I, and that the particular aspect of CRT/I that causes this is an insistence on equal outcomes across social groups. I'd be interested to first establish what the actual statistics are wrt gifted and talented student programs - are the closing faster than they opening? Are they shrinking or expanding? Where approaches have changed, are the outcomes definitely worse? etc.

Does this mean we are discounting material possibilities, such as just not having enough money or changing demands/restrictions on expenditure? Accelerated programs sound a lot like arts programs - easy to cut with minimal blowback. Are we also discounting that providing fair access to accelerated programs turned out to be far more complicated than we originally thought and that the choice has been to cut rather than spend money on extra tests and more qualified staff? CRT/I [aren't the only academic source](https://sci-hub.tw/10.1080/02783190609554382) of critique these programs receive.

I'd also contest your definition of equity in CRT/I as an overriding principle ('equality of outcomes by whatever means available' and implicitly, regardless of the consequences). CRT/I uses the principle of equity - that outcomes should be proportionate across social groups and that unequal outcomes must be accounted for. The vast majority of CRT/I scholarship explicitly focuses on 'leveling-up' outcomes, and where this focus is not explicit it is normally implicit (in that the paper would not otherwise make much sense, or the prospect of reducing everyone's outcomes to the lowest common denominator is a rhetorical tool).

‘people from oppressed classes have a truth unto themselves that cannot be taught but must be respected, and all opposing viewpoints must be shut down’: This is a misreading of CRT/I, and one that I suggest highlights its value. CRT/I asserts that everybody has a point of view and way of seeing the world that is affected by their various interlocking identities and experience. There are plenty of aspects of life were we generally accept the necessity and uniqueness of experience as a kind of knowledge - jobs, parenting, relationships, etc. Why should race, gender or class be different? However I'd argue that this assertion gets us closer to the truth. Accounting for bias in science and acknowledging how fundamental it is to people and instruments gets us better science, not worse, even if its harder. "all opposing viewpoints must be shutdown", seems to be a strawman: No reading of CRT/I demands this, in fact most of the literature consists of patient, often quantitative, critiques of systems (law, education, science, public health, etc). So if anything, CRT/I furthers the ideals you see it as threatening.

[concordDance]

Examples would be good.

[GoblinSlayer]

https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-p...

[nickik]

CRT is postmodernism, witch is basically what depressed Communists came up with to continue to hope they get communism. The amount of inroads stuff like this has made, specially in universities is beyond sad.