Matthew Yglesias on “Critical Race Theory and Actual Education”

 Matthew Yglesias, of slowboring dot com, quotes a bad educational idea associated with the antiliberal left.

“Valuing “written communication over other forms,” [Glenn Singleton] told me, is “a hallmark of whiteness,” which leads to the denigration of Black children in school. Another “hallmark” is “scientific, linear thinking. Cause and effect.””

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1. Implying that something would be wrong with “blackness” would be racist. Singleton’s suggestion that “whiteness” is bad reveals a common double standard of those with his political outlook.

2. Opposing “written communication” is anti-intellectual.

3. The reason skyscrapers don’t fall down; and the wings didn’t break off your airliner during turbulence, is that those who designed them engaged in “linear thinking.” (Anyway, science is much more than linear thinking: It’s Discovery and Demonstration. Newton’s apple: Discovery. Newton’s phenomenal conceptual analysis, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica: Demonstration via linear thinking.) I was pissed off when the hippies whined about linear thinking, and am flat out offended that Singleton carries their stupidity into the 21st century.

A hallmark of those who, unlike Singleton, are not delusional, is that they get “cause and effect.”

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Yglesias concludes: “If we stigmatize tests because they tell us bad news about racial gaps in academic achievement and then flood the zone with questionable initiatives whose efficacy we refuse to even try to measure, bad things are going to happen to the country.”