Paulo Freire Raises His Ugly Head

Joanne has a great summary post about Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire, a post primarily about Sol Stern's exceptional rebuttal to Freire's ideas. I've previously written about Freire here and here.

Those three links will bring you completely up to speed on Freire's views and why they're adored by the American Left, even though they haven't been shown to work anywhere.

Math For Social Justice, Part 1

Nineteen years ago, a group of Milwaukee-area teachers had a vision.

They wanted not only to improve education in their own classrooms and schools, but to help shape reform throughout the public school system in the United States.

Today that vision is embodied in Rethinking Schools.

So begins the self-righteous Rethinking Schools website. Of course, any decent person would have to ask what is wrong with such a vision? The sarcastic me would point you to the location of the teachers and indicate that should tell the reader where the teachers are going. The scholarly me is going to walk you through their website and point out the pernicious belief structure that permeates it.

As I read through the Rethinking Mathematics component of the website, a thought kept recurring to me--this sounds like Paulo Freire. Freire was a Brazilian educator who wrote a book entitled Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which he opined that the "filling the brain" model of education is oppressive and that students should learn within the context of doing social good for their communities, a model of education he called "problem-posing". There is much to attack in applying Freire's work to American schools, but the American left is as enamored with this man as I am of Starburst candies. I read the Rethinking Mathematics section before reading The History and Philosophy of Rethinking Schools, which I linked to above. Had I read the History and Philosophy first I wouldn't have had to use my brain so much to find the link to the leftist Freire:

Brazilian educator Paulo Freire wrote that teachers should attempt to "live part of their dreams within their educational space." Rethinking Schools believes that classrooms can be places of hope, where students and teachers gain glimpses of the kind of society we could live in and where students learn the academic and critical skills needed to make that vision a reality.

It was all there for me. But at least I had these Milwaukee educators pegged.

Now don't get me wrong and create a false dichotomy here, with Waldorf-type schools on the one hand and the stereotypical gray-concrete-Soviet-factory-type of school on the other. As I've stated before I believe that education is a social process, one that is greatly facilitated by rapport between teacher and student and by working with other students. I'm all about "academic and critical skills" that prepare students for the trials (and triumphs) of adulthood in our society. However, I very much disagree with Rethinking Schools' social view and the leftward direction in which that would lead students, to the detriment of us all.

Schools are integral not only to preparing all children to be full participants in society, but also to be full participants in this country's ever-tenuous experiment in democracy. That this vision has yet to be fully realized does not mean it should be abandoned.

While I question whether our 229 years of American independence from Britain, or our 218 years of living under the Constitution (counting from 1787), as an "ever-tenuous experiment in democracy", I'll not debate that point. What I would like to bring up is a quote from the Chinese philosopher Confucius, a quote I think apropos of this discussion: "Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous." If I may be so bold as to interpret his meaning, Confucius instructs us that before "thought", before "critical thinking", must come "learning", the mastery of facts, agorithms, etc. Students must have a solid foundation of knowledge in the arts and sciences before they can apply this knowledge to solve problems. Those that have the learning but don't use it (learning without thought) have perhaps wasted their time but have done no harm, but surely the same cannot be said of the person who pontificates without knowledge of fact.

Put simply, if you pose a problem and teach students how to solve it, they learn to solve one problem. Teach them the fundamentals of solving the problem, and they're able to solve a host of related problems. Didn't someone famous once say something about giving a fish to a man and he eats for a day, but teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime? (Yes, I know who it was.)

And what type of problem do you pose? Ah, therein lies the pitfall.

These Milwaukee teachers refer to their publication as "activist", a term I'm sure has a loaded meaning for them. I'm convinced the following, innocuous-sounding paragraph has a different meaning to those who know the codewords than it does to the lay person:

While the scope and influence of Rethinking Schools has changed, its basic orientation has not. Most importantly, it remains firmly committed to equity and to the vision that public education is central to the creation of a humane, caring, multiracial democracy. While writing for a broad audience, Rethinking Schools emphasizes problems facing urban schools, particularly issues of race.

