CRT - Why this guy is right and wrong


Carborendum
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39 minutes ago, LDSGator said:

You can easily make the case that Harold Hill made River City a vastly better place with his existence, so....what are you saying bud? 

Well, when you pulled the lipstick on a pig thing, it got me wondering, what is the mirror image of that?  Making something quite innocent (and in some ways good) "sound" horrible?... Making a mountain out of a molehill -- too cliche'd and just misses the flavor test.  But "pulling a Harold Hill" by making a pool table to be so horrible that its mere presence will corrupt out kids.  All done to line a the pockets of a con-artist?  Yup.

When the idea of public schools were first instituted, the intent was innocent enough.  And the utilization of such was a hallmark of what increased the ability of many people in this country to make America the industrial powerhouse it was always going to be.

But that same power, now wielded by those who only seek to enrich themselves, is going to be the means by which yet another jenga piece is removed from the towering superpower that is America. 

(Wow, that sounded really inspiring and dramatic.  It should go in a speech somewhere)

A tool may be great.  But what that tool is used for is quite a different question.

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2 hours ago, LDSGator said:

Public school was the first place I was introduced to ideas that, myself and my parents disagreed with. Could a home schooled parent do the same? Maybe, but I sort of doubt it.

Sweet!  Something to disagree with LDSGator about!

My wife and I homeschooled our kiddos through high school.  (And their high school is a nontraditional hybrid model with plenty of parental involvement.)  We (and I'm guessing maybe 80% of the other families we interacted with) absolutely introduced our kiddos to a crapton of ideas that we personally disagreed with.  For most of us, the goal isn't to indoctrinate our kids and make sure they turn out thinking right.  We put our homeschooling goals like this: "We're trying to create healthy, moral, well-rounded, smart, wise, adults who know what they believe and why, are willing and able to contribute meaningfully in communities wherever they live, and boldly are able to stand and defend their beliefs;   And then we release them on the world."

Our kids' journeys brought them to half a dozen homeschool co-ops, each one with a different slant.  We couldn't stand the LDS co-op.  The secular one was fine for a few years.  The Presbyterian one was fine, once they figured out our LDS kids weren't the devil.  We really synched with a co-op run out of a mega-church.  I lost track of how many mommy-teacher volunteers with advanced college degrees my kids took classes from.  The lady with a PhD in biomolecular something-or-other taught my kids science.  

Homeschooling got popular in the '80's, and the long-term studies started coming out in the turn of the century.  The studies paint a pretty clear picture: Homeschooled kids have more than better grades, test scores,  and odds of attending/graduating from college than public schooled counterparts.  They also engage in more socialization, are exposed to more ideas, and have lower rates of crime than public schooled kids.   Lots of folks just flat out cannot believe such things, so let me know if you fall into that category, and I can try to dig up some of those old studies for you.

Yes, everyone has a handful of "that kid" stories where woefully backward and unsocialized homeschooled kids smack into society and can't hack it.  They stick out because people think "yep, homeschooled".  But guess what - public schools crank out "that kid" stories too.   And for every "child services had to remove the kid out of the house with tinfoil on the windows" story, I can tell you five or ten "The rape and violent crime rate from students attending this-or-that public school is going up again" stories.

If I can get a bit lightheartedly sarcastic for a moment:

Yeah - make kids sit quietly in their chairs for 8 hours a day, being graded on how well they learn to think the same things, sitting in a room with people who look exactly like them, and tell me again how homeschoolers are the ones lacking in diversity of thought!

We used to have this bumper sticker for you tongue-clicking finger-wagging whats-the-world-coming-to worrywarts.  It was on our car when we drove our 13 yr old to her volunteer gig at the public school, teaching the high-school students how to crochet:

Unsocialized Homeschoolers On Board Vinyl Decal Unsocialized | Etsy

 

(Hope I''m not laying it on too think - you know I love ya @LDSGator

Edited by NeuroTypical
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7 hours ago, Carborendum said:

 

Correct: CRT was supposed to be taught as a legal theory in the collegiate level among law students.  It was never meant to be taught at a lower level as historical/political fact.

Incorrect:  It is your (schools) job to teach math and science.  It is our (parents/family) job to teach them about life.

The simple fact is that Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, history, etc.  CANNOT adequately be taught without also teaching about life.  It is never about a "school" (worth its name) teaching academics without also teaching values.  It is only a question of "which" values are going to be taught.

