The kids are alright. -ish. Pushing back on the great anti-woke freakout on schools and the youngest generation. With data!

 In the completely hypothetical case that anyone bothered to read this pretentious, little blog, that completely hypothetical person would come to the conclusion that I am rather irritated by modern trends in wokeness.  Well, I am.  Yet if one delves too deeply into the current pushback against wokeness, one finds an entirely different kind of scary and wacky.  The short version of that scary-and-wacky is that we're all fucked because the schools are social justice brainwashing factories, which is exactly how China wound up with the Cultural Revolution, so get ready for your struggle session!  This particular storyline is part of the general, and fascinating phenomenon in which each side perceives itself to be the loser in the modern culture war.  The left defines itself as the side of the ever-oppressed, and hence, the side that is never in power, and always kept down by "the man," and the right has convinced itself that the left's cultural ascendancy means that they're the oppressed ones, and basically it's a world of self-proclaimed losers.  Tip your kings, kiddies, you've all been checkmated, and the only victor is the belief in universal loser-dom.  Whatever.  Anyway, my point for today is that the current apocalyptic bedtime story among the anti-woke is that the burnouts and never-burneds plodding away in classrooms across the country will inevitably turn the country into Cultural Revolution 2, Elek... Fuck No, I'm Not Typing It... where was I?  Oh, right.  Wokie teachers will inevitably turn the next generation into scary revolutionaries because all those teachers read in Ed School was Robin DiAngelo, AKA critical race theory for dummies.  That latter thing is, alas, true.  But here's the question.  How messed up are the kids?  Are the SJWs coming out of our Ed Schools really doing anything?  I mean, they couldn't teach kids to read before, so why should we really expect them to create an effective force of crypto-Marxist revolutionaries now?  And put like that, maybe you start to see where I'm going today.  Relax.  If they can't teach kids to read, they can't brainwash kids to put your back against the wall.

It's not that I am any fan of what is being done in Ed Schools, or modern trends in curriculum design.  I just question whether or not we should worry, if these people just aren't that competent.  Put some competent propagandists and psychological manipulators into classrooms, and we should worry.  As a general rule, though, the kids coming out of college without a clear direction but high aptitude go to med school or law school, depending on their math/science proficiency.  K-12 doesn't pay enough to appeal all that strongly, so the top students are disproportionately drawn elsewhere.  Entirely?  No.  I've sent some top students the educational route.  Should we change the pay structure?  Fuck yes.  Not the "fuck" part.  Florida tried that, and it didn't work out so well.  Zing!  My point is, though, that the K-12 system draws on a different pool, statistically, from med school, just as an example.  So, you put a bunch of people in the classroom who have only read Robin DiAngelo because Bell and Crenshaw and Delgado and the rest are over their heads?  Maybe we should relax, or at least, redirect our concerns.

So here's what I mean.  Consider James Lindsay.  Lindsay was one of the people behind the Grievance Studies hoax, about which I have written before.  Smart guy, and much of what he has written is quite valuable.  But, and I don't say this lightly, I think he needs to take a step back.  If you want to know what makes me say this, this popped into my youtube feed, on autoplay.  I let it run for a bit, as I puttered around.  Um... dude.  Dude.  If you don't want to listen, or can only stomach a bit, here's the gist of what Lindsay is on about.  He is claiming... um... 

OK, I'm going to type this, and it's just going to sound bonkers.  That's because it is.  This isn't me saying this, OK?  We're clear, right?  This is James Lindsay.  I'm just summarizing.  This is what it sounds like when an anti-wokestir goes off the deep end.  My point is that this is what prompted me to write this post.  OK?  This isn't me.  This is Lindsay.  Just to be clear, I'm going to use a different font.  OK?

Veranda!  Veranda font, shall be the font of James Lindsay!  Why?  I dunno.  I just picked it from the pull-down menu of my blog editor.  Anyway, so get this.  Our boy, Lindsay, claims that sexually explicit materials are showing up in school libraries and classrooms, not because of any curricular judgments one might question, but because there is a secret arrangement-- a conspiracy-- between pedophiles, trans activists/"queer theory" and Marxist revolutionaries to destabilize Western civilization.  You see, Antonio Gramsci and other Marxists wrote about the need to destabilize culture in order to bring about the Marxist revolution, and that includes the family, queer theorists want to mess up everything, and pedophiles are along for the ride, so to speak, because they get kids out of the deal. 

So, yeah.  Lindsay said that.  Not me, as you can see from that different font.  That, for the record, is what it sounds like when an anti-wokestir creates a big board with every writer in history, and starts drawing lines in order to create a massive, conspiratorial web of what-the-fuckery.

