The new ideology

Via Jerry Coyne, a paper from chemistry professor Anna Krylov, just published at Heterodox STEM and based on a paper originally delivered last year at Duke University. She's now at the University of Southern California but was educated at Moscow State University. She's concerned at the invasion of "progressive " aka "woke" ideology into science - a process she compares to the ideological constraints on science she experienced in Russia, most disastrously with the triumph of Lysenkoism.

From Russia with Love: Science and Ideology Then and Now. Some extracts.

My everyday experiences as a chemistry professor at an American university in 2021 bring back memories from my school and university time in the USSR. Not good memories—more like Orwellian nightmares. I will compare my past and present experiences to illustrate the following parallels between the USSR and the US today: (i) the atmosphere of fear and self-censorship; (ii) the omnipresence of ideology (focusing on examples from science); (iii) an intolerance of dissenting opinions (i.e., suppression of ideas and people, censorship, and Newspeak); (iv) the use of social engineering to solve real and imagined problems. [...]

Just as in the USSR everything was analyzed through the Marxist theory of class struggle, we are now told to view everything through the lens of Critical Social Justice. [...]

Just as happened in  Soviet Russia, the new ideology is declaring entire disciplines—for example, mathematics—racist. There are proposals, some already enacted in Oregon and California, that call to “dismantle white supremacy” in the mathematics classroom. How does white supremacy manifest itself in the classroom? By “the focus [being] on getting the ‘right’ answer” and asking students “to show their work.” Google “equitable math instruction” to see what this is all about. These programs are backed by serious institutions, such as the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. 

In California, there is a proposal to do away with advanced math programs in schools. Why? Because they are racist. Why are they racist? Because their demographics do not match the state’s demographics. How can we make math instruction equitable? Instead of raising the quality of education for everyone, the SJW favor the path that socialist regimes—real and dystopian—took: bringing everyone down to the lowest common denominator. 

For the same reasons, proficiency tests are being dropped, grading standards lowered, standardized tests eliminated, and so on. 

What will the consequences of such policies be? I think they will be devastating, possibly on the scale of Lysenkoism. 

But read it all.

Comments

[Richard]

I can't comment on the similarities between Soviet and contemporary US institutions. But whatever their faults, I'm not sure socialist education systems reduced everyone to the lowest common denominator. Mathematicians, scientists, engineers, linguists and musicians educated in the Soviet bloc were as well taught as those educated in the West. Mediocrity certainly abounded in Soviet society, but I suspect the reasons for that lay beyond its schools and universities, in a political and economic system riddled with corruption and perverse incentives.