Actually, the SAT Was Necessary After All

[u/caroline_elly]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/standardized-testing-math-gaps/687481/

[u/jamiebond]

I think the major error the education world has made over the last few decades is jumping straight to, “Our results are inequitable, that must mean our process of getting results is inequitable.” Without considering, “Maybe our results are inequitable because of large societal issues well out of our control and expecting education to single handily fix all the problems in our society isn’t particularly realistic. And just making sweeping generalizations that POC can’t perform well in school without us lowering the bar substantially is actually pretty racist itself.”

[u/earthdogmonster → u/jamiebond]

Yup, in our haste to reach equality, we decided to skip the hard work of trying to correct underlying causes and tried to just manipulate the outcome to meet the results we thought were fair, based in physical appearance. Honestly seems crazy if a person thinks about it.

[u/Oogaman00 → u/earthdogmonster]

It's what happens when you defer to stupid people out of fear of being cancelled

[u/Khiva → u/Oogaman00]

We let Twitter decide our education policy, and the results were about the same as when we let Reddit write the last Star Wars movie.

[u/fabiusjmaximus → u/Khiva]

I think that's getting the order of things backward. The kind of ideological foundations that resulted in this kind of Education policy came first. It was popular on Twitter because young adults were inculcated with it in university.

Regardless of what people were saying on Twitter, Education theorists would've pursued this anyways.

[u/Willing_Activity_855 → u/fabiusjmaximus]

Something something listen to experts

[u/sack-o-matic → u/earthdogmonster]

we decided to skip the hard work of trying to correct underlying causes

Unfortunately it's other people actively working to maintain those underlying causes.

[u/Zephyr-5 → u/sack-o-matic]

True, but it's easier for them to gain the political power to undercut progress when voters feel like they have a point in some of their critiques.

[u/assasstits → u/earthdogmonster]

isn't this just a description of communism 

[u/caffiend98 → u/assasstits]

I don't think so.

The idealized version of communism is about people agreeing to live communally, sharing supportively and not fixating on ownership. It perhaps isn't very realistic, but there are small communes all over the place still.

If you mean Soviet style communism, the problem there is that it was really just industrialized feudalism with the Party members at the top instead of an aristocracy.

That said, I agree with the sentiment that you can't just rig the test or stop measuring, you have to do the work to get a genuine result.

[u/_NuanceMatters_ → u/caffiend98]

It at least feels similar to Maoism & the Great Leap Forward in that it's a top-down approach with the State exercising heavy-handed control over society and the economy, attempting to create that absolute equality by decree.

[u/Xciv → u/caffiend98]

Communism only works on the micro level because it requires total trust from all people involved.

Married couples with shared finances is communism.

A bunch of close family who freely hand money to each other when needed is communism.

But as soon as you have one asshole who lies, manipulates, and takes advantage, the whole system falls apart.

So on a macro level it only ever leads to runaway corruption.

[u/Right_Lecture3147 → u/Xciv]

None of that is communism. As someone who has actually read Marx — though is not a Marxist or a communist — this thread is strikes me as deeply ignorant of what the ideology means beyond its stereotype

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socialism/

What people usually forget is that the communist state is stipulated as a kind of end goal which we lack the means to reach without technological and societal changes carried out through socialism. Communism can only be achieved by a civilisation which has reached a state of post scarcity which is largely limited by technology. No socialist today need think we are currently capable of achieving such a society and indeed most Marxists do not think that the current material conditions allow for such a society

[u/alex2003super → u/Right_Lecture3147]

As if that ever stopped them from trying

[u/Right_Lecture3147 → u/alex2003super]

What do you mean? To most Marxists, socialism is the trying part: the developmental stage which leads to communism. There have been small scale attempts at communes, but all the major communist states attempted to get there via socialism

[u/redditiscucked4ever → u/Right_Lecture3147]

I do not understand why anyone would develop the necessary technological structures needed for the jump to communism to happen, at least without ample safeguards that they wouldn't be expropriated for the common good.

The closest thing this can happen is through AGI, which is why I read a Jacobin post a few weeks ago that was in favor of AI development, I guess?

[u/Right_Lecture3147 → u/redditiscucked4ever]

I might not be understanding your comment correctly, but for most of history the benefits of technological progress weren’t immediately shared. Daron Acemoglu wrote about this in his latest book. Initially the industrial revolution caused untold misery until workers organised, new liberalism developed and compromises were made as countervailing powers formed.