We don't object to values being taught in schools.  We object to values we disagree with being taught in schools.  This is true from whatever background one may come from.  But if we give in to one person's request for values being met, then another person loses.  There is no win-win in a system like this.

The contradiction here is:

1) We have expectations that "the government" is in charge of paying for that education.
2) We expect to be in charge of what value system will be taught.

You can't have both.  Either you pay for it, or someone else will decide what to teach your children about life.

It's the schools job to teach them whatever my community tells them to teach them.   

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2 hours ago, Fether said:

At what age do I start telling my son he is racist and everyone and everything is racist? Do I wait till 6 or should I start now at 3?

 

On the topic of CRT, one of the biggest things that have us all upset is some variation of the claim that everyone has unconscious bias.   Such an audacious claim requires pretty strong evidence.

Here - go take some of these tests and prove them wrong about you:  https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html  This is a link to Harvard's Implicit Associations Tests

Quote

The IAT measures the strength of associations between concepts (e.g., black people, gay people) and evaluations (e.g., good, bad) or stereotypes (e.g., athletic, clumsy). The main idea is that making a response is easier when closely related items share the same response key.

 

If you figure you don't associate white/good black/bad, then the test should indicate such.  

This is an open challenge to everyone.  Let's hear your results!  (Few took me up on the challenge when I originally made it.  Now that there's an active and powerful movement to re-tool society based on the notion, perhaps y'all will give it a try.)

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11 minutes ago, NeuroTypical said:

On the topic of CRT, one of the biggest things that have us all upset is some variation of the claim that everyone has unconscious bias.   Such an audacious claim requires pretty strong evidence.

Given the simple dictionary definitions of the words, I'd think it is pretty obvious that most people have some implicit bias.  Biases are part of the human mindset when one learns.  You can't escape it without being an ignoramus.  But we learn to control such to a minimal level based on our personal experiences and education.

Notice, that this is very human tendency is not isolated to any particular race, and is not isolated to the issue of racism.  We have biases against foods, music, clothing, professions, religions, etc.

The problem with such a statement is that it is often accompanied by outlandish statements such as "only white people can have implicit bias."  Or how about, "Implicit bias makes you a bad person."  Like so many things... it depends.

11 minutes ago, NeuroTypical said:

Here - go take some of these tests and prove them wrong about you:  https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html  This is a link to Harvard's Implicit Associations Tests

I took a test about Asians vs Whites.  I apparently had no implicit bias.  I thought it was pretty stupid. 

I took a test about Blacks and Whites.  I had a "slight" bias towards blacks.  I thought that was pretty stupid.

I don't see how the results were different since I got all the associations correct, just like for the Asian test.

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26 minutes ago, Carborendum said:I don't see how the results were different since I got all the associations correct, just like for the Asian test.

It does more than measure the answers, it measures the time taken to answer. If you literally fly through all of the X/good, Y/bad questions, but you take longer before you can answer the X/bad, Y/good questions, that would seem to indicate a bias, either in favor of X, or against Y, or both.

because, if you didn’t have a bias, then why would your response times be different?

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1 hour ago, NeuroTypical said:

If you figure you don't associate white/good black/bad, then the test should indicate such

It "should", yes. But I don't think it actually does. As with most of these sorts of things.... I think it was flawed.

And, to be fair, I'm saying that despite the fact that it probably got it right for me. That is to say, I probably feel "slightly warmer" to whites than blacks. Well....yeah. I live in Utah. I don't know hardly any black people. So the people I feel warmest towards are white --- you know, family, neighbors, friends. But the test couldn't possibly have assumed that from my theoretical subconscious association of wider noses with negative words or something. Weird. I happen to know that my ability to mentally separate pictures from words is high though...so I'm guessing the test was calculating the time it took between responses, and either I'm wrong and the test is brilliant and the milliseconds longer I took to indicate a "good" word after it showed a black person is, actually, based on my real life "warmth" towards my friends and family and neighbors* OR, it was sheer coincidence. I'm confident it was the latter. Or....the woefully inadequate survey questions made assumptions because of the way I answered a few things because they were garbage questions.

If you ask someone if they think black people are lazy, for example, it's not actually going to indicate a thing about racism. Rather, it needs to ask if they think black people are lazier than white people. And, moreover, it really needs to ask follow up questions about the whys and wherefores of such questions to actually determine if the view has anything to do with the color of their skin. Of course for most answers like that I put the neither agree nor disagree answer because how on earth could I possibly know the motivations of people I've never met or associated with? But there were a few that I know I answered in terms of, "Well, yeah...black people are whatever... because they're people. And all people are that way."

