Right Wing Nation

It was obvious long ago that there was an education problem in the public school system; when more and more of your students each semester don’t know that =C2*D2 is identical to =D2*C2, or don’t understand the basic order of precedence (and therefore leave out parentheses), it’s hard to miss.

It wasn’t until later, however, that I realized that there was at least as much of a barking moonbat problem in the public schools as there is at the universities.

No, it wasn’t Miss Goth Witch, though she did howl at the moon. She was a sophomore, so she’d had a year to be infected with the LLS (Loony Leftist Syndrome).

It was the beginning of the semester, and we were talking about distributions. My aha! experience went something like this:

“Why do you call it a normal distribution? That’s a value judgment.”

I’m rarely speechless, but I was then. What do you say to something that breathtakingly stupid? But then, another student chimed in:

“You’re saying some distributions are more normal than others, and that’s offensive.”

And as if that weren’t enough, a third student said:

“I agree. Can we call it something else?”

These were freshmen, and it was the fall semester. Had they just taken freshman comp or some wackjob “disadvantaged studies” class, that would have explained where they picked up this stupidity. But these kids were right out of high school, less than three months out of high school. (The good news is that most of the other students were at least curling their lips, if not out and out snickering.)

I’m afraid I was rather unyielding. No, it’s not a value judgment, and no, we can’t call it something else, because it’s a normal distribution, period, the end, that’s all folks, moving right along. The three students weren’t happy that I hadn’t caved to their PC braindeath, but they got over it.

That same, first student also objected to “deviation” in “standard deviation,” and for the same reason (though nobody seemed to mind “standard”). She also objected to “error” (as in “standard error”), and said “it’s just different, not in error.”

Freshmen. Three months out of high school.

Far more mystifying — and disturbing — were the “progressive” students who wanted to be business majors. Why would you want to get a business degree if you believe that capitalism is the most evil thing since Hitler? But more to the point, this kind of thing points to an unsettlingly skewed view of how the world operates and a stupefying lack of self-awareness and introspection, because they apparently don’t see the inconsistency. We would joke among each other about students who would say in class that government intrusion (read: regulation) is good for business, but it really isn’t funny when you think about it. It’s like somebody who is opposed to ever adding 2 and 2 doing a math major.

Granted, there aren’t many of these. Business students are an entirely different animal from liberal arts students. Business students are fiercely competitive, motivated, and goal-oriented. And most of the hippie wannabe types believe business students to be something akin to vampires, and avoid them like the plague. But there are the handful who decide, for some bizarre and inexplicable reason, that they want a business degree.

Back in the 70s when I was an undergrad, we had cults. Today, we have ultra-loony-leftist liberalism. It’s one thing when it permeates the university; students are, after all, on the verge of becoming adults and have to take resonsibility for their own lives. But when it has infected the public schools, well, they’re not adults.

Darren last week posted an article about the student wanting to help the people of Darfur by eating burritos. He ended up taking some heat for what he said, and the above is the reason I came down on his side of the issue. Something is very out of whack in the school system, and somebody needs to inject a bit of realism. These kids need balance, not indoctrination.

Liberals are fond of talking about power, and in one thing they are correct: We do hold power over students. This is precisely why leftist indoctrination passing itself off as education is an abuse of that power, and should be strenuously punished.

And that’s My Word (again, apologies to John Gibson).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Education.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.