A course at the University of British Columbia’s…

Moonbats 39 Comments

…Department of Educational Studies:

Postmodern, postcolonial progressives: “Huh”, “Horseshi..” and…
…hooey. Further to these posts,

Evil language
Horsesh..: “human rights imperialism”

Jonathon Narvey presents a stinking gem (should that be conceivable) at The Propagandist:

Anti-Imperialist Rot In The Foundation Of The Ivory Tower…

Update: About the prof. (via Terry Glavin):

…
Jo-Anne Dillabough is not just any old prof. She is the David Lam Chair in Multicultural Education, she’s been a Killam Fellow, a Spencer Fellow, a UBC Early Career Scholar with the Peter Wall institute for Advanced Studies, and a Noted Scholar with Flasco, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Social Sciences Institute.
She’s the boss.

She is also associated with the University of Cambridge (extensive CV at link).

39 Replies to “A course at the University of British Columbia’s…”

  1. Would you like to super-size those fries, sir? That phrase will be more useful in real life than that course.

  4. The new head of the Education Faculty got the job because she was promoting a complete do-over of the teacher training curriculum to feature “Social Justice” as the most important value for prospective teachers to acquire during their five years of studying in the Scarfe Building how to be a teacher.
    They will be graded on their social justice values rather than their ability to teach a subject or control a class of 12 year old hooligans whose parents don’t know the meaning of the word discipline.
    Bodes well for public education in BC ! It will be so progressive and wonderful and fair, like liberal comfy fur.
    If you have kids there get them out of the public system now.

  5. Are any of you familiar with Adam Carolla? The other day on his podcast he said [paraphrasing] : “When my kids finish high school I’m not sure I want to pay $50,000 per year for 4 years, only so they return home afterwards hating both me and their country.”

  7. I was just over there. Almost choked to death on “Global Ethnography”. As a former Anthro, I thought I heard Franz Boas flatulating profusely in his grave. Or maybe groaning in pain from post-mortem verbal diarrhea.

  8. From the course prospectus:
    We will begin the course with a critical history and cultural sociology of imperial education and its globalizing functions.
    And we will end the course with not a single student being able to find a job. Ever.

  10. Heh. This stuff just blows me away. Years ago I took my B.Comm, majoring in accounting at the Un iversity of Calgary.
    Presumably for the purpose of providing a “balanced education”, the university insisted that we take a number of courses in social sciences, philosophy etc.
    The business courses were bloody tough. The social science courses were laughingly easy; my golden retriever could have possibly got at least a “B” in them.
    At the time the engineering students were selling t-shirts that read “I have a liberal arts degree…would like fries with that”
    I wish I had bought one.

  11. “cultural sociology”???
    As if there were “sociologies” that were not “cultural”. “Hey honey, will you pick me up a bag of COLD ICE while you are at the store? We only have WARM ICE left”.

  13. Not my particular cup of tea, though I’m glad to see that there are still university courses premised solely on the exploration and discussion of an idea in addition to courses that focus primarily on technical or professional training.

  14. How do we make sense of this?
    “Some of these orientations include, but are not limited to, an examination of: critical transnational theories of post-coloniality; cultural geographies of race, migration and post-colonial spaces; micro-national theories of space; comparative and international cultural studies; a history of ideas tradition established through European Continental thought and its links to Orientalism(s) (Said [more here]); theories which reside outside the cultural lineage of the ‘global North’ (see Connell on Northern Theory); and global youth cultural studies. Each of these approaches acts as a lens and important background for discussing empirical research on the topic of youth, empire and education.”
    If I understand this correctly, students will be asked to role-play post-colonial peoples in order to understand how different everyone is, at least according to prominent writers on the subject. This, in turn, is going to allow the students to research other things.
    What the hell?

  16. Ah yes the social sciences, marxism tarted up as social justice spit. Orginally the progressives were communist but they changed the name to socialist now they are called progressive liberals.

  17. I think you’d learn more about transnational imperialism of the period reading “On War”, but that might just be me.

  19. lickmuffin (and kinyobe) – it isn’t simply that the students won’t be able to find a job; they’ll be brainwashed into being unable to critically THINK.
    After all, that sentence itself ‘ a critical history and cultural sociology of imperial education and its globalizing functions’ is filled with unexamined and quite fallacious assumptions.
    What is ‘imperial education’? How is it ‘globalizing’? Are these phrases, so common among the left, and those such as Said and R. Connell etc, reflecting the truth? Or an ideology?
    I’d bet that these students never examine this focus as an ideology!
    davenport – are you serious? There are no ideas in technical or professional training? I can think of many hypotheses (ideas) in biology, physics, chemistry, computers and robotics and engineering. BUT these ideas are then moved beyond words and the words are examined as representing the real world. The social sciences remain trapped in words, in a virtual reality of unreality.

  20. For a breath of fresh, pre-postmodern (or should I say postpostmodern) air, have a peek at Kieth Windschuttle’s writings. He blows these idiots out of the water, and he does so in words that I can understand

  21. “This temporalized approach will not be nation-based but will instead represent transnational account which situates imperialism and colonization in both a synchronic and diachronic temporal framework…”
    Temporalized and temporal in the same paragraph. And both impart no meaning whatsoever.
    There is a reason that some academics write like this, particularly in the social sciences. It’s to give the appearance of complexity and rigour where none exist. It would be comical if this wasn’t heavily subsidized by the public purse and of course sending so many young students off into intellectual Never Never Land.