*Actually my next door neighbor is a black guy. Great guy actually.

37 minutes ago, Carborendum said:

I don't see how the results were different since I got all the associations correct, just like for the Asian test.

Ah...but you see....you must have taken 4 milliseconds longer to indicate a positive word after seeing a Black face than you did when seeing an Asian one. Psychology! Clearly you want to kill your father and sleep with your mother.

Edited by The Folk Prophet
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2 minutes ago, NeuroTypical said:

because, if you didn’t have a bias, then why would your response times be different?

To really determine that, I think you'd have to do the test many times, and you'd have to do the same thing with images that you know you associate as bad/good, and do the test with random images and words that were neither good nor bad (but secretly assigned as such behind the scenes) and, etc., etc... You know...all that pesky "science" stuff.

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3 minutes ago, NeuroTypical said:

It does more than measure the answers, it measures the time taken to answer. If you literally fly through all of the X/good, Y/bad questions, but you take longer before you can answer the X/bad, Y/good questions, that would seem to indicate a bias, either in favor of X, or against Y, or both.

because, if you didn’t have a bias, then why would your response times be different?

I didn't hesitate on any of the answers.  So, unless they are counting microseconds, I don't see how there could be any difference.  And if they are counting microseconds, I'd say that's a pretty stupid test.  Oh, wait, I already did.

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8 hours ago, Fether said:

I agree, which is why I would only challenge them. Public school is paid for and run by the government. Like someone who is choosing to be on unemployment instead of working, they give up their right to reasonably be angry if something doesn’t go perfect.

If the free thing isn’t cutting it, maybe it’s time to put in some of your own effort.

side note: Think of everything you learned in pre-school - 4th grade. Then 4th - 6th. Grade school is only EXTREMELY simple things. I understand many still don’t have the needed education, but teaching grade school topics is mostly just learning to add and creating learning habits.

Some of you may have heard the generality of elementary school that k-2 is learning to read and 3-6 (and above) is reading to learn. I have spent my teaching career in the former. My entire day is literacy and basic math.

I will absolutely not discount the importance of finding knowledgeable help, but, when it boils down to it, once you've learned how to read and your bread-and-butter math, there's room for a whole lot of independent movement on learning everything else. You can read it, you can build on the math. Tada. 

(My one pause on letting parents run wild with homeschooling is that I happen to be really big on what is being called the science of reading--most parents don't know much about it, and more than a few kids really need more than just hope they'll absorb reading skills through osmosis.)

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53 minutes ago, Backroads said:

My one pause on letting parents run wild with homeschooling is that I happen to be really big on what is being called the science of reading--most parents don't know much about it, and more than a few kids really need more than just hope they'll absorb reading skills through osmosis.

I’ve been to a couple homeschool conventions and looked into it a ton. They all encourage parents to read into things like this and get acquainted with teaching styles. I remember either seeing a book or hearing about this while at one. 

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7 hours ago, NeuroTypical said:

 

 

On the topic of CRT, one of the biggest things that have us all upset is some variation of the claim that everyone has unconscious bias.   Such an audacious claim requires pretty strong evidence.

Here - go take some of these tests and prove them wrong about you:  https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html  This is a link to Harvard's Implicit Associations Tests

 

If you figure you don't associate white/good black/bad, then the test should indicate such.  

This is an open challenge to everyone.  Let's hear your results!  (Few took me up on the challenge when I originally made it.  Now that there's an active and powerful movement to re-tool society based on the notion, perhaps y'all will give it a try.)

 

5 hours ago, NeuroTypical said:

It does more than measure the answers, it measures the time taken to answer. If you literally fly through all of the X/good, Y/bad questions, but you take longer before you can answer the X/bad, Y/good questions, that would seem to indicate a bias, either in favor of X, or against Y, or both.

because, if you didn’t have a bias, then why would your response times be different?

 

5 hours ago, The Folk Prophet said:

To really determine that, I think you'd have to do the test many times, and you'd have to do the same thing with images that you know you associate as bad/good, and do the test with random images and words that were neither good nor bad (but secretly assigned as such behind the scenes) and, etc., etc... You know...all that pesky "science" stuff.

If this is the test I'm remembering, one big reason for a difference in response times is the need to unlearn the associations you had for the first set.

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Today's options for homeschooling are greater than they've ever been before.  You could literally get the equivalent of a high school level education with just Youtube alone.  And that's just ONE website.

