No, Promoting Anita Sarkeesian is NOT Education

The internets are alive with the sound of grumbling, as the Anti-Defamation League has released, for public consumption, a lesson plan entitled "Is Gaming a Boys Club? Women, Video Games, and Sexism."

It's a classical example of so-called "social justice education" in all of its ideology fervour, ruthlessness and factual paucity.

Intended for grade 11 and 12 students, the lesson plan is meant to deliver the message of Anita Sarkeesian into high school halls where it can warp the minds of impressionable youngsters and mold them into fatuous social justice warriors... that is, if it can actually be done within its 60 minute time limit. Which it actually can't. (More on this later.)

Putting it most simply, this lesson plan is an absolute mess.

The lesson plan provides 20 "vocabulary terms" students are to learn, and directs educators toward the ADL glossary in order to define them.

This matters because critical theorists routinely seek to redefine common words in order to suit their agenda. So the definition intended by the progenitors of this lesson plan very much matter. But unfortunately of the 20 vocabulary terms listed by the lesson plan only one -- sexism -- is defined by the ADL glossary.

Their definition reads as follows: "Prejudice and/or discrimination against people based on their real or perceived sex. Sexism is based on a belief (conscious or unconscious) that there is a natural order based on sex."

I have no objection whatsoever to the first portion of this definition. The latter, however, seems designed to implant notions of "patriarchy" into students, and accordingly skews the definition of sexism to apply only to sexism by men against women. It seems intended to preclude sexism by women against men. That's likely not coincidental, as radical feminists constantly declare that there's "no such thing as sexism against men."

It's also not coincidental that those who express these views are some of the most enthusiastic and self-satisfied sexists a person could ever hope to not meet.

Sexism isn't the only term that appears on ADL's vocabulary list that critical theorists have often set out to redefine. Also on the list are the following words:

-Abusive
-Cyberstalking
-Gamer
-Harassment

To leave these key words undefined is a serious issue for this lesson plan, particularly as each of them could be defined -- or re-defined, as is far more likely -- to deliberately create a power dynamic within the lesson plan that is solely to the benefit of the Cult of Sarkeesian.

A case in point is a now-infamous tweet in which Sarkeesian complains about abuse at the hands of "angry YouTubers." As it turns out, those individuals had merely exposed the factual shortcomings of Sarkeesian's work. Yet Sarkeesian chose to mischaracterize this as abusive, solely because it's to her benefit to do so.

So this is a serious problem with the ADL's lesson plan. But it's not by any means the biggest one.

No, the biggest problem with this lesson plan is that it's structured in such a way as to make the voicing of a dissenting view impossible.

The following is a screencap from this PDF:

Notice that there is no option for those who have not witnessed what they would consider sexism in video games, nor is there any option for those who do not think sexist things have been said or done to them through video game interaction.

The message is clear: this lesson plan will not permit you to disagree with the assertions being made at any point. Students are to "listen and believe" and for God's sake, do not allow them to think for themselves.

This lesson plan also proposes a common tactic in so-called "social justice education": dividing students up into smaller groups. As other "social justice education" resources make clear, dividing students into groups is a means by which targeted students -- frequently described as "privileged learners" -- can be isolated from one another, and reduced to a minority among students who are thereafter being agitated against them.

In the case of the ADL lesson plan, this is compounded by the application of peer pressure. As students watch their peers place sticky notes on the "I have witnessed sexism in video games" and "people have said or done sexist things to me through video game interactions" signs, they will feel pressured to do likewise.

The lesson plan eventually moves into force-feeding the students Sarkeesian. This is unsurprising, as Sarkeesian seems to exist as a public figure not on the merits of her work -- her work has been found to be entirely lacking merit by everyone who has actually examined it on a factual basis -- but on the will of high-profile and privileged individuals to stuff her down peoples' throats.

If forcing students to sit through brief unmediated readings of Sarkeesian's work isn't enough, teachers are actually instructed to force her ideas down students' throats.

Apparently the one thing instructors cannot permit is for Sarkeesian's insipid "tropes vs women" to be discarded by students as unimpressive or unconvincing.

And while the lesson plan does theoretically provide for some time for students to discuss these concepts -- and perhaps even how they openly contradict one another -- it's worth pointing out that by the time this portion of the lesson arrives, the instructor has used up no less than 49 minutes of a 60 minute lesson plan. (Yes, I tallied it up, but not by much.)

There's still two more segments of the lesson to go: reading a Pew Research paper about online harassment, then discussion of it afterward.

Interestingly, teachers are pressured to emphasize harassment of women as part of that post-reading discussion, when in fact the study indicates that men experience more online harassment than do women. Of all the modes of online harassment discussed as part of the Pew study, only two -- sexual harassment and stalking -- are experienced more by women. That's of six modes of online harassment mentioned in the study.

It's worth noting that of all the resources used to formulate this lesson plan, the Pew study is the only one that is meaningfully peer reviewed. So the one and only meaningfully peer-reviewed source in the entire plan is misrepresented within it.

That's the kind of "lesson" this is. It's not really meant to educate students at all. It seems to me that the sole purpose of this lesson plan is to promote Anita Sarkeesian and help her settle her grudges by forcing her ideas onto high school students, thus helping to further fill the ranks of her "army."