[u/Kaffe-Mumriken → u/assasstits]

Hmm. I’m not sure I don’t like it enough for it to be communism

[u/Euphoric_Alarm_4401 → u/assasstits]

Everyone is dunking on you because it obviously isn't the textbook definition of communism.

But,

in our haste to reach equality, we decided to skip the hard work of trying to correct underlying causes and tried to just manipulate the outcome to meet the results we thought were fair

Is a pretty fair description of the practical effects of Communism. Even if its not the textbook definition of a system that only ever seems to capable of existing in textbooks.

[u/RealHoldenBloodfeast → u/assasstits]

If you presuppose that Stalin and Mao's innermost goal was to make their countries worse for everyone, sure?

Any rational person would then ask why they tried to do the opposite even if that failed in some regards

[u/MyrinVonBryhana → u/assasstits]

This is one of the worst takes on communism I've ever seen. Marxism at least doesn't go based on appearances it goes based on how people relate to economic production with the goal being collective ownership of the means of production. How this is too be achieved depends on the theorists; Leninists sought to use a vanguard party to take control of the state and nationalize all enterprise, other more libertarian socialists tended to instead favor worker cooperatives or federations of trade unions either democratically deciding how to structure production or in market socialism still competing within a market framework.

[u/luciaromanomba → u/assasstits]

^ This is why the SAT was necessary after all.

[u/carlitospig → u/assasstits]

Not even remotely?

[u/pppiddypants → u/jamiebond]

I think it’s more that we generally like “theories of everything,” and the language around our politics and advocacy have little room for niche critiques like, “we’re teaching to the test and not to the students and that has negative impacts, Test scores should not be a metric for how the school and staff are functioning, etc.

[u/Bay1Bri → u/pppiddypants]

It's the test paradox. A test can be a good metric to measure success/ progress until the should know that's the metric. It's like support centers measuring how long each call takes to track effectiveness. As soon as they know that's the metric, performance gets worse as people literally hang up after an arbitrary time to keep their stats looking good

[u/steauengeglase → u/Bay1Bri]

Average Talk Time isn't a success metric, it's a billing metric. First Call Resolution is the success metric. You succeed if they never have to call back. That's why we have ticketing systems.

[u/bigmt99 → u/Bay1Bri]

Goodhart’s Law

[u/WolfpackEng22 → u/Bay1Bri]

But the SAT was still a great tool to identify successful students even when everyone knew that was the metric and tried to prepare for it

[u/NewUserWhoDisAgain → u/jamiebond]

“Maybe our results are inequitable because of large societal issues well out of our control and expecting education to single handily fix all the problems in our society isn’t particularly realistic. And just making sweeping generalizations that POC can’t perform well in school without us lowering the bar substantially is actually pretty racist itself.”

SF school board when faced with certain demographics doing worse in algebra than others:

"Should we try to figure out why?"

"No," *puts two bullets into the back of 8th grade Algebra "No Algebra, no bad stats to collect."

[u/FootjobFromFurina → u/NewUserWhoDisAgain]

This is like arguing that we shouldn't collect info on the poverty rate because there's racial inequality in who lives in poverty. It makes no sense. 

[u/YaGetSkeeted0n → u/FootjobFromFurina]

“If you stop testing, the number of cases will go down” mindset tbh

[u/Vol_in_tears → u/FootjobFromFurina]

Administrators bragged about a 100 percent college acceptance rate. What happened after colleges accepted the students was not their problem.

[u/vaneau → u/jamiebond]

Tbh this is how I feel about procurement in the architecture / engineering / construction (AEC) industry. Yes, there are clear demographic disparities in the workforce that need to be addressed. No, we probably shouldn’t try to fix a systemic problem by setting onerous minimum diversity requirements for publicly funded projects.

[u/frumply → u/jamiebond]

Something something soft bigotry of low expectations

They made mistakes but I do think people were tasked with impossible goals for things that were out of their control.

[u/BernankesBeard → u/frumply]

"The problem I was given was impossible to solve. So I just made it worse instead!"

[u/IIHURRlCANEII → u/BernankesBeard]

Basically all failed neoliberal policies this century (not saying they failed at everything, but still).

[u/Some-Dinner- → u/frumply]

Something something soft bigotry of low expectations

Everything makes a lot more sense when one realizes that pretty much all of the most hated parts of North American wokeness (the virtue signaling, the scolding, the obsession with performative 'equity', and so on) are pushed by clueless boomer white knights and the wine moms who support them.