For college level education, there are some caveats.  Most subjects are taught on Youtube.  But to really get that equivalent education, there are some things that require practice, submission, correction, commentary, discussion, etc.  And that requires real-person interaction.

I was fortunate enough that I basically had college prep courses throughout my jr. high and high school levels.  We had classes that went through all that.  But for what passes as a high school diploma (even back in the stone age when I graduated high school) really didn't require all that.

Unless you find that one hermit family in the middle of the deserts of West Texas who has no internet, there is no real argument that says that people can't get a high school level education on their own.

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11 hours ago, Fether said:

I’ve been to a couple homeschool conventions and looked into it a ton. They all encourage parents to read into things like this and get acquainted with teaching styles. I remember either seeing a book or hearing about this while at one. 

Well, that is reassuring! I'd seen too many that go with the "hope and pray the kid learns to read" model. I still think there's a generation that's anti-phonics/phonemics, but it's good to see people are catching up.

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2 minutes ago, Backroads said:
11 hours ago, Fether said:

I’ve been to a couple homeschool conventions and looked into it a ton. They all encourage parents to read into things like this and get acquainted with teaching styles. I remember either seeing a book or hearing about this while at one. 

Well, that is reassuring! I'd seen too many that go with the "hope and pray the kid learns to read" model. I still think there's a generation that's anti-phonics/phonemics, but it's good to see people are catching up.

I've mentioned this before. Teaching children to read is as natural as any other family-based teaching. All of my children learned to read before the age of five using the following simple method:

We read scriptures as a family every night (mainly Book of Mormon, but any scripture works). When the child was old enough to speak and pay minimal attention, around age 2 or 2½, we would teach him/her the word "God". It's short and easy to recognize by shape. So as we read, any time we saw the word "God", we would have the child "read" it. The child would get curious and start anticipating when he got to "read", even looking ahead to identify "God".

Shortly after teaching him (or her; it's tiresome to always type "him/her", so we'll just go with the non-gender-specific "him") the word "God", and once he was comfortable with it, we would teach him "Lord". Again, short, easily recognized, and quite different-looking from "God". Then came "Jesus".

About this time, when the child would occasionally confuse the words, we would start teaching phonetics. "This is 'G', and it says 'guh'. So this word is 'guh', 'God'." And so forth, with "L" and "J". In a surprisingly short time, the child is fluent in "reading" those terms and understands how the sounds of the letters work. You just keep slowly increasing the vocabulary and explaining how the sounds work, and soon the child is not merely "reading", but actually reading.

Using this system, by the time our children turned five, they were comfortably reading their own verse with minimal help. No teeth-gnashing, no rote drills, no harassing or browbeating, no reading assignments. (Those came later.) Just a nice family activity where they got to learn cool things and contribute to what we were doing, a natural extension of family teaching.

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42 minutes ago, Vort said:

I've mentioned this before. Teaching children to read is as natural as any other family-based teaching. All of my children learned to read before the age of five using the following simple method:

We read scriptures as a family every night (mainly Book of Mormon, but any scripture works). When the child was old enough to speak and pay minimal attention, around age 2 or 2½, we would teach him/her the word "God". It's short and easy to recognize by shape. So as we read, any time we saw the word "God", we would have the child "read" it. The child would get curious and start anticipating when he got to "read", even looking ahead to identify "God".

Shortly after teaching him (or her; it's tiresome to always type "him/her", so we'll just go with the non-gender-specific "him") the word "God", and once he was comfortable with it, we would teach him "Lord". Again, short, easily recognized, and quite different-looking from "God". Then came "Jesus".

About this time, when the child would occasionally confuse the words, we would start teaching phonetics. "This is 'G', and it says 'guh'. So this word is 'guh', 'God'." And so forth, with "L" and "J". In a surprisingly short time, the child is fluent in "reading" those terms and understands how the sounds of the letters work. You just keep slowly increasing the vocabulary and explaining how the sounds work, and soon the child is not merely "reading", but actually reading.

Using this system, by the time our children turned five, they were comfortably reading their own verse with minimal help. No teeth-gnashing, no rote drills, no harassing or browbeating, no reading assignments. (Those came later.) Just a nice family activity where they got to learn cool things and contribute to what we were doing, a natural extension of family teaching.

I admit I got heart palpatations with the idea of "This is the shape of the word" (you really can't expect most kids to memorize all words) but I do like phonetics are still getting in.

I have quite a few friends in homeschooling, so I peruse some of the online communities, and I'm always shocked at how many tweens and teenagers out there who still can't functionally read whose parents blog about how they'll eventually pick it up.

