Unteach Racism – Module 1

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A new website called Unteach Racism has been set up for teachers in New Zealand. Apparently, this is the result of a few years of collaboration between the Teaching Council and the Human Rights Commission. The stated aim of the website is to support teachers to ‘identify confront and dismantle racism in education.’ Who knew racism was such a problem in New Zealand education?

Who knew teachers were deliberately favouring some and targeting others for failure? Being a teacher myself I was shocked! Having always desired the best for all my students and delighted in the achievement of every single one regardless of ethnicity, I was shocked to be informed that racism is a systemic part of New Zealand education. I assumed my colleagues were more or less the same as me. Yet it seems thousands of my colleagues are racist rednecks who have slipped into the education system with the nefarious intention of secretly passing on their intolerant bigotry and deliberately targeting sections of our community for permanent illiteracy, innumeracy, shame and poverty.

Thankfully, despite being educated in such a patently racist system, our glorious Teaching Council has remained untouched by this racism and is committed to rooting out the bigotry of hate and oppression in order to usher in a glorious new dawn of racial harmony and educational equality. So the result is an app that is apparently designed to brainwash support teachers to think about what they know about racism so they can teach unteach it in the classroom. Thankfully this will without a doubt immediately shame all these evil racist bigots within the teaching profession and they will repent of their evil ways. No longer will they be able to blame weeknight party throwing, sexually immoral, unemployed, drug-dealing drunkard parents for the failure of their children. The blame will be back squarely where it belongs – with the racism of the system.

So in the next few weeks, we will work through the eight modules on the app. Today we will look at Module 1 which is entitled “Unteach Racism”. The stated aims of this module are to introduce the concept of systemic racism and identify its impacts in education and other sectors. We commence with a typically emotive and fluffy speech that one expects from a young girl who has not yet moved into the real adult world. She is a young Maori student who suggests that failing to pronounce a name or place correctly is feeding the ‘taniwha of racism’. So take that all you ignoramuses who pronounce Paris ‘Pa-riss’. You racist bigots.

We are then taken on a tour of examples of ways that racism has shaped our systems, structures and social outcomes. The module consists mainly of statistics of which some are noted below. A few of the statistics are linked back to government reports, but a couple are linked to articles from Stuff – that bastion of neutrality and objectivity.

  • June 2017 unemployment rate for Pakeha was 3.4% while Maori had an unemployment rate of 11.1%
  • In 2017 the mean hourly rate for Pākehā was $30.09, for Pacific Peoples it was $22.96
  • 52.9% of the prison population is Maori, but only 18.7% of our population is Maori
  • Maori home ownership rate is 31%, whereas Non-Maori home ownership is 57.9%
  • Pacific and Māori participation in Early Childhood Education is lower than Pakeha
  • Only 2.7% of students are enrolled in Maori medium education
  • Maori learners are twice as likely to be suspended

Once again, we have a list of disparities cited with no context to ‘prove’ racism. Despite the stated aims of the module being to introduce the concept of systemic racism and identify its impacts in education, it seems that the two ideas are conflated. For the designers of this brainwashing app, systemic racism seems to be defined as the existence of disparities between races. This ‘proves’ systemic racism. Actually, these statistics do no such thing. Even a quick read of some of the linked reports demonstrates there is complexity. For example regarding the unemployment rate, a Statistical Analysis of Ethnic Wage Gaps in New Zealand suggests that “Educational level and occupation are the two factors that have the largest impact on Māori-Pākehā and Pacific-Pākehā wage disparities, amongst all those considered.”

Assuming systemic racism is the cause of these disparities is simple and perhaps, therefore, appealing to the simple-minded, but what if the existence of disparities is not so simple? What if different cultures in their different values tend to choose things in accordance with those differing values? And what if those different choices lead to different outcomes? Even some of the quotes from learners illustrate this. One child in Kura Kaupapa Māori was asked about achievement. The learner said, “Achievement should be more than grades. Be able to support whānau and doing jobs well in life.” That’s not something I (an experienced teacher) have heard regularly (if at all!) from an Asian parent’s lips. Perhaps, just perhaps, the values a family has will make more of a difference to a child’s educational success and achievement than this mythic taniwha named ‘systemic racism’. If the problem is ‘white privilege’, what is it that enables other minorities such as Asians to succeed more than Pakeha New Zealanders?

Since feedback is an essential part of the teaching process, I have assigned a grade to the Teaching Council of New Zealand and given them my teacher’s comment on their work. Let’s hope for better in the future.