Just so we're clear, this is nuts-o.  In fact, when we write the technical definition of "nuts-o" in political science, we shall refer back to this podcast, by James Lindsay, which I say as a fan of much of Lindsay's work, including the Grievance Studies hoax, and Cynical Theories, coauthored with Helen Pluckrose.  Critical race theory is not just wrong, but crazy, and it developed because a bunch of extremists interacted only to each other, such that they had nobody to check their own excesses.  This is what happens when nobody checks James Lindsay's excesses.  This is what happens when Lindsay commits the same offense that produced the thing he hates most-- critical race theory.

Dude, go talk to some people who disagree with you, or at least read in a different mindset.  'Cuz this?  This is bonkers.  This is nuclear-grade bonkers.

The thing is, Lindsay actually has read Gramsci, and every other Marxist philosopher, and at this point, more queer theory than anyone who ever went to Ed School.  Yet that itself is a rather salient point.  He's read this stuff.  They haven't.  So there's no way they're thinking what he's thinking because they haven't actually read the literature.  As a professor, I can never accuse someone of "reading too much," but once you reach a certain point, never assume that others have read as much as you have.

Teachers and curriculum designers read a couple of things by Robin DiAngelo, and someone probably pulled a DiAngelo, dumbing down Judith Butler for the Ed School/marginally literate SJW crowd, and they read that, and that's about it, because it's Ed School, not a Ph.D. in Marxist philosophy, or gender studies, or any of that.  If you assume that these people have read that shit, and build a model of their intent on that assumption, you're gonna go full Lindsay.  Don't go full Lindsay.  Not on this, anyway.  Dude knows his shit, but the problem is that he's assuming everyone else does too.  Have you read Gramsci?  I think I probably did back in, like, fucking undergrad, but only because I'm a fucking political scientist.  These people haven't.  And I don't remember his fucking commie ass.

That said, it is important to understand that the current crop of teachers are SJWs.  And yes, they are teaching critical race theory.  And they are signing petitions, insisting that they will do so in the face of laws to the contrary.  Wanna see it?  Here.

So here's the question.  The empirical question.  The social scientific question.  Are these SJW teachers actually doing anything?  Besides signing petitions.  What I mean is, are they accomplishing their goals?

If so, some of us are gonna be up against the wall when the revolution comes, but that Lindsay rant was so batshit that I needed to go to my safe space.  Data.  My safe space is social science.  Data analysis.  Let's do some, shall we?  Spoiler alert:  these SJWs aren't doin' shit.  The great generational freakout is a nothingburger.

I've been crunching the numbers, and laughing my anti-woke ass off!  Yeah, we should freak out about climate change, and that other real shit, but this?  This?  Let's murder a beautiful theory with a gang of brutal facts.

We turn to the 2020 American National Election Studies survey.  Digging around, it does not have any truly fantastic measures of ultrawokeness, my little Droogies, but let's do what we can.  I would have loved some questions directly addressing "defund the police" or some of the other way-out-there policies on race, and with respect to gender, it would have been really interesting to see some questions addressing medical transition for minors/adolescents, the provision of hormones without the knowledge/consent of parents, and those kinds of issues to get a real sense of how many people take the most extreme positions.  NES did not ask those questions, so we don't have the data.

What do we have?  The bathroom question.  In 2020, NES asked respondents to place themselves on a six-point scale for which bathroom people should use.  Interestingly, and noteworthy given academia, the wording of the question was structured entirely around "gender" rather than "sex."  Should people use the bathrooms of "identified gender" or "birth gender?"  It is fascinating that the structure of the question avoids using the word, "sex."  Normally, when we write survey questions, we attempt to construct position statements that allow respondents to use their own terminology rather than their opponents' terminology.  With transgender issues, that gets thrown completely out the window.  The position that people should use the bathrooms of their biological sexes is not permitted to be described in terms of biological sex.  The entire question must be phrased in terms of "gender," including requiring those who conceive of the issue in terms of biological sex to answer in terms of "gender."  This is unique within NES and survey research.  We never do this.  This is a big methodological, social-scientific no-no.  It is, within the realm of the question, taking a position within the survey itself and casting judgment.  Why is NES doing this, on transgender issues and nothing else?

Because more than just about any other issue in the history of social science, scholars are not allowed to take a dissenting view on anything relating to transgender matters.  This is total within academia.  You can read it in the NES survey questions.

Hell, it's almost a risk for me to point out that one isn't allowed to dissent, and that you can see it in the question wording in NES, but methodologically, it jumps out to me that the wording forces those who interpret the policy through the lens of biological sex to answer in terms of self-identified gender.

That's bad social science methodology and we all fucking know it.  And it is inserted into the survey because the discipline won't let anyone do anything but speak in terms of "gender" rather than biological sex.  We violated our own rules of survey methodology for the sake of saying "gender" instead of "sex," to force the people we don't like to use our wording rather than their own.