Perhaps even the lay person can see the direction the authors will take us, and it's certainly not a direction in which I'd want to go.

So far I've gone after the philosophy of the Rethinking Schools people and haven't yet discussed the text of the Rethinking Mathematics section. You can see that this post is called Part 1; in later parts I'll attend to math specifically instead of generally. My goal here is to show you the bias and danger inherent in this philosophy as a whole before getting into the details of math instruction. I'll close with one more paragraph.

There are many reasons to be discouraged about the future: School districts nationwide continue to slash budgets; violence in our schools and cities shows no signs of abating; attempts to privatize the schools have not slowed; and the country's productive resources are still used to make zippier shoes, rather than used in less profitable arenas like education and affordable housing.

I love these unsubstantiated statements that are presented as facts. While I have no doubt that some school districts are cutting budgets, the question to ask is, why? Is there no good reason ever to cut a government budget? But let's look at education spending. The EIA website, which I quoted here, gives us the following information:

The percentage increases in current spending on public education for the last 10 years are: 4.7, 6.0, 5.7, 5.7, 6.5, 6.8, 5.5, 6.6, 3.0 and 4.4. NEA estimates that total expenditures on U.S. public schools in 2004-05 were $495,235,283,000.

From the same source:

So we were treated to speeches from NEA state affiliate presidents from Michigan, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts and Ohio – decrying their fiscal situations, referencing devastating cuts to education funding and complaining about "Third World budgets."
...
How about devastating budget cuts? Here are the per-pupil spending estimates for 2004-05 from NEA, released just last week:
Michigan: up 3.6 percent
Illinois: up 6.0 percent
Kansas: up 3.5 percent
Massachusetts: up 5.1 percent
Ohio: up 5.8 percent
California: up 2.4 percent
Nationwide: up 3.3 percent

So the claim for "slashing" budgets is interesting. But we all know that violence "shows no signs of abating", right? Uh, not quite. According to the FBI, crimes of all types have shown a sharp decline in the last few decades. In fact, this report shows that last year crimes were down overall nationally, and in every region. I'm not one who thinks privatizing schools is bad, so let's look at the last part, that "our productive resources are still used to make zippier shoes, rather than used in less profitable arenas like education and affordable housing."

What are they saying here? That our industries should be giving away their profits to public schools? If so, what are taxes for? Or are they saying that profit is bad, that we should not have "zippier shoes" until what these educators see as societal woes are all solved?

Why does the left hate capitalism? What is it about the left that they don't understand that humans are most productive when there is a profit motive at work? They don't like monopolies, because there's no competition in industry and that's bad for the consumer. But they don't like the profit motive that breeds competition, either. Leaves only a few choices that I can see, excessive socialism or communism, and neither meets with my approval.

Future posts will deal with Rethinking Schools' painful political views as they relate to teaching mathematics.

Here's Part 2.

Not Paulo Freire Again

This author wants high school students to have read Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed in high school, presumably so she can continue with the Marxism at the university. I've written about Freire a few times, and challenge Freire's thesis with a single statement attributed to Bertrand Russell: The first task of education is to destroy the tyranny of the local and immediate over the child's imagination.

If you want to read more about the Tucson situation--with a viewpoing that doesn't quite jibe with the first link above--I've written about it here. Notice that it was a judge who said the program was illegal, not the schools superintendent, as the author above stated.

Bertrand Russell vs. Paulo Freire

Too many people I work with are taking CLAD courses (Cross-cultural, Language, and Academic Development--think "bilingual ed") and some have become enamored of Paulo Freire, an education nutball if ever there was one. His Pedagogy of the Oppressed sounds wonderful to those socialists and and other lefties who, again, see people only as groups and not as individuals.