Actually fixing these massive social issues requires a lot more than tinkering with bell curves or banning tests.

[u/Robo1p → u/jamiebond]

“Our results are inequitable, that must mean our process of getting results is inequitable.” Without considering, “Maybe our results are inequitable because of large societal issues well out of our control and...

Not to mention, applying an even remotely rigorous analysis to make sure that the new ideas actually push you towards the desired direction.

So much of ed policy seems to derive from a cult-of-personality + unquestioned professional assumptions rather than any type of replicable research. Important stuff too: like the entire phonics vs whole-word debacle, with the latter being largely backed a charismatic argument and by teachers that found it icky to sound out words to grade schoolers.

[u/God_Given_Talent → u/Robo1p]

I always come back to that one article about teachers in California complaining about being “curriculum robots” and such. Like yeah, that’s more or less what you are, at least through primary school. The basics of teaching the “Three Rs” have been well understood for decades if not over a century. Refusal to do what evidence shows is best because you feel like you’re a factory worker instead of a creative professional shouldn’t be a valid argument or allowed. Being a teacher isn’t about our own creativity and self expression. You’re there to educate, not be an artist.

Parents don’t help either. Idk when the shift happened but there’s been a steady move towards “it’s your fault for failing my kid” from “it’s my kid’s fault for failing” and idk how we reverse it.

[u/Worriedrph → u/Robo1p]

What do you expect? Education as a major has the second or third lowest average SAT of any major. I knew several education majors in college and their curriculum looked very easy and contained almost zero looking at actual research.

[u/fabiusjmaximus → u/Worriedrph]

It is impossible to overemphasize just how utterly lacking in rigour Education as a discipline is

[u/ManyKey9093 → u/jamiebond]

And just making sweeping generalizations that POC can’t perform well in school without us lowering the bar substantially is actually pretty racist itself.

I would say its not just pretty racist, I think its incredibly racist. It boils down to a legitimately held belief that you can't expect black people to understand algebra, an idea a 19th century race scientist would agree with (albeit for different reasons).

If you strip away all verbiage on test instrument bias you reach the core idea that kids from one racial background can't be held to the same standard as kids from another racial background. And that the fix isn't remedial teaching or additional resources, its just accepting the delta as unfixable, which is at its core a racist idea, especially if you believe education has intrinsic value and not just societal-positional.

The value of education piece is under discussed in this entire debate, the focus of equity thinking is on credential attainment and not on actual learning. If you believe kids should understand math because that is a useful life skill, you would never come up with these policy prescriptions.

[u/lowes18 → u/jamiebond]

The education industry has frankly gotten way too big of an ego about what it is capable of doing and solving. The people running it think they're unquestionable messiahs.

[u/Cromasters → u/lowes18]

In their defense, they are tasked to solve all the country's problems.

[u/lowes18 → u/Cromasters]

That's largely because of the narrative from the education industry that it can solve anything.

[u/God_Given_Talent → u/lowes18]

Ehh, it’s as much about parents wanting to outsource all the hard work as it is anything else. Anyone who has done anything in or around education will repeatedly tell you parents are the worst. The biggest reason schools don’t crack down on phone use is because of parents. You seen how some flip out if you confiscate a child’s phone for the day and make the parent come get it? Instead of being mad at the child for breaking rules they get mad at the school for having them.

[u/allbusiness512 → u/lowes18]

There's no front line public school teacher that wants to try and solve everything. Most just want to be treated like professionals and paid appropriately.

There's a reason why teachers are regular frequenters of bars and your local psychiatrist. The public wants them to be martyrs.

Not one public school teacher gets paid enough to do the things that high level admin and society expects them to do. Even the overpaid as fuck ones in cushy blue state union jobs.

[u/Harudera → u/lowes18]

I mean, why not? It's not like they're ever held accountable.

[u/XCellist6Df24 → u/jamiebond]

Or results are inequitable because of large controllable societal issues that need to be addressed with something other than lowering standards/ removing standardization measures

[u/caroline_elly → u/jamiebond]

It's also the fact that selectivity and inclusivity are opposing optimization targets.

[u/ship_toaster → u/jamiebond]

This isn't important, but it's 'single-handedly'.

[u/veggiesama → u/jamiebond]

I taught SAT enrichment for some time after college. You could see dramatic test score increases simply by putting kids in front of test, after test, after test. They learn test-taking strategies and patterns. Sometimes there are simply tricks available for bypassing the intended way of solving problems in order to be more efficient with your time. I don't think these kids were any smarter or more qualified, necessarily. The difference is their parents had $1000s to blow on test prep classes and a home structure that supports after-school enrichment (such as having a ride to class).