Grade: F–

Comment: Teaching Council of Aotearoa New Zealand. Thank you for finally handing in your group assignment entitled Unteach Racism. It’s a little overdue. I note you started this in 2018 with the Human Rights Commission. Frankly, I expect more from you given the exorbitant fees you forcibly charge me for the privilege of you hectoring me and badgering me all in the name of improving my teaching. Furthermore, given the extensive time frame you got with those extensions, I was hoping for a top-quality assignment. Unfortunately, I have to grade you an F double minus for biased presentation of statistics with no context, lack of critical thinking, an absence of diversity of thought and alternative viewpoints and a divisive approach to race relations in New Zealand. I also think you have inaccurately titled the assignment. I suggest “Teaching Racism” would be a more suitable title. Please do better next time. With a little more research and a more balanced approach, I hope, though sincerely doubt you are capable of more.

Are you serving your children up to cannibals?

There are only two things wrong with our schools: everything that our children don’t learn there and everything they do. The public schools, with their vast political and bureaucratic machinery, are beyond reform. That does not mean that persons of goodwill should not offer themselves up as missionaries of truth and goodness and beauty, to teach there, as in partibus furibundis. But we would be quite mad to send our children there, We send missionaries to cannibals. We do not serve the cannibals our boys and girls.

Anthony Esolen on schooling in Out of the Ashes

Language Lies

No doubt my readers have noticed the wonderful ability of some of our ‘thought leaders’ to brainwash the young, gullible and ill-educated by lying to them. They have become so brazen that they will now use a term to mean the exact opposite of what it truly means.

One example of this misuse of language is the term “diversity”. When our thought leaders use this word and claim they want diversity, they mean they don’t want me or other conservatives who have different opinions to them to speak or have a platform anywhere. Another example is the phrase marriage equality. Marriage was always equally open to any man or woman who could find someone who wanted to marry them. Marriage equality was about destroying the definition of marriage. A third example is the word ‘anti-racist’. To be anti-racist, you must support policies that actively discriminate based on race in order to lead to equal outcomes. So an anti-racist is a racist. Of course, let us not forget the chestnut “economic justice” which sounds so beautiful, but has nothing to do with justice, but is about stealing from some to give to another group, which when you think of it doesn’t sound very just at all.

A current example of deceitful speech of our thought leaders is the term conversion therapy. A friend of mine recently shared this thought experiment with me. Let’s imagine you went back to the time when your grandparents were young, and you asked them which of the following was conversion therapy, and which was gender affirmation therapy: 1) Telling a person that they need to live in accordance with their male or female sexed body. 2) Assisting a person live as the gender they consider themselves to be in their minds. This may involve removing parts of the body and injecting the body with hormones from. I think most of our forebears would imagine that gender affirmation therapy would be described by number 1, and conversion therapy would be number 2, which in actual fact is the opposite of how the elites define these things.

There’s a great video which I’ve posted before which brilliantly points out this stupidity. Watch it before our tolerant and inclusive elites decide it’s dangerous.

Now some readers might be saying to themselves, sex and gender aren’t the same. You, dear reader, have been brainwashed well. What is this idea of gender? It seems it is something you define yourself according to the whims of your feelings. How can you scientifically investigate a thing like that?

I leave you with a brilliant quote from Anthony Esolen’s book Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments For Sanity. ‘I do not use the word gender, except to refer to the grammatical category. I’m quite aware of the non-sensical idea that sex is one thing, referring only to a minor bit of plumbing in the nether regions, and gender another, referring to everything else about men and women, all of it supposedly “socially constructed” and arbitrary. Yes, I’ve heard it all my academic life, and the more we actually learn about biological maleness and femaleness, the more absurd this line becomes. Every cell of my body is marked as masculine. My adrenal system is different from my wife’s – it is primed for sudden attack and just as sudden calm; an adrenal system for all-out fighting, followed or preceded by cold strategy. Hers is not that way. I doubt anyone caring for small children ought to be that way. My heart-lung capacity at age fifty is that of a woman at her peak, at age twenty. I will possess more brute strength (by far) than my daughter until I am very old, or in the last stages of a terminal disease. My wife sees things I do not see; she makes connections with people I would not make; she has the touch.

Nothing but Blind Pitiless Indifference

Many of my readers are no doubt familiar with Richard Dawkins, probably the world’s most famous and outspoken atheist and critic of religion. The author of The God Delusion has recently had his 1996 humanist of the year award withdrawn by the American Humanist Association for statements that demean marginalised groups.

Just what statement was this? It was a tweet.

Harmless enough right? Well, not in this age. Especially not for the secular humanists. There is a beautiful irony in this. Rev Richard Dawkins has not caught up with the implications of his materialist religion. He’s the chap who wrote, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” Here’s what happens when your religion has no transcendent authority mate. If there is no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, there certainly is no rationality. You’d be best just to watch which way the mob is going and run with them. Alternatively, you could stop suppressing the truth, believe in the God who is and who is the reason there is truth and rationality. That’s God’s voice you are hearing in creation that causes you to know men can’t really identify as women.

Who is changing Whom?