Freire's belief was that there were two kinds of education, banking and problem-posing. Banking is what I think of education--an instructor has knowledge and teaches it to students. This is bad, according to Freire and his devotees, because someone in charge--the oppressor--has decided what the student needs to learn and merely fills that student's head with facts of the oppressor's choosing. The oppressed student has no say in this matter. Problem-posing, however, is the end-all, be-all of education. You allow the student to become a social activist who supposedly learns academic content by solving problems in his or her community. As I've said before, the lefties love this idea of turning students into social activists without ever really teaching them anything.

Bertrand Russell, however, had a different idea. According to one Kieran Egan, “Bertrand Russell, after his first disastrous experiment in organizing a school, observed that the first task of education is to destroy the tyranny of the local and immediate over the child’s imagination."

Russell is correct. The purpose of education is to get a child to see what's beyond his own nose.

Vygotsky and Gramsci

Do you recognize those names? If you earned your teaching credential in at least the last 20 years you probably do. I certainly recall encountering them in my credentialing classes as well as my CLAD (cross-cultural, language, and academic development--think "bilingual") courses. Here's an interesting article that links them:

Months ago, an email from a teacher spurred me to investigate the theories of Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934). My research revealed starry-eyed academics enamored of collectivism.

Vygotsky contended that "creative play" could provide relief to children dealing with "tension" caused by unsatisfied desires.[2] The psychologist expounded on Soviet activity theory, an offshoot of "cultural-historical theory."[3] Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist whom I've discussed in previous articles, also drew on cultural-historical theory. Gramsci's "cultural Marxism" called for the intentional erosion of Western society. Since the 1980s, early childhood education has increasingly incorporated Vygotskyian techniques that answer Gramsci's call...

Two prominent psychologists find that Lev Vygotsky's "Marxist orientation" determined "his scientific preoccupations," in other words, his education theories.[9] Revealingly, nine years after Vladimir Lenin violently seized power and fathered the USSR, Vygotsky lauded "the cleansing threat of social revolution." Furthermore, Vygotsky cheered the crumbling of "the very foundations of bourgeois morality," insisted that the achievement mentality "be swept clear out of our schools," and anointed educators with the job of instilling a new morality. To Soviet Vygotsky, the best morality was Soviet collectivism.

Vygotsky intended to "create the new Soviet Man, the kind of being that would be needed in the Soviet society of the future." The psychologist conceived the "Zone of Proximal Development" (ZPD), a tool for reconditioning young minds and forming a new society from the old. Vygotsky aimed to deliver young collectivists to ruling class elites intent on "societal reconstruction."[10]

Ignoring Vygotsky's motives, the authors of America's early childhood education curricula train teachers in techniques based on the ZPD. A bit of investigation shows that education students are fed "grand" arguments and kept in the dark concerning "numerous underdeveloped ideas and contradictions."[11] The Tools of the Mind organization even admits that Vygotsky's theories are but "a specific set of beliefs." [Emphasis added.] The TOTM curriculum's effectiveness was tested only by a "quasi-experimental study" plagued with sloppy methods.[12] The truth is that there is simply no trustworthy proof that Vygotskyian techniques develop superior cognitive skills in children. Indoctrinated and misled, America's teachers are unwittingly using tactics conceived by a Marxist to spawn USSR-minded kids in the USA.

Teachers are also not informed that Vygotsky detested "capitalist culture," rejected Western society, and cherished the "tribal village." The psychologist prescribed a "moral education" blended "imperceptibly into all those general modes of behavior that may be established and regulated by the social environment." To accomplish the blending, Vygotskyian-trained teachers rigidly control the classroom environment and allow only authoritatively prescribed behaviors. Individualism is verboten. Gene by gene, the collectivist virus erases children's predisposition for achievement. Neuron by neuron, the bug weakens traditional morality. And teachers aren't even aware of having injected the pathogen.

Indeed, teachers faithfully condition children in Vygotsky's "new ways of interacting with people," unaware that those "ways" conform to totalitarian visions.

In one of my classes once, we were given a talk by someone who'd worked directly with Paulo Freire in Brazil. When I asked her a question relating Freire and Gramsci, her response was something along the lines of how much she "enjoyed" getting questions about Italian communists from American Republicans, and that she'd get back to me. Of course she never did.

