Curios of the week #18

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

You know all about what I have been up to this week because I have been posting about my meeting with the professors of Academica and my visit to Michaela. So, I will restrict myself to one small detail.

Today, I visited Bewdley in Shropshire, near where by Dad lives. There is a statue in Bewdley of Stanley Baldwin, three times Prime Minister of Britain between the two World Wars.

It is an unassuming statue and Baldwin is holding his signature pipe. I cannot help reflect that Baldwin’s form of cautious conservatism, rooted to place, is something that has now gone from the political landscape, for better or worse.

This week’s curios include super teachers, an opinion piece from the New York Times, the effects on the gender gap of having female STEM teachers, the vicissitudes of education politics and much more.

Commentary of the week

John McWhorter has written a thoughtful piece about his own experience with affirmative action in the U.S. education system. His starts with how it affected his early attitude to grades:

“I grew up upper-middle-class in Philadelphia in the 1980s. As early as high school, I picked up — from remarks of my mother’s, who taught at a university, as well as comments in the air at my school — that Black kids didn’t have to achieve perfect grades and test scores in order to be accepted at top colleges. As a direct result, I satisfied myself with being an A- or B+ student, pursuing my nerdy hobbies instead of seeking the academic mountaintop. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t affect my future in the way that it might for my white peers.”

He goes on to discuss the way affirmative action facilitated his passage as onto tenure track program, despite being less qualified than the other finalists, and the growing realisation that his, “…skin color was not just one more thing taken into account but the main reason for my hire.”

Finally, the tables turned and McWhorter was implementing affirmative action himself as part of hiring committees:

“I will never shake the sentiment I felt on those committees, an unintended byproduct of what we could call academia’s racial preference culture: that it is somehow ungracious to expect as much of Black students — and future teachers — as we do of others”

It is a powerful reflection given the news of the U.S. Supreme Court striking down affirmative action and growing calls for the next step to be legacy admissions.