The fact that Nikole Hannah-Jones has been honored with a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" and a Pulitzer Prize, and has had the New York Times backing her error-riddled and fundamentally mistaken 1619 Project as a curriculum throughout the United States, tells us that we live in an intellectually degenerate moment in history.  That she has been granted an endowed chair (despite no doctorate) and is heading a new center with $20 million in funding at Howard University bespeaks a collapse of standards.

Yesterday, when featured on Meet the Press, she demonstrated genuine intellectual mediocrity.  She packs a boatload of BS in this 42-second excerpt:

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Parents shouldn't be in charge of their kids' schooling: "I don't really understand this idea that parents should decide what's being taught. I'm not a professional educator. I don't have a degree in social studies." Yet she wants the 1619 Project in schools. pic.twitter.com/UAjFTCvVmg

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) December 26, 2021

I don't really understand this idea that parents should decide what's being taught. I'm not a professional educator. I don't have a degree in social studies or science. We send our children to schools because we want them to be taught by people who have expertise in a subject area, and that is NOT my job.

When the governor, or candidate, said that he didn't think parents should be deciding what's being taught in school, he was panned for that. But that's a fact. This is why we send our children to school and don't home school. Because these are the professional educators who have the expertise, social studies, history to teach science, to teach literature. And I think we should leave that to the educators[.]

First of all, she has disqualified herself from offering her 1619 Project as a curriculum if you take her at her word.  She is not an educator, and only educators can tell children what to learn.  Yet huge institutions are pushing that project to be the basis of school curricula throughout the country.

I do not think people with social studies degrees from schools of education have any special qualifications to decide what students should learn.  Schools of education are notorious for the low quality of the students entering them.  Even Jill Biden got a doctorate in education for a ridiculous "dissertation" featuring an embarrassing basic arithmetic error and precious little substance:

Mrs. Biden's only original research consists of interviews with two — that's right, two — ex-students and a few colleagues at Delaware Technical Community College, where she used to teach, plus the results of a vacuous questionnaire she wrote that was returned by about 150 people who worked or studied there. Oh, and she also called two nearby community colleges seeking interviews about their retention rates. One of them wouldn't answer the question; the other wouldn't assign anyone to speak to her at all. Telling us about this misadventure serves no academic purpose, though it does fill up four pages of her generously spaced paper. The transcripts of her group chats with campus figures and colleagues take up nearly 30 pages out of 129. The questionnaires eat up another 18 pages.

The dissertation, Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students' Needs, shimmers with the wan, term-papery feel of middle school, although in defense of today's middle schoolers, they at least know how to use spell-checking software, unlike Mrs. Biden.

With intellectual leaders like Dr. Biden producing the "expertise" prized by Hannah-Jones, how can one grant any authority over parents to holders of Bachelor's degrees in social studies?

The idea that parents have no role in deciding what their children should be taught is a repulsive dogma of those who worship the state as a religion.  She knows that expressing this view is what got Terry McAuliffe defeated in his bid to become governor of what had been a blue state, Virginia.  Yet she so strongly believes in the myth of educators' expertise that she doubles down on the  notion and even seems to regard homeschooling as morally wrong because parents don't have education degrees from pre-eminent institutions like the University of Delaware School of Education, Dr. Biden's doctoral alma mater.  Yet homeschooling graduates outperform public school graduates on most metrics.

There is no reason why this woman deserves the influence and honors she has reaped other than serving the destructive agenda of the radical left.

Photo credit: Twitter screen grab.

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