What does it mean to teach "social justice" and "diversity"? University of British Columbia deepens its project of academic tyranny

Before we turn to today's news in the Vancouver Sun, let us ask ourselves, what could it possibly mean to teach, in the context of a teachers' college, "social justice" and "diversity"? What could it mean to be a professor, at the centre of a room of students, telling them that when they become teachers they too must instill in students a respect for "social justice" and "diversity"?

Is the form of a lecture, or mere seminar leader - i.e. telling people what is just and diverse - consistent with raising people to be just and diverse in their habits? Or does our submission to the lecturer's authority mitigate against our acquiring the appropriate habits? And what happens when the lecturer/class leader is aware of such a possibility and avows, in response, that she will do all she can to insure she only speaks in the name of empowering those who are somehow oppressed by our inherited norms and habits, as they pertain to teaching?

I think first asking such questions will help us divine what we are being told by this news report:

Social justice and diversity issues would get unprecedented attention in every course offered by the University of B.C.’s education faculty if a major program overhaul that began several years ago is approved.

“It’s safe to say that every aspect of our program is going to be changed,” associate education dean Rita Irwin said in an interview. “We want to be as responsive as possible to what’s happening in schools. Right now, we’re doing our best to do that, but we think there’s a need to reconfigure.”

It won’t simply be a matter of the university following the lead of B.C. high schools and offering an optional course similar to Social Justice 12. Rather, social justice and diversity are expected to become dominant themes in all education courses, Irwin said.

“If only one class deals with it, then teacher candidates can kind of set it aside. What we’re trying to say now is that you can’t set it aside. You have to understand that it infuses everything you’re doing.”

You have to understand... that I have authority because I speak for those you would forget, if you could...

For example, she said students taking a mathematics course might also end up discussing class, gender or race.

But what could this mean? That in trying to learn the intricacies of algebra, students will be distracted and lectured on the problematic nature of a discipline in which boys have historically done better than girls? in which Asian students tend to better than others? that algebra is somehow testament to the brilliance of Islam or the Arabs in learning how to link together the disparate bits and pieces of their own culture? But how could any such questions be negotiated while actually learning algebra? And perhaps more important, how can any classroom difference be negotiated by ordinary students supposedly interested in "justice" and "diversity", if they have to defer to a central authority? and is a deferral to central authority not inevitable when we define the problem as a greatly scandalous one of "class, gender, or race", when it's no longer a matter of inter-personal differences but an invidious difference of world historical signficance?

Irwin stressed that the redesign has not yet been approved by the university senate. “We’re pretty confident it will go through, but theoretically, it’s not quite through yet,” she said, adding she doesn’t expect changes will take effect before 2012.

The proposals are so far-reaching that Irwin described the process as the “re-imagining” of the UBC education degree. Part of that includes an expectation that education graduates would be “teacher inquirers” with an understanding of a wide range of education issues. As an example, Irwin said they would comprehend the arguments for and against the categorization of special-needs students.

“We want them not to think of teaching in a technocratic, instrumental way but ... [as something] that’s constantly evolving. They need to be attentive to the society around them, they need to be lifelong, life-wide learners, they have to take into consideration what new research in education is saying.

“We really want them to be questioners [and] people who are going to be engaged.”

And what if our questioning leads us to a realization that teaching "social justice" and "diversity" is the epitome of technocratic instrumentalism and as such the great enemy of individual questioning? What if those in authority who are telling us to question authority do so because this is a devious way of asserting their lingering authority in an age that likes to think it has learned the lessons of how dictatorships work. I mean, "Class! Can you tell me of one twentieth-century dictatorship anywhere in the world that didn't justify its authority in the name of saving the people from their oppressors, be these Jews, Freemasons, kulaks, bourgeois, the educated, the technocratic, Americans, white colonialists, etc. etc.? Does a dictatorship ever exercise power in the name of personal responsibility, unless it is pointing to a failure of someone's personal responsibility because said person is allegedly serving the cause of some oppressive group?

And even when you are aware that so much authority justifies itself by declaring the previous holders of authority to have been just so reliant on scapegoating and oppressing, can you yourself escape the cycle of scapegoating and oppressing if you propose to teach "social justice" and "diversity" instead of, say, individual responsibility in the context of maximally free political and economic markets?

The faculty also hopes to encourage specific areas of interest, such as UBC’s social-emotional learning experiment that began this year as the first in North America and possibly the world, Irwin said. (Social and emotional learning is a process for helping students develop the knowledge, understandings and skills that support learning, positive behaviour, and constructive social relationships.)

Nope, no one can accuse them of promoting technocratic authority...

Speaking for myself, I think we would have a lot more justice, and genuine diversity in our society if we made teaching a profession that anyone could enter on their own merits, regardless of whether they had passed through perhaps the most PC institution in our society and perhaps the universities' least intellectually serious faculty - the teachers' colleges. I think we would have a lot more justice and diversity if instead of worshiping professors we respected, in our own individual and barely public ways, people like Laura Wood, The Thinking Housewife.