That's not what classrooms are for. This lesson plan has no place in any classroom anywhere. Any teacher who willingly attempts to teach it is eminently unqualified to be a teacher, and should consider seeking a career better suited to their talents and temperament.

Asian Privilege: I'll Bet You Never Heard of THAT Before

White privilege exists. Or so critical race theorists and those in their thrall would have you believe.

To make you believe it, they're frequently keen to bombard you with half-cooked statistics combined with half-baked logic. Here's one that recently came to my attention: in schools operated by the Toronto and District School Board, black and aboriginal students are suspended most often.

That's bad.

But here's something from the Toronto Star's take on it that really stands out:

"Black students make up only about 12 per cent of high school students in the Toronto public board — about 32,000 — yet account for more than 31 per cent of all suspensions. White students account for some 29 per cent of suspensions, but make up nearly one-third of the entire student body."

So black students are statistically overrepresented in their share of suspensions. But at 31% of students, white students account for 29% of suspensions. There's a pretty good chance that two percent is within the study's margin of error. For all practical purposes, white students are neither overrepresented nor underrepresented in suspensions.

The only way this is possible is if some other racial/ethnic group is underrepresented among student suspensions. And as it turns out, one is: Asian students.

The comparison in suspensions between white and black students is the kind of thing that critical race theorists frequently point to in order to prop up their claims that white privilege exists. But if privilege accounts for the rates of suspension, it would seem that it isn't white students who are privileged at all, but rather Asian students.

Of course, you never hear about "Asian privilege". (At the risk of uttering a racial slur, would "yellow privilege" be a more appropriate term?) As a racial minority, critical race theorists hold that Asians cannot be privileged, their own standard of evidence to the contrary.

Of course, there's a better reason why you don't hear about "Asian privilege." Because like "white privilege," it doesn't exist.

Karma in Quebec

Let me start off by agreeing with Chris Selley: schadenfreude is an unworthy emotion.

But if there is anything to be said about the $124 million cut being imposed by Quebec's Parti Quebecois government on the province's colleges and universities, it's this: this is karma for the Quebec student movement that empowered the PQ. In virtually every way imaginable.

And in every way imaginable, they did it to themselves.

Should anyone be surprised that Premier Pauline Marois' first impulse after having achieved power through the Quebec students' movement was to turn around and screw them over? Absolutely not. They set themselves up for it. They did it to themselves. As Thom Yorke would add, and that's why it really hurts.

Simply put, these Quebec students are really the victims of the same intellectual and ideological morass that has afflicted the Parti Quebecois itself: a lack of new ideas. Quebec separatism has been devoid of new ideas for decades now, and it's very telling that as soon as Marois and her merry band of incompetents were elected, the first thing they did was revert to the PQ's old form. Pushing draconian and discriminatory language laws. Trying to pull the Canadian Flag off of the National Assembly. Playing economic chicken with the rest of the country.

Same old, same old.

In the same sense, what the Quebec students movement demanded -- free or nearly-free tuition -- is itself far from a new idea. It's been considered and rejected by nearly every government on the planet with any sense. Most of those governments that made the mistake of trying it found it to be prohibitively expensive and have thusly since abandoned it.

Free post-secondary tuition may be a novel idea, but it's also a failed idea.

That didn't stop Quebec students -- who already enjoy the cheapest university tuition in Canada -- from toppling the Jean Charest government over modest tuition increases that still would have left Quebec with the cheapest tuition in the entire country. And while Marois did temporarily make good on a promise to cancel the proposed tuition increases -- at a speculated cost of $20 million -- she has instead turned around and imposed a funding cut of six times that amount.

Perhaps it's a cynical way to treat the people who basically got her elected. But this is the natural destination of a political movement that has produced no new ideas in at least thirty years.

Of course, they frequently manage to convince themselves that they have produced new ideas. If you peruse the #CdnPoli Twitterverse, you hear them trumpeting them all the time. Yet when you actually pay attention to these "new ideas," you find that they aren't new ideas at all. Rather, they're simply new ways to get attention.

Which is nothing more than what the inane "Casseroles" movement was: simply a desperate bid for attention, in the loudest and most obnoxious way possible. Far from the visionaries of a utopian future, the #ggi movement had reduced themselves to a pre-school-aged Bart Simpson, tearing around banging pots and pans while the adults in the room plaintively begged for some peace and quiet. And Marois was not content to be one of the adults in the room -- she was right there along with the other children, banging pots and pans while seemingly fully aware of the sheer absurdity of it.

That was perhaps the most fatal error the Quebec students movement ever made. For as much as they coveted attention for attention's sake, so do the most cynical of politicians. And virtually everything Pauline Marois has done since becoming the Premier of Quebec blares of cynicism to the nth degree. After having waited to gain power since 2003, the PQ had -- and continues to have -- no idea of what to do with it.

They, like the Quebec students' movement, are utterly bereft of new ideas, and accordingly doomed. They, like the Quebec students' movement, are now finding that getting all the attention they ever wanted was the worst thing that will have ever happened to them. They now form a minority government that is stunningly immobilized by the lack of a coherent program,

So for the Parti Quebecois, just as for the Quebec students movement, there is plenty of karma to go around in Quebec.

They did it to themselves.