Not A Bad Start For Age 20, But...

When you're a teacher and you see an article titled This Author Thinks He Knows How To Stop Kids From Hating School, you have to stop and read it.  When you learn that the referenced author is only 20 you feel a little let down, because you know where the article is going to go--straight to Angst-town.

The author is 20 and didn't like school.  He stereotypes (but perhaps not unnecessarily so) and extrapolates--and then comes up with the ideal school:

Goyal documents his research in a new book, Schools on Trial: How Freedom and Creativity Can Fix Our Educational Malpractice. He looks to progressive, democratic schools -- both public and private -- in Chicago, New York and Philadelphia, as models of what's possible. These schools encourage students to take control of their educational experiences, design their own curriculum and play as much as possible. They create happy environments, where bullying is virtually non-existent, Goyal writes....

Hm.  Amazing that that's never been suggested before (except it has been, in every generation since Rousseau).  And my counter to his proposal is the same I've had to Rousseau, to Pestalozzi, to Freire:

According to one Kieran Egan, “Bertrand Russell, after his first disastrous experiment in organizing a school, observed that the first task of education is to destroy the tyranny of the local and immediate over the child’s imagination."

That's not to say that students shouldn't have a wide choice of classes from which to choose.  I think schools should have more electives, not fewer, and students should be allowed more freedom to choose.  I wouldn't go as far as Goyal suggests, though.  Neither am I willing to be completely swayed that we should change our entire educational system because he didn't like school.

As for the next quote, I'm willing to believe that perhaps Huffington Post incorrectly used "destruct" rather than "deconstruct".  If he actually said and meant "destruct", well, then he's just in idiot; why should schools, paid for by contributing members of society, encouraging "destructing" that very society?

I think they're creating docile, passive adults who largely are not capable of complex, critical thinking.

I think they generally create people who fit into the social order and don’t look to destruct it as much. It's very rare for kids to come out of school with a lot of their imagination and curiosity intact.

I'm on record as saying that a prerequisite to critical thinking is having a large base of knowledge about which to think critically.  And Goyal here paints with an extremely broad brush, one I'm not sure that he's intellectually capable of handling.  Really, it's "very rare" for kids to graduate with imagination and curiousity?  Really?

I'm sure Goyal is well-meaning and may very well have some good ideas.  The ideas expressed in the linked article certainly aren't bad for a man of 20--but I'm not ready to "destruct" our educational system and replace it with his, not just yet.

The Tyranny of Relevance

Edublogger Joanne is off on a cruise (lucky!) and has not one but two capable stand-ins.  I read this today:

In other words, if you can persuade kids to stick with something that’s initially difficult or not palpably fun, you see their interest grow over time. But if you give up, you encourage the “relevance” crutch: you feed their demand for studies that feel good and seem to meet their needs and wants, right now. “Relevance” and “fun” are not exactly the same, but in their shallowest form they become close to synonymous. When omnipresent, they become that shallow.

It takes a lot of energy to get students to stick with something in their studies that doesn’t immediately grab them–but it’s worth the struggle. Then they become capable of a larger range, and they overthrow the tyranny of relevance.

The tyranny of relevance.  Hmmm, I like that. The embedded link is to the author's own blog on the subject, where she states the following:

The polarization of education discussion is sad—but even sadder are some of the points of consensus. Across ideologies, educators insist that education should be immediately and obviously relevant to students’ lives. Those of a narrow utilitarian bent maintain that a lesson should have a specific, explicit, measurable objective and that students should be constantly working toward that goal. Students should know exactly what they are learning and should always have a “task” to perform; by the end of the lesson, they should be able to demonstrate attainment of the objective. By contrast, “student-centered” educators hold that the lesson should shape itself around the students’ opinions, interests, needs, and desires. Though opposed on the surface, the two camps commit the same error: they reduce education to what can be immediately grasped and used.

