My tutor at a famous university in the English heartlands was one of the nation’s most prominent socialist intellectuals. His works anatomized—and anathematized—the capitalist system from the traditional Marxian perspective. His wider writings championed a structuralist view of society and its institutions. He not only inveighed against the supposed moral inferiority of capitalism. He was convinced about the inevitability of its collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
But Andrew Glyn was first and foremost a teacher, an intellectually insatiable pedagogue with a desire to foster among his students a hunger for a broad understanding of the discipline.
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this looks like something i’d like to read, but it seems WSJ doesn’t give a couple of free articles per month?
If you have some patience and want to see the article without subscribing, try to time hitting the ‘esc’ key right after the page refreshes. It is a very strict timing for the WSJ site but, it def can be done. good luck 
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I learned economics from a Marxist.
It was the height of the Cold War, a critical moment when the survival of the West seemed in doubt, an age when many people, even those under no illusions about the unfolding terror of Soviet communism, wondered whether capitalism’s days might be numbered.
My tutor at a famous university in the English heartlands was one of the nation’s most prominent socialist intellectuals. His works anatomized—and anathematized—the capitalist system from the traditional Marxian perspective. His wider writings championed a structuralist view of society and its institutions. He not only inveighed against the supposed moral inferiority of capitalism. He was convinced about the inevitability of its collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
Marxist economist and Oxford Tutor Andrew Glyn.
PHOTO: W. CARLIN
But Andrew Glyn was first and foremost a teacher, an intellectually insatiable pedagogue with a desire to foster among his students a hunger for a broad understanding of the discipline. His reading list each week included the canon of classical economic thought ( Adam Smith, David Hume, David Ricardo ), John Maynard Keynes and his followers, and a thorough grounding in the modern neoclassical and monetarist works (F.A. Hayek and the Chicago school, Milton Friedman especially).
No thinker—no ideology—was off-limits. It was the early days of the Reagan-Thatcher counterrevolution. Neither seemed guaranteed of success at the time, and we were encouraged—in fact required—both to learn what they were doing and to understand dispassionately its intellectual origins.
Glyn was also—unexpectedly for those of us who thought communists were louche types with disdain for the protocols of petit bourgeois society—a rigid disciplinarian. Woe betide you if you hadn’t done the reading each week. Obliging attempts to blame our sloth on the inherent class injustices of a medieval university system or the ennui induced by late-stage capitalism would be greeted with a thin smile and a final warning.
He believed—passionately—that his own critique of the Western system was right. But he had no intention of forcing his students onto a narrow intellectual path that would preclude the possibility of our embracing alternatives.
This is the essence of a liberal education: the nurturing and development of independent minds by erudite teachers of various ideological persuasions through exposure to the widest range of intellectual inquiry. It is what made England, and then America, the greatest force for civilizational progress the world has known.
And it is in peril.
The crisis engulfing our institutions represents the struggle for ascendancy of an ideology that is literally the antithesis of the educational values that have driven the West’s unrivaled economic, social and technological progress for the past few centuries.
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Critical race theory—and its various postmodern cousins—is not some interesting interpretation of social and political history that we are free to examine, embrace or discard. Its proponents do not seek to frame a critique of modern America to be tested alongside alternatives.
They insist that a traditionally liberal approach to evaluating the merits of competing ideas is itself an outgrowth of an illegitimate system of oppression. Rejection of their critique is the product of false consciousness, since critical thought is itself invalid, the product of white male hegemony.
This isn’t really education at all, not in the sense in which the term has been understood in the post-Enlightenment era. It is closer to pre-Enlightenment religious instruction: the imparting of doctrinal truth with the practical aim of saving souls and reordering the world. Hence its migration from college campuses to K-12 schools, where its practitioners expect to find supple and more-suggestible minds. They have taken to heart the old Jesuit maxim about the first seven years of life.
There are encouraging signs that this recent migration itself may be sowing the seeds of its own destruction. Parents across the country and the political spectrum are vocally resisting. In local elections voters have seized the opportunity to oust the ideologues pushing this un-American extremism on their children.
Growing numbers of professionals, however eager to display their progressive credentials, know that they owe much of their success to a steeping in the canon of Western thought and are growing uncomfortable with the idea that their children might now be taught that Ibram X. Kendi has more to offer than John Locke or Jane Austen.
Most telling, the attempts by the ideology’s defenders to redefine critical race theory suggest they know how indefensible it is. Efforts by multiple states to restrain its spread have been falsely characterized by journalists and progressives as attempts to stop children from learning about slavery and segregation. When you have to disguise your own ideology to purge it of its noxious core, you know you’re losing.
