When Neel Kolhatkar created his classic “Modern Educayshun” sketch, he forgot one very important thing: satire is redundant in Clown World. No matter how ludicrous the comedic lunacy Kolhatkar might dream up, there’s always a genuine academic who’s ready to go him one better – for real.
Kolhatkar jokes about a student being graded higher because of his race and sexuality? Woke academics are way ahead of him.
But where Kolhatkar really got it wrong was in thinking that a student who turned in a massive amount of work would count for nothing. Putting in effort will indeed be rewarded in a Marksist Edycayshun system.
Not getting the right answer. Goodness, no. No self-respecting Marxist would ever pride themselves on being right.
Just so long as you put in the effort.
Some schools are ditching traditional grading.
Instead, they use “labor-based grading”, an idea promoted by Arizona State University professor Asao Inoue.
Labor-based grading means basing grades more on effort than the quality of work.
After all, Marxist academics have been rewarded for decades, for churning out reams of absolutely nonsensical gobbledegook. None of it makes a lick of sense. In fact, not even other Marxists can even agree on what it means. But, hey, as long as you put in the effort to flatulate stuff like this:
The monistic construction should not lead to a mediatization of the world of states by the authority of a world republic which ignores the fund of trust accumulated in the domestic sphere and the associated loyalty of citizens to their respective nations.
That’s Marxist superstar Jurgen Habermas, by the way. The sentence may be pure nonsense, but no doubt he worked up quite a sweat stringing such a concatenation of world-class bullshit together.
It would have been better if he didn’t even write it in actual English.
In addition, Inoue lectured a conference of rhetoric professors “stop saying that we have to teach this dominant English. … If you use a single standard to grade your students’ languaging, you engage in racism!”
Which is odd, considering how much money and effort non-English-speaking parents around the world put in to making sure their offspring can speak and write English.
My German-speaking parents made me learn proper English. Where would I be if they hadn’t?
Teaching Marxist education theory at a prestigious university, probably.
Lecturing to professors, Inoue says, “White people like you … built the steel cage of white language supremacy … handmaiden to white bias in the world, the kind that kills Black men on the streets!”
What? Teaching standard English kills Black men?
“I think it can,” says Inoue. “We have Eric Garner saying, ‘I can’t breathe.’ But no one’s listening and he dies. That’s the logics that we get.”
Yes: a professor actually said “logics”*. He is also prone to such awkward constructions as “languaging”. I’m inclined to many laughings at his appalling Englishing.
(*Yes, in some circumstances logics can be a proper plural. But definitely not in the sentence quoted.)
But it also begs the question:
I still don’t get it. Eric Garner died because white people teach standard English?
So, if he’d said, “Yo! I ca’t breada’n’sheet*”, he’d still be alive?
If you think I made that up, consult this handy “Ebonics” translator. Because, of course “Ebonics” is a language, now.
Twenty-six years ago, a school board in Oakland, California, announced that its Black students were “bilingual.” They spoke both Black English (Ebonics) and standard English, and the schools should give “instruction to African-American students in their primary language”.
Ebonics advocates told teachers not to correct students who “she here” instead of “she is here.”
When many people, including Black parents, objected, Oakland officials said that they never intended to teach Ebonics, just to recognize it as a legitimate language.
Inoue says that the Ebonics movement didn’t do enough […]
No wonder his students label him “easy grader”. I’m glad he doesn’t teach engineering.
Yo! dahs brahdge wahll be all rahght mah nahzza. (Also a genuine Ebonics translation.)
As it happens, Inoue isn’t some brutha from th’ hood, but a Japanese-American whose parents probably had high academic expectations of their offspring. Instead, he became a self-described “Marxian educator”.
I tell him that Japanese Americans earn, on average, $21,000 a year more than average Americans, yet he keeps talking about America’s “white supremacy”.
“What kind of white supremacist country lets that happen?” I joke.
Inoue replies, “Japanese American communities wanted to be seen as more American” and made great efforts to join American culture.
Takimag
Wait, what? Is he saying that minorities who make an effort and pull themselves up by the bootstraps will rise to the top in America? That sound pretty much like a vindication of the colour-blind American Dream.
But that’s probably racist, or something. (Yo! dat’s racahst.)