Sorry.  Getting off track here, but this is a core violation of survey research methodology.  My position is use whatever the fuck bathroom you want.  Don't fucking accuse me of anything here, SJW shitheads.  I'm pointing out that the survey has been fucked up to accommodate your ideological-linguistic dictates.  I agree with you on policy, but your linguistic demand is fucking up our research methods!

Back on track.  Not going full-Lindsay.  Don't be James Lindsay today.  That's the mission statement.

So let's talk about the data.  Six point scale, from those who feel strongly that people should use the bathrooms of their self-identified genders to those of their "birth genders" (biological sexes, but the surveyors weren't allowed to say that).  Let's look at an age gap, shall we?  Wanna see?  It's there, but...

Anyway, let's start with the oldsters.  60-90, just to have a group of near-the-gravers.  The breakdown is as follows:

Strongly (birth)                36.8%

Moderately (birth)           10.5%

Weakly (birth)                  3.7%

Weakly (identified)          7.9%

Moderately (identified)    22.6%

Strongly (identified)       18.4%

OK, so the old people who are about to die are actually relatively evenly split, and among those who have moderate-to-strong opinions, the biggest difference is that the go-with-biological-sex side feels more strongly.  However, about the same proportions combine for moderately/strongly on each side, with 41% on the gender side, and 47.3% on the biological sex but-you're-not-allowed-to-say-that side.  That is probably somewhat different from your expectations, but that's why we have data.  Also, Dr. Noonien Soong.

Moving on, let's see what's going on with the OMG-WTF wokestir kids.  18-25 is basically what we can do, data-wise, so that we're no longer just in Lore territory.  Here's their breakdown.

Strongly (birth)                22.6%

Moderately (birth)           10.4%

Weakly (birth)                  7.4%

Weakly (identified)          13.6%

Moderately (identified)    17.6%

Strongly (identified)         28.3%

Holy shit, the 18-25 demographic looks absolutely nothing like the 60-90!  It's a total sea change!!!!  Wait... no, it's not.  They are... different, but not that different.  40.4% of the youngest generation still go with biological sex on the bathroom question, and there's only a 10 point gap on strong preference for self-identified gender between the youngsters and the oldsters.  Half of that can be explained by the moderate preferences just being... strong preferences instead.  That's it?  That's... it?!

Yeah.  That's the big difference between the 18-25 cohort and the 60-90 cohort on bathrooms.  So how much of "school indoctrination," or whatever is freaking James Lindsay the fuck out, are we capturing here?  The 18-year-olds had been getting this stuff in school for years.  When did the gender stuff start in schools?  Varies by school, of course, but that's actually part of my point.  The bigger point, though, is look at the damned data.  Yeah, there's an effect, but is it big?  Well, compared to what?

Now, let's go back to my motivation.  What I'd really like to know is preference for the more extreme stuff, like medical transitioning for kids and adolescents, giving hormones to adolescents without the knowledge or consent of parents... you know, the really hot-button issues.  NES isn't asking about that stuff.  However, think logically about this.  Nobody is going to support medical transitioning for 12-year-olds, or giving hormone replacement therapy to kids without the knowledge or consent of their parents unless they also feel strongly about bathroom access by self-identified gender.  They're just... not.  This is on a scale.

Nobody is going to support pogroms against the anti-woke unless they're in the feel-strongly category!

They're just not!  The threshold is higher for any more extreme position.  That's the point.  So, two observations.  First, there is only a 10-point gap between the oldest and youngest cohorts, and second, even among that youngest cohort, strong support for bathroom use by self-identified gender as actually only 28.3%.

So as anti-woke as I am, I'm still more woke than most of the damned kids!

If you are looking for support for anything you think might be "scary," however you define that, you're starting with a subsample of 28% that could even conceivably support it among that 18-25 cohort, and a lot of them will still oppose it.

Bottom line:  the kids are not that woke.  Line below that bottom?  The SJW teachers who are trying to get them woker?  They aren't doing a very effective job!

So I'm fucking freaking out about this shit, the schools, and whatnot, and I'm more woke than they are?!  Seriously?  I'm telling everyone to go read the Grievance Studies hoax, Cynical Theories, and learn to push back against wokeness, and I'm woker-'n the kids, who are supposed to be the scary ones?!

You see, James?  This is how you calm yourself down with data.

But wait!  There's more!

At the core of the great, anti-woke freakout (of which I am guilty of participating) is a fear that the younger generation just doesn't value speech as highly.  To be sure, "cancel culture" is real, it is documented, and I'm just not rehashing that here.  However, the concern among the anti-woke has been that if the younger generation, brainwashed by the SJW-factory schools, simply ceases to value speech, then long-term, the liberal order is doomed.  Shall we see how those fucking commie teachers are doing, chipping away at students' beliefs in free speech?