I learned economics from a Marxist. But the most important thing he taught me was that open inquiry was the antidote to ruinous extremism. It’s a lesson we may finally be relearning.
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Growing numbers of professionals, however eager to display their progressive credentials, know that they owe much of their success to a steeping in the canon of Western thought and are growing uncomfortable with the idea that their children might now be taught that Ibram X. Kendi has more to offer than John Locke or Jane Austen.
I actually know the response to this, they will argue Jane Austin (for example) is a product of a dominant or as they call it white supremacist culture. I had been calling different perspectives from different groups “existential realities”, seems the term I was looking for was Standpoint theory, or standpoint epistemology
Basically the main concepts are.
- A standpoint is a place from which human beings view the world.
- A standpoint influences how the people adopting it socially construct the world.
- A standpoint is a mental position from which things are viewed.
- A standpoint is a position from which objects or principles are viewed and according to which they are compared and judged.
- The inequalities of different social groups create differences in their standpoints.
- All standpoints are partial; so (for example) standpoint feminism coexists with other standpoints.
That pretty much describes what I have been trying to say for a while.
I guess I’ll put this here, though peak woke probably fits as well:
Male vs. female educational attainment is a similar story, especially in the UK; it is not an unrelated phenomenon to “white privelege” in that it is rooted in actual problems but the proposed solutions and blindness to contradictory evidence is astounding.
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I’m a truth with a capital ‘T’ kinda guy, myself (as you may have guessed from my Forumosa handle). I can understand that people must view things from within their frame of reference, but I have a more individualistic perspective on that than what seems on offer here. My epistemology is based on complexity, which isn’t a well developed area philosophically but seems to me the only sensible way to look at the world. Yes, there is Truth, but it is complex.
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I agree, I was going to add more but from this point every direction becomes so entangled and complicated with contradicting ideas I gave up. Will let it bounce around my noggin for a while before adding additional thoughts.
call it complexity theory, sounds better 
Only white people (who are not a race but part of one) can be racist.
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Another parent speaking out against CRT, and this one is articulate AF.
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I read it.
It doesn’t feel like it has much to do with the issues I have with the right wing current issue boogey man - many of the people railing against it don’t know what it is / what it means to them / it means so many things to so many people that any particular discussion is difficult without painful definitions. It’s very removed from the very specific issues I have with my school board banning it, nor how those against it presented some training my company gave (that I’ve taken).
Given all that, specifically regarding the article, some of the article apparently wants people to think some things are ridiculous, but I just don’t find it so. Like the anti racist baby book… the sample from it says “confess when being racist. nothing disrupts racism more than when we confess the racist ideas that we sometimes express.” Am I supposed to be outraged by that “indoctrination”? I’m not. I think it’s a good message. And I have a hard time that the author thinks that page supports the conclusion that “The goal of education of children this young is to cement the notion at the most formative age that America is at its core an oppressive racist system uniquely designed to exploit, harm, abuse, and even kill the non-white” (and I guess that’s the best example the author has from that book if he highlights it). And yes, Sullivan has some extreme examples, like from the math class. Even then, I think it’s much closer to truth and have much less of an issue of that then, for example (on the topic of race), the lost cause mythology that’s still perpetuated in some schools (like in my local district).
my $0.02
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Trying to teach self-hatred to a generation of young Americans is a fool’s errand.
I’ve been looking in to CRT for a couple of days to see if I agree with anything. It kind of scares me to be honest.
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Is her show a ridiculous media parody as well?
I wonder how many were actually parents.
Media Matters has identified 64 Facebook groups dedicated to opposing “critical race theory,” with at least 9,800 combined members. Nearly all of these groups were created this year. We have also identified 187 right-wing parent and/or education groups on Facebook, many of which formed to combat “liberal indoctrination” in schools more generally and are now focused on critical race theory. These groups have more than 200,000 combined members.
Some of these groups that Media Matters has identified were created by people who have been amplified by right-wing media as “local parents and teachers” concerned about critical race theory – but that doesn’t tell the whole story. These figures, including Tatiana Brahimi, Scott Mineo, Ian Prior, and Elana Yaron Fishbein, have been active in conservative politics and right-wing movements such as “Blue Lives Matter,” and now they are leveraging this moment with viral videos, interviews, and Facebook networks to amplify their attacks on critical race theory.
We’ve also identified at least three networks of Facebook groups which are now focusing on “critical race theory” and have ties to local Republican politics, extreme anti-LGBTQ groups and figures, and/or the movements to reopen schools and businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Poisoning the well is a type of informal fallacy where adverse information about a target is preemptively presented to an audience, with the intention of discrediting or ridiculing something that the target person is about to say.
Autoracism is always going to be a tough sell so going straight to logical fallacy mode is probably the wisest choice.
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