One of the beauties of life is the simple fact that no matter how stupid things get, reality always wins.
Whether your personal life or whether politics writ broadly, the simple fact of the matter is, eventually, you are going to run up against reality — and reality is going to win.
That doesn’t mean bad political ideas can’t emerge victorious in the short- or even the mid-term.
It does mean the realities of human nature, the realities of the world surrounding you, don’t just go away. And ultimately, those policies will fail dramatically. The dumber the policies, the faster they tend to fail.
One of those dumb ideas that has obviously taken center stage of late has been the dumb idea of woke.
Woke is a foolish idea. Now, what exactly is wokeness? Wokeness is the basic idea that if there is any sort of disparity between group outcomes in American life, that group disparity is due to discrimination. The only corrective is, therefore, reverse discrimination or some form of discrimination that is going to equalize the outcomes of the various groups.
We have seen a wide variety of policies that have been implemented in order to close all of these gaps. The Quest for Cosmic Justice — as the great thinker of our time Thomas Sowell has put it — is a foolish quest. It is not something that can be solved because the reality is the vast majority of group gaps are either inborn or they are the result of culture and environment — because those are all the factors that there are.
That does not mean every result is the result of inborn differences. Differences in intellectual outcome very often are about educational or cultural differences as opposed to, for example, height differentials between particular groups; those are about genetics. This happens throughout life.
Looking at the rationales for why things are different in terms of outcomes between groups can be a good way of crafting good policy — but we’ve thrown all of that out in favor of stupidity. Now, we are going to educate our children in the stupidity, which does not reflect reality. We are seeing the results of that.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported on this:
A Hayward elementary school struggling to boost low test scores and dismal student attendance is spending $250,000 in federal money for an organization called Woke Kindergarten to train teachers to confront white supremacy, disrupt racism and oppression and remove those barriers to learning.
The Woke Kindergarten sessions train teachers on concepts and curriculum that’s available to use in classrooms with any of Glassbrook Elementary’s 474 students. The sessions are funded through a federal program meant to help the country’s lowest-performing schools boost student achievement.
The basic theory behind this program is that if you just teach kids self-esteem, they will magically become smarter and better performing. If you teach them about the radical injustices of the life they lead in the freest country in the history of the world, then they will magically perform better.
Only one problem: It fails because reality always wins.
The Chronicle continues, saying:
But two years into the three-year contract with Woke Kindergarten, a for-profit company, student achievement at Glassbrook has fallen, prompting some teachers to question whether the money was well spent given the needs of the students, who are predominantly low-income. Two-thirds of the students are English learners and more than 80% are Hispanic/Latino.
This is not a particular shock because woke kindergarten is a stupid idea. Teaching kids terrible ideas is likely to make them perform worse, not better. District officials defended the program, saying the kindergarten did what it was hired to do.
That’s true, albeit not in the way they intended. They made the scores lower. It made things worse.
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One of the most amazing attributes of the nonprofit world, and this is true virtually across the board, is that nonprofits are constantly exacerbating the problems they are supposed to fight so they can raise money to fight those problems.
This happens all the time in nonprofit land. One of the jobs of politically motivated people on the Left is to exacerbate inequalities so as to claim inequity.
That is the goal. Because if at any point those inequalities actually narrowed as a result of freedom and good incentive structures, then what would they do for a living?