  22. Today’s humanities and social sciences are the modern equivalent of 1950’s girls finishing schools. It is a place where future social justice warriors learn proper etiquette and manners for progressives. After graduation these students are fully equipped with all of the buzzwords and PC language needed to enter the protest market. From there they hope to hook up with an activist organization or NGO and ensure a lifetime of taxpayer funded employment.
    IMO, the person who wrote up the course description is either uber-pretentious or pathetically insecure. In fact, it is a clear indication to avoid the class because the prof may be a borderline megalomaniac.

  23. ET is correct. I have worked with people from a variety of educational backgrounds (labor, trades, technical, masters and PhD’s) and I have yet to see a correlation between education level and critical thinking skills. The capacity to reason and think independently or make good decisions under pressure is a combination of innate ability and life experience.

  24. ET, I gathered that. The whole point of that ridiculous “subject” was to gauge and ultimately erase any common sense these students might have had. That’s the point of any material one sees in schools these days.
    It’s amazing how useless verbiage can actually mean that the left wants to brainwash people.

  25. It’s a common problem – “FFC” (Former French Colony)
    Just look at Haiti and Ivory Coast, and feel lucky.

  26. “Afghans, especially, who every day take greater risks and make greater sacrifices in the struggle for the rule of law, free speech, woman’s rights and civil liberties than any of the rich-kid “anti-imperialists””
    ah yes…those ‘rich kids’ you speak of are our Bi-Proxy Victims who are empathetic to those that don’t want to see their culture disappear regardless of what that culture entails. It is my opinion that this empathy is rooted in their own desire not to be judged for they’re own lives. THIS…I believe is the main thrust behind the vitriol Atheist’s have towards god, Christians and other religious folks. It is abhorrent to them to think that they are responsible to someone else beyond themselves; or, that they will be judged on the criteria of someone else. This is the only way someone can have exactly what they want, no matter what it is, with no strings attached.
    Also, I never accept the ‘settled’ premise that Imperialism was some type of egregious act towards those conquered people. I’ve said here many times that Imperialism is the greatest thing that could have happened in our history; else, today there would truly be no refuge from tyranny.
    What Left-tards fail to realize is that if it wasn’t the British or French and so on, it would have been someone else. Likely someone less appeasing.
    In high school I was asked to write an essay on how constructing roads for the military during the Cold War through NWT, the Yukon and Alaska effected the indigenous people of that region, considering the effects of such construction on their ability to hunt and such. Of course the instructor was expecting an essay about the poor Indians and mean Whitey. I took a different approach and wrote about what the plight of the Indian people might have been had the USSR invaded and occupied the North. I titled the essay “Pay me in Rubles Please”.
    I must say that my instructor was not impressed, but not less so than the instructor that asked us to write a “controversial” essay, to which I argued that the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote was the main cause of the market crash in the late twenties causing the Great Depression. Needless to say I couldn’t squeeze better than a 60% out of her for the whole year.
    BTW, there was no research required, this was the inaugural assignment for gr.12 English to evaluate my writing skills. Apparently I don’t write too good.

  27. A long time ago I had a psychology course compliments of the US military industrial complex.
    The instructors were not marxists and we benefited.
    We learned instinctively to identify the enemy’s greatest fear and how to enhance it.
    That makes it much easier to understand why 10,000 Iraquis surrendered to a coupla lost “journalists”….during Desert Storm (Gulf I).

  30. This is a classic example of A illeteracy designed to impress how deep the writer’s knowledge of the subject is. When analysed nothing important has been said, but it does illustrate a problem with an education system wrapped in its self importance and disonnected with reality.

  31. The education industry passed its best before date some time ago. It hasn’t had a good idea in a hundred years and any ideas it now has are shown to be wrong. It props itself up through a closed shop network and gate keeper to a higher paying job. If it were a rug it would best described as stained, soiled, threadbare and in desperate need of being replaced.

  33. ET: “davenport – are you serious? There are no ideas in technical or professional training?”
    As if to prove my point, you’re being too literal.

  35. Apparently secondary English classes now teach the addition of ‘ism’ and ‘ized’ to most of the words in a sentence. The new ‘eth’?
    I challenge anybody to interpret this description into 20th century English. My education, apparently, was not progressive enough to accomplish this.

  36. She’s “just another prof”, with nothing of value to offer the world for trade. And “social justice” is the mother of all anti-concepts — the biggest fraud going, probably even bigger than Keynesian economics by this time.

  38. Fred writes: “The new head of the Education Faculty got the job because she was promoting a complete do-over of the teacher training curriculum to feature “Social Justice” …”
    I think you are referring to the head of the department that houses pre-service teacher education. The Faculty is about to appoint a new dean, who will take it even further down this dead-end street.

  39. Why not cut the camouflaged lingo and call this “course?” what it is :
    Indoctrination to Marxist identity group politics, politically corrected revisionist history and using both to destabilize and subvert the society that feeds you.

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