In the linked article, Wood argues that schools are becoming dominated by feminine values that, on the one hand, marginalize boys and their needs, and on the other set up girls to expect the world but in a way that is to insure at some point in the future a great personal fall and disappointment when the girls learn the world is not what they have been led to believe, that they cannot have everything.

Class! Can there be any doubt that what the University of B.C.'s education faculty proposes is to further assert feminine classroom authority, an unquestionable maternal authority, in the name of "social justice" and "diversity"? Again, I ask you how can these values be asserted without asserting a centralized authority without which all that we are taught to be totally scandalous - the invidious distinctions we ascribe to "class, race, and gender" - cannot be mediated. I mean, once we believe "social justice" and "diversity" MUST be a part of everything we do, are we left to do anything without deferring to whomever has the power to make the necessarily arbitrary dictates on what is and isn't a scandal to "equality" and "justice" in the "diverse" classroom? Can individual students who don't aspire to serve in the ranks of a victim-naming priesthood really be empowered by such a curriculum? How can I discuss my difference with you if what divides us is all the hidden power of the "class, race, gender" system? Must I not defer to the authoritative diagnosis of the alleged evils before we can start to talk? and would not such a deferral mean we won't really talk, but rather you will lecture me on my "privilege" and I must either go along with that or get out?

Can real differences and diversity emerge under such a regime, or can we only ritualize and freeze in place some set of authoritative social distinctions that only slowly changes according to the politics in the backrooms of the teachers' colleges? Does "social justice" and "diversity" mean anything other than that we must become more, not less, dependent on the University of British Columbia Faculty of Education?

I think those who truly wish students to be able to make a difference have to focus on the individual person. But alas, that is an idea firmly rooted in Western, Judeo-Christian traditions. And that is the great scandal of our times...

In the meantime, practical students will be pressured more and more to ask only "what are the hoops we have to jump through" to please the technocratic authority that disguises itself in the names of "social justice" and "diversity" and anti-technocratic authority? And the real teachers and good people who make their way in the world despite all the evils of academic officialdom will be stuck with the task of asking how to turn the "what are the hoops?" question into a genuine moment for learning.

The Bloody Cost Of Willful Denial

Writing from a nation at war with itself, Pakistani blogger Nadeem F. Paracha's passionate post reminds us that the world is filled with souls at war with reality, and how tragically common it can be for the human mind to imprison itself within a cage of lies, binding itself into a slumber so deep that neither bullets, burnings nor bombs can successfully wake it from a living dream of willful denial.

A Nation Of Sleepwalkers:

...
Take for instance the recent case of a famous TV anchorman who visited a devastated area in Peshawar that was bombed by a remote-controlled car bomb. He talked to about 10 people at the scene. More than half of the folks interviewed spouted out those squarely unproven and thoroughly clichéd tirades about RAW/CIA/Mossad being the ‘real perpetrators’ and that ‘no Muslim is capable of inflicting such acts of barbarity.’
...
I felt bad for the few bystanders at that Peshawar bombing site who kept contradicting their more gung-ho contemporaries by reminding them that for months the shopkeepers where receiving threatening letters from the Taliban warning them that they should stop selling products for women and ban the entry of women in the area.

One shop-owner who said he lost more than millions of rupees worth of goods in the blast was slightly taken aback when the anchor asked him who he thought was behind the bomb attack. For a few seconds he looked curiously at the anchor’s face, as if wondering why would a major TV news channel be asking a question whose answer was so obvious. ‘What do you mean, who was responsible?’ he asked. ‘The Taliban, of course!’

Fasi Zaka wrote a scathing piece on the floozy response of some students who chanted slogans against the Kerry-Lugar Bill outside the freshly bombed Islamic University. He was battered with hate mail, even from those who did agree with him that it were the Taliban who bombed the unfortunate university. But these folks turned out to be even worse than the deniers. They are apologists of all the mayhem that takes place in the name of Islam in this country.

Every time the barbarians set themselves off taking innocent men, women, and children with them, these apologists suddenly emerge to write letters to newspapers and try to dominate internet forums explaining the intricate ‘socio-economic problems’ that are turning men into terrorists.

The West's cult of human sacrifice

(Update: welcome Steyn/NRO readers; feel free to join the discussion in the comments...)

If you ever doubted that the political correctness of the West is a cult of human sacrifice, one that needs a continual stream of victims to sustain its reality-denying pieties, now is the time to watch the MSM. Wretchard, as he so often does, provides some great analysis of the problem, as he responds to MSM reports that the Fort Hood killer, Hassan, was somehow a victim of Muslim baiting, traumatic stress, and "compassion fatigue" (quotes are from comments 47, 110, 132, and 155):

I wonder whether we as a society kept saying “it’s OK” even when it really wasn’t OK. So a guy like Hasan follows the breadcrumbs without apparent consequence. Political correctness denies him any real negative feedback until one day the breadcrumbs lead him over the edge and society comes at him like Gangbusters. The negative feedback comes all at once all in the shape of the SWAT team.