Of course education should be relevant to students’ lives; of course students should not be endlessly frustrated in their search for meaning. But what sort of meaning? Promoters of relevance have taught children to expect quick connections to their lives, whether they are making a “text-to-self connection,” completing a “Do Now” exercise about a childhood memory, or “sharing out” at the end of the lesson. As a consequence, when students don’t see the direct application to their lives, they not only stop paying attention, but start disrupting class or ask for something interesting to do. On the one hand, there is something honorable in this protest; on the other, it can be shortsighted, especially when the students don’t wait to see what a book or lesson holds.

The students did not create this situation; they were brought up in it. They have been taught, day after day, to expect their learning to apply to real life. The idea that a theorem could be interesting for its elegance or its relation to another theorem—that is remote from their consciousness. A few students enjoy patterns, possibilities, shades of meaning; they enjoy coming to understand things that were dense or distant before. But many hold to the doctrine—which the Church of Present-Day Relevance preaches—that the teachers are supposed to make things clear, fun, and useful this very minute.

I can't address the issue of relevance without yet another reference to Paolo Freire's flawed ideas and Bertrand Russell's and Will Fitzhugh's insightful ones. Put simply, there's more to the world that what interests a student in the here and now.  If we indulge only what interests or what is relevant to the student, we do them the disservice of failing to provide the broad education that we're supposed to.

Our job is to open minds, not to reinforce their closure.

(Now go read my post at the last link.  Go ahead, it won't take long!)

Filter Bubbles

Given that I have a lot of time on my hands lately, I've taken to watching TED videos. What is TED? Here's some information from the About Ted page:

TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences -- the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh UK each summer -- TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and TED Conversations, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize.

The annual TED conferences, in Long Beach/Palm Springs and Edinburgh, bring together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes or less).

On TED.com, we make the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free. More than 900 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week. All of the talks are subtitled in English, and many are subtitled in various languages. These videos are released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.

Our mission: Spreading ideas.

Some of it is pretty highbrow stuff, but much that's interesting is.

Anyway, I just finished watching this video and wanted to comment on it immediately. If you have 9 minutes and 5 seconds to spare, go watch it; if you don't, I'll not do it justice with this synopsis:

The speaker fears that instead of presenting us with a "worldful" of information, the internet instead is allowing each of us to live in a "bubble" wherein we get only the information we want to get--to the exclusion of ideas that challenge ours. This often happens behind our backs, as search engines use detailed algorithms to feed us information based on several criteria (e.g., our location, our browser, our search history, etc.). This lack of diversity of ideas being presented to us threatens, among other things, democracy itself.

I'll state up front that the author labeled himself a "progressive", and at that point I feared he was going to suggest some form of legislation mandating that we receive information we might not want. I was ready to award myself the Prescience Prize when he talked about newspaper editors as the old "gatekeepers of information", and his fears that nameless, faceless algorithms , without humanity and ethics, are replacing editors as gatekeepers. I was ready to pounce--but he never suggested mandates or legislation; rather, he appealed to search engine companies (Larry and Sergey in particular) to make their algorithms transparent and to allow users to have control over their own filters, to find and have access to whatever information they want regardless of their search history. In this I applaud the speaker.

If my tangent has taken us too far from the speaker's thesis, let's review it: that search engines are filtering content for us, without our knowledge, with the result that we don't even have access to a variety of points of view. Among other things, this is bad for democracy.

Again, I feared he was going to suggest legislative mandates. He spoke about intellectual fine dining vs. intellectual fast food, and I wondered: who is to determine that which is valuable and that which isn't? After all, is not one man's garbage another man's treasure? To his credit, he appeals to search engine companies to allow individuals to determine their own filters. He suggests society would be better off if people were to be presented with the opportunity, at least, to access information that might run counter to their own world views, and on this point he and I happily agree. Allow me to show a case in point:

In my Cross-cultural, Language Acquisition and Development (CLAD) classes I was introduced to the writings of one Paulo Freire, a Brazilian socialist who posited that rather than telling students what they need to learn, we should allow them to explore ideas that interest them. While it sounds wonderful, I side more with the idea of Bertrand Russell that education should get a child to see what's beyond his own nose.

