George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 1 July 2020.]

The current insanity sweeping the western world that started with the George Floyd killing is now way past that outrage and moved on to much bigger objectives.  The event served as a trigger to launch the ready and waiting socialist and anti-capitalist factions to start their push toward a global collectivist world by first weakening or doing away with sovereign nation-states that have cultures built up over the centuries which today are the glue that unify their populations.  The socialist elites and their fielded militants in the streets have identified several critical weak points in the ties that bind nations.  One of them involves the flawed histories that each developed western nation has, which includes their role in colonizing the third world and fighting religious wars among themselves.

All of these pursuits are ample demonstrations that violate today’s standards of political correctness, social mores and values, treating all peoples and races equally and with appropriate respect for their indigenous cultures.  Western nations did little of that when they conquered and colonized the more backward civilizations of Africa, the Americas, and southern Asia.  All of that history is used by the global Left to indict today’s mostly white and European-derived countries of everything ranging from ‘cultural appropriation’ to genocide.

The west’s public educational systems have long been co-opted by progressive cadres injecting leftist principles at all levels of curriculum.  The generations of the so-educated are now primed as they doubt their own worth to humanity, and are ready to adopt a more virtuous course forward that demands fundamental changes in each nation’s basic and foundational institutions.  The ‘evidence’ for this ongoing stratagem overwhelms us daily every time we tune into mainstream media outlets.

Part and parcel of this assault on western civilization is taking place in our academe.  The humanities were already compromised a couple of decades ago.  They have now become magnificent edifices for dispensing and adjudicating the socialist gospel.  In those ivy-covered halls the standing motto has long been ‘the socialist way or the highway’ for students and faculty.  This ideological pandemic has now breached the ramparts of science, technology, engineering, and math – the disciplines whose advances and mastery have determined the fate of nations for at least the last two centuries.

Leading universities, ranging from large systems like the University of California, along with our Ivy League colleges, and across the sea to the hallowed halls of Oxford and Cambridge, they have all capitulated and are in a pell mell race to “decolonoize” their maths and science courses.  Typical in this rush to academic oblivion are initiatives to make their curricula “more inclusive (by) adding diverse voices to it. This includes steps such as integrating race and gender questions into topics, embedding teaching on colonialism and empire into courses, changing reading lists to ensure substantial representation of a diverse range of voices, and ensuring better coverage of issues concerning the global South in syllabuses.”

As a career engineer, scientist, and teacher I can assure you that today there are already not enough hours in a day in which to cram into a young person’s head the core STEM subjects she needs to master in order to become a contributing member of a first class research and development team.  Substituting a litany of virtue-signaling and guilt-assuaging readings for hardcore subjects dictates that such universities will produce second rate STEM graduates whose careers guarantee that their nation-state will not be competitive on the world stage.  You can bet the ranch that China, Russia, Iran, and other rogue states countenance none of these diversions as they train their scientists and engineers.  They know what will assure their competitive leadership as future global hegemons.

But in America and Europe the graduation of such marginally competent or incompetent cadres of professional technicians is the aim of leftwing political parties everywhere that work for a post-capitalist world with government-controlled markets.  And no one on Main Street sees coming this tragic part of our ongoing fundamental transformation. 

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[Addendum]  A growing chorus of leftwing voices is demanding that the ideological revolution, having already infested government and corporations, complete its hat trick by encompassing the remnant parts of academe that so far have escaped the infection.  STEM subjects must now be infused with dollops of diversionary progressive propaganda.  For openers, they will attempt to minimize the contributions of dead white Europeans, and seek (manufacture?) where possible alternative sources for the discoveries that changed the face of science and our understanding of nature.  Much of this will include the narrative that the white scientists plagiarized the extant discoveries of scientists in countries they colonized.  Reassigning such credits is just another aspect of belatedly achieved social justice.

Another coincident thesis is that all of STEM teachings are already political, but of hues that are either not well thought out or that serve the wrong masters – e.g. capitalists who exploited their workers.  Since that is the case, redressing such curricula with today’s proper political orientation is the just and proper course that reflects today’s correct values and mores on the roles of socially just and inclusive advancement of science and technology.  (more here and here)

And finally, there is the progressive faction that takes a dim view of the monies, public and private, that have gone into STEM education.  Specifically they wonder why so much emphasis and spending has been focused on STEM, because America’s students have never achieved the top STEM rankings.  According to Harvard’s Michael Teitelbaum –

But the metric used to determine America’s standing is far from perfect, and its 2012 score isn’t necessarily an aberration. “I found that the U.S. has always been in the middle—we’ve never been at the top,” Teitelbaum said, pointing out that many of the education systems at the top of the list are cities, like Shanghai and Hong Kong, or very small countries like Singapore. “I’m not saying their performance is irrelevant,” Teitelbaum said, but the comparison shouldn’t be considered a direct one. “If you take a national average of the U.S., you have a huge disparity in educational performance across this country, even down to the local level, so you have a higher variety of educational outcomes,” he said, so it makes sense that Americans' average is not as high as smaller education systems. “We’re not falling back, some [other] countries are just rising, and the U.S. is not rising.”  Other metrics corroborate the idea that the U.S. isn’t falling behind when it comes to STEM. 2012 data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows that the U.S. spent more than any other country on research and development. Similar data from the OECD shows that, in 2011, American scientists had published the most papers in reputable scientific journals and had submitted the greatest number of patents. … I think that being competent in STEM fields at the end of secondary school is the modern equivalent of being literate and numerate in the 19th century.

What people find hard to understand is that despite our mediocre standing on the global scene, our level of ‘STEM productivity’ is the highest because of our private sector entrepreneurial culture that motivates through the promise of profits, as it leaves individuals to take the inevitable risks that come with R&D and the launch of any bleeding edge technology-based enterprise.  Governments seldom do well in advancing science, save perhaps when national security is at stake, and government has a long record of ignoring the advent of ground-breaking technologies.  For example, in 1838 Samuel Morse could not get the federal government to support demonstration of the telegraph over long distances, a technical breakthrough eventually funded by private capital that changed the face and fortunes of our nation. (more here)