For a generation now, the air has been thick with the talk of “changing the world,” but who is changing whom? There is no question that the world would like to change the church. In area after area only the church stands between the world and its success over issues such as sexuality. Unquestionably the world would like to change the church, but does the church still want to change the world, or is its only concern to change the church in the light of the world? Something is rotten in the state of Evangelicalism, and all too often it is impossible to tell who is changing whom.

Os Guiness in Impossible People

Reddit Parenting Advice #6

Today we are looking at the topic of tantrums which every parent with toddlers will be familiar with. The title of the Reddit post was “Tantrums are ruining parenthood for me”. Given that the entire post is long, I will comment on a few sections of it.

Let’s begin with this chestnut. I make most of my decisions based on whether or not it will result in a meltdown. If they have a meltdown, then I have a meltdown. Because of this, I feel like my children run the show—they are my boss. This mother makes her decisions based on whether or not it will lead to a tantrum. This is precisely the opposite of what she should be doing. She is electing for the easy choice hard road scenario we have mentioned in earlier posts. Interestingly, she knows that this has lead to an untenable parenting situation. She sees that she is controlled by her child’s tantrums because they impact her choices.

Our mother here needs to change her behaviour. Instead of running from meltdowns, she should seek them out. What do I mean? I do not mean that she should actively try to cause her children to throw tantrums, but she should use all situations to send her children the message that she is the authority and she will not be moved. If she senses she is about to make an ‘avoidance’ decision, she should instead aim for the tantrum. This stage of parenting is all about asserting authority. This is often the hardest when you are away from home. If she says it is time to leave the park, and the little one becomes upset, she should sternly say something like, “Mummy is the boss. We are going.” Then if the child continues to refuse she should pick him up and carry him to the car. At home, things tend to be easier, and she should use this to her advantage. More time at home with a toddler is a good thing, because training can include physical chastisement that might not be appropriate in public situations. An example might be she sees her toddler playing with some books that she does not want wrecked. In a commanding voice, she should say, “Don’t touch.” Invariably, the toddler will make a whining or screaming noise and keep on touching. This is the cue to walk over to the child, take the object away from him, give him a sharp tap on the hand or leg and say sternly, “Mummy said no!” This must all be done with no outward emotion. Short stern statements are the way to train toddlers.

If the child continues to whine and scream, a firmer impartation of knowledge to the seat of understanding (!!) may be called for along with a statement such as, “We don’t scream.” or “No tantrums!” Then, require a “Sorry Mummy” from your child.

This is what parenting during the toddler years needs to look like. Your goal is to demonstrate every day to your child that you love them, that you are their authority, and that what you say must be obeyed immediately, or there will be negative consequences. Consistent self-discipline in this area is key. Regularly acting like this does make tantrums less frequent as your toddler realises they are not worth the effort. Children disciplined in this way learn to become more compliant.

Our mother goes on to say, “I want to be able to focus on my kids and empathize with what they’re feeling rather than resent them for their behavior. I feel like I simply can’t do that when they are screaming in my face and stomping around the house. It feels like I’m physically incapable of viewing things from their POV during a fit.” Most of the time, you do not need to learn to empathise with a toddler. Much of their behaviour is completely selfish and destructive. Their emotions are ridiculously over the top. We do not want to empathise with these things. We want to train them to appropriately express frustration and disappointment, and throwing a tantrum is not appropriate. They need to learn from adults how to appropriately express themselves.

Cruel Mercies

It’s a funny thing. Those of a more godless statist bent tend to like to paint those who disagree with their methods as uncaring. But the truth is, we are actually caring, it’s just that our care is more thought out. We tend to be sceptical of state solutions because…well when have they ever improved a situation before?

A classic case is all the hand-wringing about child poverty. Leaving aside the definitional problems of child-poverty, what is one of the largest causes of child-poverty? Sole-parent families are a huge contributing factor to child-poverty. Lindsay Mitchell, a researcher into welfare in New Zealand recently authored a report which found that although single parent families make up 28 percent of all families with dependent children, they are the poorest families in NZ. Indeed, 51% of children in poverty live in single parent families, and these parents have the lowest home ownership rates and highest debt ratios. But do we see our leaders point out the truth that men and women who decide to have children together ought to stay together for the welfare of their children? Do we see government initiatives to support and strengthen two-parent families? Do we see an acknowledgement that this is the best way to bring children up? Of course not, that wouldn’t be…kind. So instead our leaders encourage behaviour that leads to more and more children being born into poverty and therefore we increase income inequality and hinder the life prospects of a large proportion of our population.

Truly, the mercy of the wicked is cruel.

Let’s Reject Co-Governance

If you are concerned about the move towards co-governance in New Zealand – and as a citizen of a democracy, you should be, then you need to take a look at this post which is a reproduction of a recent newsletter from Hobson’s Pledge. It highlights a Government plan to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) to establish two governments in New Zealand by 2040, one for Maori and one for everyone else. Then, when you have read that, go here and sign the petition. Go on, do it!