In 2020, NES asked respondents to choose a priority among four issues:  "Maintaining order in the nation," "Giving people more say in important government decisions," "Fighting rising prices," and, "Protecting freedom of speech."  You will notice not only that inflation thing (tad prescient, maybe?), but at least a hint of crime, attitudes towards law and order, and hence maybe something that implicitly touches on "defund the police."  Maybe?  Yeah, not quite.  Anyway, you also have a sort of pseudo-populism thing, except that we have an authoritarian party that plays at populism, and... gettin' off track here.

Anyway, let's look at the same age breakdowns, shall we?

Here are the numbers for the oldsters (60-90)

Maintaining order      39%

More say                    25.9%

Inflation                     6.3%

Freedom of speech    28.8%

OK, so those geezers weren't particularly concerned with inflation (yet), but put the highest priority on order.  Shocker, right?  Next was freedom of speech.  Muy interesante, no?  Now, let's check in on those kiddies.  18-25.

Maintaining order      16.6%

More say                    43.0%

Inflation                     9.1%

Freedom of speech    31.3%

What the fuck?!  Wait a minute, I've been freaking out about the impending doom that comes about because critical theory rejects the concepts of rights and liberty (true), and these kids are being raised to be so hyperwoke that they want to shut down any speech that offends them, yet empirically, if anything, they're more protective of speech than the old people who are about to fucking die?!  Seriously?!  These numbers are telling me that if someone's gonna protect my right to speak, it's more likely to be some fuckin' kid than the older generation?  I mean, yeah, it's statistical noise, but huh?  This is totally reversed, and the opposite of the anti-woke hysteria in which, admittedly, I've been caught up.

Does this mean there's no such thing as cancel culture?  No.  I can observe it.  It occurs.  What this means is that whatever is happening in schools is not doing that brainwashing thing that is causing the anti-wokestirs to shit their pants.

There is, actually, a significant difference between the kids and the about-to-die-ers.  (Hey kids!  Protect my right to make that very un-funny joke!)  The oldsters care about order, and the snot-nosed punks care about giving-people-a-say, or some fucking shit like that.  Yeah, I'm sure you're totally surprised by that.  Watch what happens to those numbers when those kids get a paycheck, a house, and something to protect.  The kids are spouting populism, but phrase questions a different way and you can get the Trumpist oldsters to spout a different form of "populism," and whatthefuckever.  As a dyed-in-the-wool elitist, I don't like populism in any form, but the important point is what we don't observe:  diminution in support for free speech.

I'm just throwing out a few numbers, but the basic point is that as of right now, I'm not seeing any evidence that the SJW-ism that has taken over the schools is doing jack, fuck, or shit.  And really, why should we expect it to do anything?

Look, this fount-of-blather is a professor's blog.  Did I pay attention to anything before college?  No.  Why not?  Because it was fucking boring!  Until college, I hated school, and I'm sure this may shock you to learn, but I was kind of intellectually rebellious.  I needed to read, and think, and make up my own fucking mind, and if you told me something, I wasn't just going to accept it because you said so.

But then there are the great, unwashed masses.  Yeah, there's my elitism again.  By "unwashed masses," I mean that their brains are unwashed.  Why?  Because they never listened, never read, and never cared enough to engage.  The difference for me was that if something caught my attention, I would challenge it.  That's a hard brain to wash.  You know what other brains are hard to wash?  The hermetically sealed ones.  The brains that cannot be reached because the owners of said brains don't listen or read, or otherwise, listen more to those outside of schools.

When you look at those numbers, and see that 40% of the kids still think that transgender people should use the bathrooms of their biological sexes, they aren't listening to their teachers.  To whom are they listening?  Parents?  Churches?  Social media?  There's a fuckload out there with whom these SJW teachers are competing, more than at any point in the past, and they were never any good, even when they didn't have that competition.  That generation gap?  It just is not that big, and on speech?  It doesn't exist, statistically.  If there is a difference, my rights are safer with the kids.

Look, James.  Take a breath.  You're a mathematician.  Numbers are your friends.  I understand.  I think like you.  My basic training, too, is in math.  I also enjoy reading, and knowing the intellectual history of the various disciplines.  Yet never commit the fallacy of assuming that others have read.  Instead, look at the empirical data.  The kids are alright. -ish.  I'd rather they get over the populist bullshit, but they probably will.  They'll get jobs, and paychecks, and houses, and then they'll have stuff to protect, and that's what order does.  Free speech, though?  That really is sacrosanct.  That is vital.  That is the sine qua non of Western liberal democracy.  I have written enough paeans to freedom of speech that I will spare you another today.  Yet should we be concerned about what is coming?  No.  Look at the fucking data.  I'm just not seeing the hyperwoke brainwashing thing.  Or at the very least, there is no reason to be concerned that our teachers have suddenly become overly competent.

Cold comfort, I suppose, but these days, we take what we can get.

Frank Zappa, "Who Are The Brain Police?," from Freak Out!