Woke’s Assault on STEM Education

George Rebane

I was shocked to read in the 75^th anniversary issue of ACM Communications, the flagship publication of the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery, that computer science education in the US needs to be revamped.  Three maximally woke socialist (communist?) professors of education spell out their proposals in ‘Toward Justice in Computer Science through Community, Criticality, and Citizenship’.

Computer science is a vast field that encompasses and entwines many technical disciplines.  It has boggled many capable minds in the task of developing undergraduate CS curriculum that fits into a four-year baccalaureate program.  Now there has started a neo-Marxist initiative in education that seeks to inject into the curriculum the propagandizing of students with the tenets of critical race theory, social justice, equity, and inoculation against white supremacy, racism, and other social sins that originated in white Europe.

To accomplish this added and/or integrated layer of indoctrination will require the elimination or diluting beyond recognition of core subjects required by entry level practitioners in the field.  The authors already specify that merit and acquiring technical skills must be moved aside due to their longstanding systemic racist and white supremacist taint.  Time must be made instead for integrating students’ race, cultures, and life experiences which should shape the revised curriculum.  Added to that, the students will be encouraged (required?) to consult with their “community elders” to make sure that their CS training encompasses community, criticality, and citizenship.

The introduction of leading-edge technology has involved taking risks as the bugs are worked out of early-adopted commercial products.  Well, if something goes wrong with, say, an autonomous vehicle involved in an accident, then the new-age CS practitioners should be able to critically assess and assign blame to the appropriate participating agents ranging from the vehicle’s design, all the way to the way it was fielded to drive on the roads.  Our triumvirate of educators expand on this –

In order to bring such criticality to computing education, we will need to move away from focusing solely on developing technical skills and move to understanding and challenging the role of CS in maintaining and perpetuating systemic injustices. As a first step, we must engage educators in critical conversations that explore their own identities in order to move away from color-blind approaches to teaching CS. In addition, we must support educators by developing curriculum and pedagogy that challenges the “unbiased” and “objective” nature of computing. As educators develop their own critical computing competencies, it will lead them to “create spaces for collective development of critical consciousness, help develop plans for action to make the world a better place, and develop a sense of agency among learners.”

One thing is certain.  The Russians and Chinese are laughing their collective asses off, and doing everything they can to fund, through well-oiled circuitous channels, more of these woke initiatives to infect STEM education in the US and the west.  Read the short article to get a better picture of what we're up against.

Comments

[The Estonian Fox]

George, part of the problem may be the CV of the 3 authors of that ACM article.

Marie Heath, Ed.D. Towson University, Instructional Technology

Dr. Aman Yadav, Professor of Educational Psychology & Educational Technology at Michigan State University

Anne Drew Hu (huandrew@msu.edu) is a doctoral student in the College of Education at Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA.

I couldn't locate their degrees in Comp Sci. Oh, maybe because they DON'T HAVE any. They are all in Schools of Educ.

I especially appreciated the email address of Anne Hu - made to look like she is a he - huANDREW...And by golly, I think (s)he is a he (from a LinkedIn page), it is Andrew Hu, posing as Anne Drew Hu. You devious Chinese devil you!

Admiral Levine, arrest that man for impersonating an IT guy.

[Scott O]

It's 100 degrees today and having gotten all my yard work done early, I find myself with time to try to wade through the word salad of that article.
Blech.
It's boiler plate wokeist horse shit.
Students don't fail courses, courses fail them.
People of 'marginalized' groups don't last in tech jobs not because they can't produce value, but because the industry doesn't take into account these peoples' life experience.
If I were in the high ranks of the ChiCom military I would be pounding the desk daily for an ever increasing budget to go to programs to promote this societal quackery in the US and other western countries.

[Gregory]

It's drek like that that led me to abandon the ACM and IEEE decades ago.

[Randy]

Come on Dr. Rebane, learning is hard. And it's racist to expect someone who isn't white to learn because it's racist learning. Blew my mind when the Smithsonian flirted with these ideas as racist / the result of white culture: Rugged Individualism, Family Structure, History (European descent,) Protestant Work Ethic, Religion, Power/Status/Authority, Future Orientation, Time (Management,) Aesthetics, Holidays, Justice, Competition and Communication. Scroll down the page for the "chart" https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rational-thinking-hard-work-are-white-values-1518333

[Scott O]

re Randy's link to the Newsweeks article:
"Another section says that white values include "steak and potatoes: 'bland is best'" and that white people have "no tolerance for deviation from a single god concept.""
Wut??!!
First of all, a stupid and clumsy lie and beyond that, by the left's own definitions - blatant racism and outright hate-speech.

Are you sure this isn't the Babylon Bee?
"The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture had no comment for Newsweek."
Of course not - that would involve logic, rational thinking and quantitative emphasis.

[George Rebane]

Unfortunately, it's real and it's the sign of the times. Such articles now appear regularly in the ACM and IEEE journals. Everyone is scared shitless of not going along to get along on this woke crap.

[Randy]

I thank my lucky stars the current employer hasn't pushed the whole "there are 150+ gender pronouns, learn them and use them or else!" Sorry there are only two biological genders and that is it. It's called science (and chromosomes) stupid! Despite the most recent Supreme appointment's outlook on the matter...