In Seattle, there will now be three kinds of students: those who can add, and those who can't
/
In the future, historians will look back upon the suicide of our civilization and will see this poison for what it is. In Seattle, the city’s public schools have decided that everything, even mathematics, has to be seen through the lens of oppression and racism. Below are actual screenshots from the guidelines for math education there:
This rot has already infected higher education science courses, and now, just as fecal material flows downhill, it’s invading basic education. Here’s Purdue’s Engineering Dean, one Donna Riley, arguing against tough courses and explaining why the school is eliminating “rigor” in testing and learning:
“One of rigor’s purposes is, to put it bluntly, a thinly veiled assertion of white male (hetero)sexuality,” she explains. According to Riley, rigor “has a historical lineage of being about hardness, stiffness, and erectness; its sexual connotations—and links to masculinity in particular—are undeniable.”
“My visceral reaction in many conversations where I have seen rigor asserted has been to tell parties involved (regardless of gender) to whip them out and measure them already,” Riley added.
“Rigor may be a defining tool, revealing how structural forces of power and privilege operate to exclude men of color and women, students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, first-generation and low-income students, and non-traditionally aged students” she expands.
Riley also contends that scientific knowledge itself has a racial bias. “Scientific knowledge itself is gendered, raced, and colonizing,” she claimed, going on to argue it is “inherent masculinist, white, and global North bias…all under a guise of neutrality.”
“We need these other ways of knowing to critique rigor, and to find a place to start to build a community for inclusive and holistic engineering education,” she concludes.
These people have already ruined traditional humanities study; soon it will be worth your life to drive across bridges or enter a building. One could ask who ill be available to design and build all those marvelous yet-to-be-invented green machines that will save us from global warming, but logic itself is a white male construct, so why bother?
