Kerby Anderson
Entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Peter Thiel recently spoke about the “Diversity Myth.” Back in the mid-1990s, David Sacks and he wrote a book by that title about multiculturalism and political intolerance on campus. The first chapter focused on the decision by Stanford University to abandon the great books as other universities were abandoning the teaching of Western Civilization.
He concluded that three decades later that almost every point he made was right. Back then it was called multiculturalism. Today it is called woke, which fights for diversity, equity, and inclusion. The original cancer has metastasized.
He even thinks the title “diversity myth” has held up well. If you emphasize the word “diversity,” that means that diversity is not real. It is a fiction. There is no real multiculturalism, it’s just monocultural. If you emphasize the word “myth,” then you can dismiss diversity out of hand.
He also noted that the ideas of diversity, wokeism, and multiculturalism also prevent finding real solutions. Here’s the flawed logic. “Homelessness is a mess. It’s a problem. And at the same time that it is a very real problem, it is a giant machine to redirect attention from all the other problems across America toward a narrow aspect of big-city dysfunction. When homelessness is forced into every policy conversation, it leads to circuitous, dead-end reasoning—We’re never going to fix homelessness until we fix the schools, but we’re never going to fix the schools, the police, or even the roads until we fix homelessness.”
Diversity may sound like a wonderful goal, but it doesn’t lead to concrete plans of action. It may make the proponents feel good, but it never really solves anything.

Kerby Anderson
Now that summer break has arrived, it’s worth taking a moment to evaluate student behavior in the public schools. An article in City Journal reports that “students nationwide have been filmed swearing at teachers, flipping over desks, and committing physical violence.” Bad behavior has been the rule for many years but has gotten even worse since the pandemic.
A 2022 EdWeek article reported that 44 percent of school-district leaders said they received more threats of violence from students now than in fall 2019, and that “two out of three teachers, principals, and district leaders” noted more misbehavior from students compared with 2019.
The pendulum swings back and forth. In the 1980s, school districts implemented “zero tolerance” discipline policies. This meant mandatory suspension and expulsions for behavior issues, especially if they involved threats of violence. Ten years ago, the federal government told school districts to remediate these policies because they were racially discriminatory. They were replaced with “restorative-justice” policies that minimize “exclusions” from school.
The obvious solution is to deal with any behavior in the classroom before it gets out of hand. But there are other obvious solutions like going back to grading policies based on merit instead of letting students retake tests.
Tracking is another issue. Students bored with a slow pace of learning are more likely to act out. Students who can’t keep up with a faster rate get confused and frustrated.
Another obvious solution is to ban cell phones from the classroom. They distract teenagers and are just one more class disruption. Many of the videos I have seen result from a teacher trying to take away a cell phone from a student.
Student behavior is getting worse. It is time for administrators, principals, teachers, and parents to act before school starts again.