You might think I'm being hypocritical here, stating above that people should choose what they want and here stating that we should force a curriculum on children, but honestly, let's not go there. I'm willing to be a bit more paternalistic with children than I am with adults, and for millenia that's been a reasonable position to hold. If you want to argue it, let's not do so here.

Back to the TED speech: I compare the speaker's point to Russell's in that we need to allow access to a wide world of information, and that we should resist a "tyranny of the local and immediate", especially when it is imposed on us without our permission.

We should be free to choose, and not be force fed information by either a human or an algorithmic gatekeeper. It's the same reason I oppose the so-called fairness doctrine.

Update: added the last two sentences.

Education Quotes Regarding What's "Relevant" To Students

Earlier this week I received the March 2010 issue of Education Matters, the periodic publication of the Association of American Educators, and enjoyed reading Will Fitzhugh's article titled History Relevant to Them: NC debates the role of history in schools. The article itself discusses a suggestion in North Carolina that would change the required US history class to include history only since 1877 (the end of Reconstruction)--to make history "more relevant" to the students.

Two thoughts in that piece jumped out at me, and not just as they relate to history. The first was Kieran Egan's quote from Bertrand Russell, which I've posted on this blog before:

The first task of education is to destroy the tyranny of the local and immediate over the child's imagination.

Later, Fitzhugh himself makes some very lucid points:

But the task of academic work is not to appeal to a student's comfortable confinement to his own town, friends, school, and historical time (exactly the same criticism I had of Paulo Freire--Darren).

Academic work, most especially history, opens the student to the wonderful and terrible events and the notable human beings of the ages. To confine him to what is relevant to him before he does academic work is to attempt to shrink his awareness of the world to an unforgivable degree...

Our job as educators is to open the whole world of learning to them, to see that they make serious efforts in it, and not to allow them to confine themselves to the ignorance with which they arrive into our care.

Hear, hear.

Bilingual/Multicultural Education, Part VI--The Final Class Begins

From 6/2/03:

The State of California requires 12 units in 4 specific courses to get a CLAD--cross-cultural language and academic development--certificate. Sacramento State "requires" 15 units; I dropped the one course not required by the state and today started the final course--Multicultural Education.

If the first two reading assignments are any barometer of the tone of this class, I'm in for a long month. The first was an article about unearned white and male privilege in society--no facts in the article, just unsubstantiated statements that pass for empowerment.


The second is from a book called Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire. Reading the first chapter, I got the impression I was reading the Communist Manifesto, what with all its class warfare references. Shortly into the chapter came the references--Hegel, Marx, Engels, and Mao!!! And keep in mind, these are the reading assignments given on the FIRST DAY OF
CLASS!

I'm hopeful that such assignments are not going to be the norm. However, I'm mindful of a quote whose originator eludes me: "Hope is all you have left when you're tired of being afraid."

Actually, that class ended up being exceptional. The instructor tolerated, accepted, validated, challenged, and encouraged views and opinions different from her own. Especially given the title of the course, I fully expected a "hate whitey" course. Instead, it was the antithesis of such a course. I was so glad to be done with that program, but at least this particular course ended it on a good note.

Women's Sports (and A Name From My Past)

I'm a pretty smart cookie.  I know what a woman is.  I also know that, for the most part, women cannot compete physically with men.  If that weren't true, there wouldn't be women's sports leagues or women's sports in K-12 and college.  

And no, a guy who claims to be a woman isn't a woman.  William Thomas was an average swimmer until he changed his name to Lia and started swimming on the women's team, shattering records as he went.  At least Bruce Jenner competed as a man and still set records.  When a "trans woman" set a bunch of records in weightlifting in Canada, this happened:

A bearded pro powerlifter entered a women’s competition in Canada — and smashed a record held by a trans lifter who was watching.

Avi Silverberg, the head coach for Team Canada Powerlifting for more than 10 years, entered Saturday’s Heroes Classic tournament in Lethbridge, Alberta, after identifying as a female.

