Oy.

Stanford pushes separate physics course for minority students

From a brief reading, this appears to be less “minorities need to be taught F=MA in a separate space from white people because F=MA varies from race to race” and more “due to quota requirements and affirmative action, we’re bringing in minority students who are simply not prepared for Stanford-level physics and need to be trained up on the rudiments that other students already have.”

This should hardly be surprising. Affirmative action has long been demonstrated to generally be harmful to those it purports to help. Consider:

Option A: you’re from a  financially well-off family, race unimportant. Your grade/middle/high school education was top-notch, possibly private. When it comes time for college, you are prepared educationally and financially. You can basically pick your school (or, as recently shown, your limousine liberal parents can simply buy your way in, even if you, the student, don’t care about said school, or even schooling at all). If you find that you are scholastically in trouble, you can buy mentors and tutors and whatnot and plow your way through.

Option B: You’re from a financially middlin’ family, and you are not from a politically favored ethnicity. Consequently, you know well in advance that your college options are to either earn those scholarships (scholastic or athletic) or to set your college goals realistically. The South Houston Institute of Technology rather than Stanford, say. You thus enter a college that you can (more or less) afford, with students who, like you, are not the cream of the crop academically. You are with your academic peers.

Option C: Your family finances suck, but you’re ethnically popular. Since you come from poor finances, you likely went to a financially dubious set of primary schools, and possibly got an education that’s not worth the paper the diploma was photocopied onto. But you win the political lottery and through the magic of Affirmative Action not only get into college, you get into a *high* *end* college. Huzzah! But… a high end college means high end students and a high end grading curve. You are not prepared for Stanford. You are at the bottom of the class and failing hard. You drop out. You are depressed and demoralized and turned off the higher education system. History has shown that rather than licking your wounds and taking your failure at Stanford as an important lesson and then setting your sights more realistically and applying at the South Houston Institute of Technology, you say “screw it” to college and never go back But… huzzah! Your family took out a bankload of loans to get you into Stanford. You were only there for a year or two, but it was long enough to put them into debt for the rest of their lives, and since you have no college degree… suck to be you.

Yeah, life ain’t fair. But it does few people any favors to drop them into an environment that they are unprepared for. It may well be that it’s not their fault that they are unprepared. They may not have had the opportunity to become prepared. They may have even been held back from becoming prepared. But the fact remains… they’re not prepared.

Me, I managed to get an aerospace engineering degree. It was more difficult than it should have been, for two simple reasons: Calculus 1 and Calculus 3. I was a *disaster* with those. Calculus 2 and Differential Equations? Blew right through them, no sweat. But 1 and 3? Kicked my ass, *hard.* But… I still manged to get through it.

Now… instead of college-age me going for that Aero E degree, assume I had somehow obtained entry in, say, the ninth grade, several years earlier. It still would have been me… but it would have been a me substantially less prepared. The chances of success would have been probably nonexistent.

So what Stanford is doing makes a certain amount of sense. But it would make more sense for Stanford to do this *away* from Stanford. If these students are found to have the natural talent for the education they’ve signed up for but not yet the skills, rather than putting them into Stanford and giving them separate training alongside the other students, give them a year of “Year Five Of High School” somewhere *then* bring them to Stanford. I’m sure there are more than enough community colleges around the country that can do this.

And then put all the students into the same classrooms without discrimination, shame or the taint of forced diversity.

But not all of what Stanford is doing is aimed at the betterment of their students. Behold:

A similar course, titled “Physics 93SI: Beyond the Laboratory: Physics, Identity and Society,” is led by students, rather than professors. In this course, physics majors can earn academic credit by generally exploring “issues of diversity and culture in physics,” by applying concepts such as “critical race theory.”

Anyone who pushes “critical race theory” is working to ruin students as productive members of society.