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4 minutes ago, Backroads said:

I admit I got heart palpatations with the idea of "This is the shape of the word" (you really can't expect most kids to memorize all words) but I do like phonetics are still getting in.

As adults, we read words primarily by shape and letter composition, and very rarely by phonetics. Children need to learn phonetics, of course, but as mature readers, they will sight read by shape, just like every other proficient reader. As long as we are careful to teach them the phonetic relationship between the letters and letter combinations of a word and the sound of the word, I don't see any problem with letting the child get a jump on reading by looking at a word's shape—which, let's face it, is not fundamentally different from looking at a letter's shape to identify it.

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I am not sure I can communicate all my thoughts concerning this subject and thread in a single post.  Or for that matter 100 posts.  But I will begin with my understanding that education has become more political than a means to enlighten society.  I do not think this is just a government - teacher union political problem.  I think we are disconnecting the responsibility of parents and their relationship to children.  It seems that so many things are nuts in our current society.  Let me give one little example with the concept of bulling.  There is currently (in my mind) a over reaction to bulling.  We so want to protect our precious children that we begin to shelter them for all opposition, harassments and confrontations.   So they never learn how to deal with such things.

I do not think education is a science but rather more of an art form.  But we want to pigeon hole it with a concept of one size fits all.  I believe that I was blessed with dyslexia for the sole reason that I cannot be pigeon holed with the vast majority of the population.  Even so I still keep getting stuck thinking that every person's learning experience is like mine or if not that it ought to be.  And yet whenever I drill down I discover learning is more often different than it is exactly same.

I do not believe we need to fear critical race theory, communism or any other theory.   It may have been @Backroads or @NeuroTypical or @Carborendum that suggested that we teach critical thinking rather than what is right or wrong thinking.  As annoying as the simple question is we need to institute the question "WHY?" as our primary goal of education.  Why does anyone pursue critical race theory - why has communism failed - why have dictatorships been historically so successful - and why have democracies started out so successful and quickly folded in on themselves.

Sometimes it seems to me that the more we want to corral thinking in education the more we destroy the students abilities to function or solve difficult challenges.

 

The Traveler

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10 minutes ago, Vort said:

As adults, we read words primarily by shape and letter composition, and very rarely by phonetics. Children need to learn phonetics, of course, but as mature readers, they will sight read by shape, just like every other proficient reader. As long as we are careful to teach them the phonetic relationship between the letters and letter combinations of a word and the sound of the word, I don't see any problem with letting the child get a jump on reading by looking at a word's shape—which, let's face it, is not fundamentally different from looking at a letter's shape to identify it.

You're not wrong, but there is still an awful lot of reading curriculum out there that focuses primarily on learning the word, and then kids age up, read more advanced text... and have no idea how to even begin reading the words. 

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8 minutes ago, Traveler said:

I do not believe we need to fear critical race theory, communism or any other theory.   It may have been @Backroads or @NeuroTypical or @Carborendum that suggested that we teach critical thinking rather than what is right or wrong thinking.  As annoying as the simple question is we need to institute the question "WHY?" as our primary goal of education.  Why does anyone pursue critical race theory - why has communism failed - why have dictatorships been historically so successful - and why have democracies started out so successful and quickly folded in on themselves.

Probably wasn't me.

I actually can't stand the idea of teaching people to think critically. It's something that is developed by observing and dealing with situations. The moment one says "This is what Critical Thinking Looks Like", we've boxed everyone in to one mode of thought. 

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6 minutes ago, Backroads said:

You're not wrong, but there is still an awful lot of reading curriculum out there that focuses primarily on learning the word, and then kids age up, read more advanced text... and have no idea how to even begin reading the words. 

If you're referring to the so-called Look-Say reading method, then for the record, I am 102% against it. It's much worse than nonsense. Children need to be taught the relationship between letters and sounds. That is the basis of all proficient reading in English. I would even say it is the basis of literacy.

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1 hour ago, Vort said:

About this time, when the child would occasionally confuse the words, we would start teaching phonetics. "This is 'G', and it says 'guh'. So this word is 'guh', 'God'." And so forth, with "L" and "J". In a surprisingly short time, the child is fluent in "reading" those terms and understands how the sounds of the letters work. You just keep slowly increasing the vocabulary and explaining how the sounds work, and soon the child is not merely "reading", but actually reading.

Kids also love questions. Once they realize there is a question to be asked, they will ask it over and over again. My son is always asking “is your name X?” And “what is your name?”

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