3 Comments

From the Bari Weiss essay:

"The story focuses on the students left behind by remote learning and the indefensible gap between those students and the kids who have pods, and private tutors, and reliable wi-fi and helicopter parents who ensure they don’t fall behind. "

Two comments:

First, how is that indefensible? Parents who obsess about achieving a goal tend to achieve it more often than parents who don't. I expect that Weiss is whipping up the usual class warfare bit by implying that you can only achieve education success by throwing money around and doubly expect that Weiss isn't even aware of a world where parents can help their kids achieve academic success in ways that don't involve conspicuous spending.

Second, I've seen the results of parents like this. They tend to produce kids who achieve certain benchmarks on paper and have an amazingly thorough lack of ability to survive on their own. Everything has been handled for them to reassure the helicopter parents that it was done "correctly", from household skills like washing dishes and doing one's laundry to emotional coping skills, especially in dealing with failure. If the price of an emotionally resilient and independently competent kid is somewhat lower standardized test scored then I would (and did) pay it gladly.

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Keep an eye out for this:

https://twitter.com/hamandcheese/status/1435286530898149381

I hope they give you credit somewhere

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Making government and institutions completely color-blind is a worthy goal. But if you remove all ethnicity from government reports then science like that of Thomas Sowell and Charles Murray becomes impossible to do. I don't think that should be shut down.

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