Even after the Fort Hood incident polite society may still be sort of sending the message “it’s OK” by dancing around the jihad issue. This disincentivizes the Muslims who hate what Hasan did by making them invisible men. Society has built a kind of closet for peaceable Muslims to go an hide in. If any of them wanted to come out and call Hasan an SOB they’d be like little kids looking around them in a haunted wood surrounded by thousands of glowing wolf eyes.

I sometimes wonder whether half the guys who decide to go and become jihadis aren’t carried along three quarters of the way by polite approval and reflexive anti-Americanism until all some imam has to do was pick them up and carry them across the finish line. While it’s true Hasan crossed the line all on his own it may be because he had the guts to put some of the toxic points some people only talk about into action. The things he espoused are old hat. You can get any edgy radical to say them. It was the action that was new.
[...]
All democratic struggles, whether in secular society or in a religious context, are between the region +/- 2 sigma from the mean and the tails. In other words, it’s a battle that the ordinary Joe — or Mehmet as the case may be — must wage to preserve daily life against the brilliant kooks on the right hand tail of the distribution and the moron kooks on the left hand tail. It’s between the people who are content to wait for Jesus — or the 13th imam — and those who for reasons of their own, think they are the Messiah — or Mahdi — himself.

One of the reasons political correctness is so damaging is that it shuts everybody up. It creates inaction, and therefore prevents the implementation of small, relatively painless corrections until a huge head of steam is built up; like a boiler at 2,000 psi, just waiting to blow. It constipates every politician; turns public discourse into codespeak, creates a climate of suspicion, enables fruitcakes and in general turns the whole friggin political arena into a funny farm.
[...]
I don’t think it is right to wish for the death of hundreds of millions of people or to hope for mass deportations. But it is precisely for that reason that it is important to restore a rational process that prosecutes the guilty and protects the innocent. When you think about it there is little to choose from between a system of political correctness which treats everyone, regardless of guilt, as innocent and one that treats everyone, regardless of innocence, as guilty. Both have the same net outcome: the goats have no incentive to separate themselves from the sheep.

Political correctness is lynch mob mentality in another guise. The eventual effects are the same. Group innocence flips to group guilt. Eventually anyway. It just delays the lynching until everyone can be hanged. So everything tootles along in a kind of fake normalcy with everyone smiling fakely at everyone else with gritted teeth until the desired and long awaited Der Tag comes along and then it is open season. The beast gets turned loose and look out below.

Now it is precisely because we must avoid nuking this place and that place in response to a nuke in this American city or that American city that a legitimate war on terror must be fought. That UN rapporteur who thinks using Predators is a violation of international law has everything backwards. If you don’t get them terrorists the day will come when it won’t be Predators but B1s and B2s that will be in action. It’s like the national security equivalent of the subprime crisis. Keep kicking the can down the road until you kick it over a precipice and then follow after it. It’s crazy.

What the subprime crisis — and the deficit spending of today — has convinced me of is that many politicians have absolutely no regard for long term consequences. they couldn’t care less. What matters is now. Ahora. En este momento. What happens tomorrow is none of their concern. Sayonara buddy. Been nice knowing you. You’d think it impossible, but we just saw it happen to the economy. Now we think: but surely the politicians can’t be crazy enough to set up a powderkeg that blow up in our faces. I wouldn’t bet on it.

But I think the real enemy — in the sense of the most important enemy — isn’t a bunch of flea-bitten jihadis sitting in a cave somewhere. It’s Western civilization’s craziness. We are setting our hair on fire and putting it out with a hammer.
[...]
What I’m really scared of, especially after watching the self-flagellating clips on TV talk shows, is that the elite are finally on the road to giving the Openly Ridiculous Order. Hasan created a terrible dilemma for the politically correct. If they recognize his existence their whole house collapses; and rather than bend slightly and allow for the fact that America might just be facing an enemy, they’ve doubled down. It’s incredible, but a lot of them are upping the ante on a patently ludicrous proposition. ‘Hasan was just too compassionate. Hasan was just another victim of George Bush’s failed policy’.

And the net result of this, if the PC clowns can get away with their campaign of inversion they will practically ensure two things happen simultaneously. A: they will make any rational inquiry into traitors in the military impossible and B: they will put all Muslims, however patriotic, however brave under a cloud of suspicion from which they can never emerge. It will be like affirmative action in its worst sense all over again. Rather than promote integration it will promote fractionalization. If America doesn’t have a Muslim problem now it soon will — courtesy of political correctness.

But there’s worse.

Eventually you will have situations in which people who are actually not trusted may be put in formal positions of authority simply because they can’t be questioned. This when the Openly Ridiculous Order situation comes in. When an elite starts to issue lunatic directives a certain something snaps. They lose legitimacy. People obey, but they do not comply. In other words, they start to obey only when the bosses are around. The moment the super leaves the room, they all start to laugh at him.

The really perverse thing about political correctness isn’t that they give you slops to eat; it’s that they give you slops to eat and expect you to smile and ask for seconds. The entire exercise is pointless except as an exercise and confirmation of power over you.

Societies don’t last long when their leaders become ridiculous. It’s a dangerous moment. In many ways the damage that Hasan created in Fort Hood, bad though it was, will be as nothing to the cannons he’s untied that are now rolling unsecured around the deck.