Tag Archives: English language

Peak Idiocy: Rutgers University Declares Grammar ‘Racist’, by Rick Moran

Posted on July 27, 2020 | 1 comment

Now it’s grammar that’s racist, but understanding try language it without. From Rick Moran at pjmedia.com:

(AP Photo/Mel Evans)
If you’re looking for peak idiocy from academic institutions that are falling all over themselves to kowtow to the mob’s notions of “social justice,” look no further.

The English Department at Rutgers University has declared that proper use of grammar is a hidden form of racism because it disadvantages students of “multilingual, non-standard ‘academic’ English backgrounds.”

Grammar is rather boring, so the department is going to sex it up with all sorts of fascinating additions.

Washington Free Beacon:

The “critical grammar” approach challenges the standard academic form of the English language in favor of a more inclusive writing experience. The curriculum puts an emphasis on the variability of the English language instead of accuracy.

“This approach challenges the familiar dogma that writing instruction should limit emphasis on grammar/sentence-level issues so as to not put students from multilingual, non-standard ‘academic’ English backgrounds at a disadvantage,” Walkowitz said. “Instead, it encourages students to develop a critical awareness of the variety of choices available to them [with] regard to micro-level issues in order to empower them and equip them to push against biases based on ‘written’ accents.”

“Variability instead of accuracy” means incorrect usage of grammatical norms. It’s nice that someone speaks a foreign language, but isn’t the whole point of teaching proper grammar teaching foreigners the proper way to speak English?

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Turning on the Light, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on September 9, 2019 | Leave a comment

The first step towards improving the educational system is to teach children to speak and write proper English. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

For years, lawmakers in deeply blue, proudly progressive New York City have grappled with a seemingly intractable problem: Its schools are among the most segregated in the nation.
— The New York Times

And so Bill de Blasio, New York’s Mayor, who has been busy running for president, proposes to end the sorting-out system for the “gifted and talented” (G & T) that is theoretically responsible for that segregation. 75 percent of the G & T kids are Asian and white and, according to the school system’s Diversity Task Force, are not equitably distributed among the schools that end up being mostly black and Hispanic.

The proposal stoked a furor among those very “deeply blue and proudly progressive” parents whose G & T kids have been safely sequestered away from the “normals” who grind out their days in schools that only go through the motions of education and who come out years later unable to read or do math.

I’m a product of the New York City school system, so I know a little about it up close and personal, and many of its current features were well underway in the 1960s, when I was there. My primary school, PS 6, on 82nd and Madison Avenue, was almost entirely white because the Upper East Side was entirely white. However, New York was a middle-class city in those days. The hedge fund had not yet been invented. PS 6 released us little inmates to the streets at noon every day — hard to believe now — and I spent many lunch hours in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was a block away, and free in those days, and pretty empty on weekdays because all those middle-class adults were at work. Even stock-brokers were middle-class back then, though it might be hard to believe.

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