Dismantle DEI was first published as Dismantling DEI, Ideology, and Some Modest Proposals to Reimagine Purpose by Intrepid Ed News from OESIS Dismantling DEI, Ideology, and Some Modest Proposals to Reimagine Purpose Change always involves a dark night when everything falls apart. Yet if this period of dissolution is used to create new meaning, then chaos ends and a new…
“When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.” You may not remember this, but the whole story of To Kill a Mockingbird is Scout Finch’s account of how and why Jem broke his arm. At best I type with two fingers. I’m now down to one. With the help of a malevolent…
I wrote this primarily as a way to sort my ideas out. Feel free to skip. However do take a look below at the painter of the featured intersection: Wilfred Rembert. What a life! And what extraordinary works of art. A Defense of Intersectionality The legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in 1989 although the concept had been…
It’s been a bit quiet on the R and R front this Fall but I’ve not been entirely idle. I have a piece coming out in Intrepid Ed News next week so that’s something to look forward to along with Thanksgiving. It takes a rather jaundiced eye on the topic of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and how our obsession…
The disruption to schooling in the early months of the pandemic led me to 1939, Operation Pied Piper, and the work of pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. Under Operation Pied Piper, close to a million children living in cities were separated from their parents and evacuated to safer areas. An evacuation on such a large scale was unprecedented. Britain was…
In her thoroughly researched and scrupulously fair-minded book Time to Think, Hannah Barnes relates the history and calamitous downfall of the Tavistock—England’s only child gender clinic. It’s a sobering story of the harm done to hundreds of children. It’s about distressed adolescents, desperate parents, over-stressed professionals, and out-of-control activist organizations. Barnes shows us just who these children are and what conditions…
I’m launched on a Wittgenstein project. I thought it was about time I knew more about him and his work than the odd anecdote and the quotation beloved by English teaching theorists: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Any Wittgensteinian folks out there with words of advice? All thoughts welcome. I’m easing my way in…
In 1913, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West” 1921 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the German Albert…
Long ago, but not so far away, but decades before DEI rebranded itself as Divide, Exclude, and Intrude I too committed acts of diversity workshopping. I have no idea whether they were in any way useful but the intentions were good. But you know where those usually lead. I know we’re in the dog days of summer but any moment…
A long time ago I studied Christopher Marlowe’s play Edward II as a set text for “A” level. As was my wont, I scoured the meager resources of the school library for as much information and commentary on the play as I could. I came across the expression “haughty indifference” in a description of the character of Mortimer. It captured…
On 14 June 1940, Paris fell to the German Army. The British author Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote in her diary. ‘Paris has fallen — has been abandoned.” The occupation of Paris, the cultural pivot of Europe, and the fall of France which followed two days later were ‘a flaring, presaging comet in all men’s eyes’. The war was not going…
Here is the video that caused all the discussion: What do you think?
The daily stroll last week took us down Claremont Avenue where large picture window affords a passing glimpse into a college classroom at Barnard. A young teacher was talking while on the large screen was a slide headed “Principles of Democracy”. Only the top bullet had been revealed – “Inclusion”. Perhaps I jumped to a wrong conclusion but that gave…
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice. “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.” Why is a raven like a writing desk?’ Alice laughed. “There’s no use…
I chanced upon this painting of the meeting between Galileo and John Milton and had a flashback to undergraduate days and the anthology we were required to buy and lug around (and possibly read.) It was American, very heavy, very expensive, and full of all kinds of interesting but rather dense texts. I remember the pages were flimsy thin, and…