SUCKER.

I’ve recently discovered that’s true.

Ah bum, my greater-that / less than symbol was predictably eaten as the opening and closing of a HTML tag. You get the gist. I wonder if “><” works…

You can extend this absurdity to mathematics. 1+1=2 demonstrates a bias against the “world views” that posit that 1+12. Do maths teachers have to give equal time to these other world views, for every other bloody number? There’s an infinite number of alternatives, and if you divide any number by infinity you wind up with zero, ergo to give even time you must teach “1+1=2″ a total of zero times.

This is stupid.

I think people forget the natures of conservation and progression. If a student learns nothing, it is a conservation of their cognitive state and if they learn something new, it is a progression.

Conservatism by definition is the observance of tradition until you are forced to do otherwise, even beyond the point where reason breaks your theory (hence why the conservative end of the spectrum is haunted by homophobic dead-morality, creationism, pseudo-science racism and so on) whereas universities are the place where new knowledge is generated and old theories are broken.

Of course learning institutions have a bias against conservatives. Motivated conservatism isn’t just a political persuasion it’s also by way of it’s deficient epistemology a form of learned mental retardation.

And of course “leftist academics” are going to seem intellectually intimidating to someone who is retarded. The distinction needs to be made between an academic that appears intimidating and a teacher that is motivated to intimidate.

It’s the same with difficult assignments; they may intimidate the student but that’s no reason to give them something so bloody damn far in their comfort zone. Or in the case of the whinging conservative, a right-wing-relativism, all-views-are-correct, even-if-the-evidence-says-that-the-crap-they quoted-from Ham/Lind/Behe/etc is entirely false, charity. A motivated, responsible learner (i.e. a student who is doing what is obligated of them) doesn’t shirk the kind of challenge that an intellectually rigorous task presents.

Bias and indoctrination aren’t the same thing of course. Indoctrination is a methodology and evidence of bias isn’t evidence of indoctrination.

Indoctrination if either conservative or progressive is bad but what I do find interesting in having watched this kind of anti-academic, anti-progressive witch-hunt take place in the US is that they sometimes find evidence of bias, but rarely of indoctrination. Indeed, as with the Benning case in Denver, the parts of recordings where the teacher made caveats that his lectures were to be critically analysed and that he was in parts playing the devil’s advocate, were removed before being handed over to the media.

I can remember Mike Jericho in a case of special pleading, pointing to the tone of Benning’s voice. It was shrill. So what? It proves nothing (just like the rest of the selective evidence presented in the witch-hunt).

I expect the same phonyism to occur down under. I also expect that as with Howard’s Public-Schools-Have-No-Values-BS from 2004, only the utter nutters are going to take it seriously and most people will just tell them to go and take a jump.

Only this time, I suspect the Australian public will be even less likely to be caught out by this kind of spin (as indicated by their treatment of the product of the right-wing culture warrior propagandists over the past 16 months).

Has Nick seen this?

When they make a podcast out of that, my ship will truly have come in.

All we could remember was that it was Jed Clampett in the Beverley Hillbillies.

Another noice one, and well done to Kej.

the Young Liberals purge of leftists seems familiar to me.

it reminds me of the Cultural Revolution I instigated back in the day, students closing schools, persecuting teachers for not being communist enough…hey even actually killing the treacherous bastards.

I think the Chinese Communist party should sue.