Video shared by athlete activist group the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS) shows him walking up to the platform still fully bearded and wearing a regular men’s singlet.

He then casually bench-pressed nearly 370 pounds — beating the current Alberta women’s record by almost 100 pounds.

That record — 275 pounds — was held by trans athlete Anne Andres, who was seen watching Silverberg while volunteering at the event.

This is the part I love:

ICONS said Silverberg “mocked the discriminatory [Canadian Powerlifting Union] policy” that allows competitors to register for events under their “gender identity and expression, rather than their sex or gender,” vowing “no consequences” for doing so.

Your policy is stupid. 

That worthless human Megan Rapinoe, whose team was beaten by some teenage boys, would be the nobody she deserves to be if she had to compete against men.  Even LGBT icon Martina Navratilova has acknowledged that men should not compete athletically against women.

Here's what gets me:  we all know this to be true.  We all know that most men are bigger, stronger, and faster than most women.  It's not a secret, it's not something that's just been discovered.  This has been known by every member of our species for millenia.  If this weren't true, we never would have passed Title IX and required universities to have more women sports than they previous had.  That was done in 1972, back in the Dark Ages when people still had common sense.

So now we have Riley Gaines, an NCAA Champion (woman) swimmer, attacked physically by a biological man who claims to be a woman, because he didn't share Riley's viewpoint.  And crazy lefties condemn Gaines because she is smart enough to think that women shouldn't have to compete against men athletically, and says so openly.  I don't hear any of them condemning the biological male who decked her, no, that would be "transphobic".  There was more than just one striking blow, read the whole story at the link.

When I was growing up, we were taught that a man should never hit a woman.  The reason was obvious--it would be an unfair physical contest.

I heard more details about Gaines' ordeal while I was driving to work today, and then I heard a name.  I came home and read the article linked above:

But SF State’s vice president for student affairs and enrollment management, Jamillah Moore, sent an email that made no mention of an apology to Gaines, or the acts following her speech about saving women’s sports to the university’s chapter of Turning Point USA. 

"Let me begin by saying clearly: the trans community is welcome and belongs at San Francisco State University. Further, our community fiercely believes in unity, connection, care and compassion, and we value different ideas even when they are not our own," Moore wrote.

"Thank you to our students who participated peacefully in Thursday evening’s event. It took tremendous bravery to stand in a challenging space. I am proud of the moments where we listened and asked insightful questions. I am also proud of the moments when our students demonstrated the value of free speech and the right to protest peacefully. These issues do not go away, and these values are very much at our core."

Jamillah Moore.  That's not a common name. 

Twenty years ago I took 4 courses at Sac State in pursuit of a CLAD (cross-cultural, language, and academic development) credential.  It was all the rage at the time, ensuring we teachers knew how to deal with students for whom English wasn't their first language.  I wrote 7 blog posts about my experience, which wasn't positive, and the links are included in this post.

I was in a cohort of teachers, most of whom were from my district, who were taking classes for the CLAD credential.  In one class there were about 25 teachers, mostly from my district, and all were women but me.  The instructor created such a horrible class environment that--I am not exaggerating here--one of the other teachers would just spontaneously burst into tears, even if we were just working individually and quietly.  And no, it was never the same person twice.  You could cut the tension with a knife.  I ended up having a relative of that instructor as one of my students a few years later (daughter or niece, I can't remember now) and I'll admit it took me a long time to warm up to that child.  Anyway, that instructor ran a class that was by far the worst educational experience I'd ever had.

So going into next (and for me the final) class, most of us expected another train wreck, another racist disaster.  I was quite surprised at how welcoming the instructor of this class was, how she "walked the walk" of tolerance, how she didn't attack when faced with an opinion with which she disagreed.  I certainly didn't agree with some of the readings in that course, especially by nutjob Paolo Freire, but being exposed to ideas with which we disagree is part of education.  The instructor handled the class adeptly, she truly impressed me.

Her name was Jamillah Moore.

To say I'm disappointed in her (non-)response to the SFSU mob violence would be a tremendous understatement.