RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/06/righting-our-sinking-educational-ship/

Public education in our country is struggling, and many proposed solutions are of no help whatsoever. First, too many people in the field are fixated on race. For example, many education schools partner with the Racial Justice in Early Math teaching fellowship, whose one-year program “helps kindergarten teachers better understand the intersection between racial justice and early math.”

Sung Yoon, who teaches kindergarten and first grade in Washington, participated in the program in 2023–2024. He said the fellowship changed his approach to teaching. Yoon reported that when he told friends and colleagues about the fellowship, a typical response was, “So you think math is racist?” He would clarify, “No, that’s not what this is about. It’s about how we teach math and dismantle the white supremacy that has been embedded since the dawn of time.”

On the other side of the country, New York City might elect a race-obsessed mayor in November. Currently a New York State Assemblyman, Zohran Mamdani has supported legislation to eliminate the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test—the only merit-based standard used to admit students to Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech, three of the top high schools in the country. These schools have graduation rates above 99% and college placement rates over 90%. Mamdani and his allies say they want to boost diversity, but replacing merit with subjectivity doesn’t fix inequality—it just lowers standards. The real problem isn’t admissions tests; it’s the K-8 schools’ failure to prepare students properly.

Mamdani has also co-authored a bill that allocates $8 million in taxpayer money to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) teacher hiring programs. These funds prioritize demographic quotas over merit. Meanwhile, New York’s teacher workforce is already diverse: a 2023 report showed that 42% of teachers identify as Black and 29% as Hispanic—figures that exceed those communities’ representation in the city’s overall population.

And then there are the money grubbers, and no one is better at this than Vermont’s socialist Senator Bernie Sanders. He has introduced legislation to address the “teacher pay crisis in America” and ensure that all public school teachers earn a “livable and competitive wage that is at least $60,000 a year and increases throughout their career.”

This is nonsense. Just Facts examined teacher pay data and found that, in the 2021–22 school year, the average school teacher in the U.S. earned $66,397 in salary and received an additional $34,090 in benefits, including health insurance, paid leave, and pensions, totaling $100,487 in overall compensation.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/what-is-western-civilization/

In the 1980s Jesse Jackson helped banish “Western Civ” from Stanford with a silly chant. Many colleges and universities that had not already done so followed suit.

But in the classical counterrevolution of the 21st century, Western civilization is back. The Great Books, long thought a relic of Mortimer Adler’s Cold War-era salesmanship, now guide the curriculum at many of the over 1,000 classical schools that have been founded over the past few decades, dozens of which are publicly funded charter schools. A new Great Books college sprouts up every year or so. Dead languages like Latin seem to be very much alive again.

Whether it is humanism, the medieval liberal arts, or even just memes about the Roman Empire, it turns out that Western Civ did indeed have to go—big.

The 21st-century classical counterrevolutionaries should not get high on their own supply, though. If their project ends up being a retread of the Mortimer Adler-Robert Hutchins show, they may be greeted by an even deeper abyss of failure than the ostracism Western Civ faced in the name of diversity that occurred with the rise of racial and gender studies.

Avoiding such a future will require the efforts of everyone involved—teachers, students, parents, professors, policymakers, and activists. One of their many tasks involves apologetics, that is, giving a defense of what they are doing. Central to this project is answering a simple-seeming question: What do you mean by Western civilization? It seems obvious enough: Greece, Rome, Christianity, Europe, the New World. The history, thinking, and art stretching from Plato to NATO.

But if you’re going to base an educational system around this claim, your skeptics will have some questions:

You include Dostoevsky and Tolstoy on your list even though Russia is obviously in the East, so what about the literature of the Islamic Golden Age? Their philosophers were reading Aristotle before Thomas Aquinas was.
The Bible came from the Near East, not Europe. Will you then include more from the Near East—for example, Akkadian literature like the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enūma Eliš? And if so, why not the Sumerians like Enheduanna and Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta? If you’re willing to do those, why not the Middle Egyptian language too? While we’re at it, let’s include all the Afro-Asiatic languages!
On what grounds do you exclude the study of Chinese literature and history? Much of what Confucius says aligns with the greatest Western philosophers of both ancient and modern times. After all, if what you’re after is “the best that has been thought and said,” you shouldn’t narrow your study on arbitrary geographic grounds.

Maybe Western civilization is not so much a place or a people, but more of a mindset. Yes: Western civilization—just like America!—is an idea.