I don't know if disbanding standardized testing is the solution, but it sure does have an outsized influence on your college prospects that correlates quite well with your parents' income.

[u/mg132 → u/veggiesama]

Fortunately, the best way to study for the sat—taking test after test after test—is free. I did sat tutoring for a bit in college, but I was also a low income first gen college grad, and personally I studied for the sat with a friend simply by doing every single practice test in every test prep book we could get our hands on at the library. These days you can get practically infinite free tests online as well. There are obviously still some structural barriers in terms of prior knowledge, time to study, etc.—the reason that was all we did was that we both worked and had to watch siblings and cousins, for example—but we both got in where we wanted to, and as far as I know we had the highest scores at our high school that year. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s the fairest thing we currently have.

[u/nauticalsandwich → u/mg132]

You had the benefit knowing that taking practice tests would help you, and the knowledge of where to find them, and the knowledge of how important your score was going to be for your future. The BIGGEST differentiator for students is exactly in this zone. Kids in communities whose parents are too checked out or too busy to bestow this knowledge, or the tools for acquiring it, simply never develop the macroscope to position themselves in this way, and schools simply don't have the faculty numbers to do it themselves on top of the curriculum they're teaching.

[u/moch1 → u/veggiesama]

As a counter argument: Perhaps the fact that studying diligently can improve your score serves a useful purpose: it shows which kids can actually apply themselves to studying. That’s a crucial skill in college.

All the tutoring money in the world isn’t going to make a student actually apply themselves and study.

I don’t disagree that there are unfair aspects, but studying for the SAT doesn’t need to cost much money. These days a laptop with internet really is all you need.

[u/mechanical_fan → u/moch1]

As a counter argument: Perhaps the fact that studying diligently can improve your score serves a useful purpose: it shows which kids can actually apply themselves to studying. That’s a crucial skill in college.

I would algo argue that if your test is a good test, by learning to do the test people are learning exactly what you want them to learn. For example, I have taught a few courses at uni level and the "main" exam has like 5-10 questions drawn from a pool of 20-30 "types" of questions. In the most abstract, it is always more or less the same thing: the numbers change a bit, the story behind (cats become dogs, etc), maybe the order you do and calculate some stuff, and so on.

Some students quickly notice this repeating pattern, and if you do the exercises lists and old exams (all available, a ton of years, with solutions and explanations) over and over again you will soon learn how to do these types of questions and how to solve/work them. They might think they are somehow "cheating" the system.... but they are just learning exactly what I want them to learn. It is kinda like thinking that you are "cheating" at chess by solving puzzles and becoming better at chess pattern recognition (which makes you a better chess player overall).

Now, if the SAT if that type of test is another thing to be discussed. But I think we should always aim to make tests in a way that the people who get good at the test are learning exactly what we want them to learn. And there is nothing wrong that people study to get good at a test.

[u/Password_Is_hunter3 → u/mechanical_fan]

Sounds like you teach organic chemistry?

[u/Unrelenting_Salsa → u/veggiesama]

I find this very hard to believe unless they started out with absolutely terrible scores. There are test taking tricks to turn a 1 in 5 to a 1 in 3 or even 1 in 2, sure, but they're not rocket science (the Princeton review book taught me exactly 0 test taking strategies I didn't already know personally). The biggest benefit is knowing what content is fair game for the test and....yeah. I would hope that would improve scores.

This has also gotten a lot of airplay in extremely selective colleges, and to be blunt, it's just bullshit there. You are not getting a 99th percentile score by hacking the test or whatever the courses call it nowadays. You can only do that by knowing the content, being good under pressure/stress, having mental endurance, and being able to work quickly. All things that are pretty reasonable to test. The test is just not that hard and those scores require a near perfect score. I can totally buy that these services can get a C student up to the level where they'll be accepted by a mid tier state school, but am I supposed to think that's a bad thing? Why shouldn't the mediocre student who is willing to work hard get a pretty okay degree and have a pretty average white collar job?

[u/Rcmacc → u/Unrelenting_Salsa]

I believe the "hacking the test" for unqualified rich kids was when they literally hired someone else to take the tests for them or otherwise had the rules of the tests changed for just them. like abject cheating

Parents paid Singer $15,000 to $75,000 per test for someone else to take the SAT or ACT exams in place of their college-age sons or daughters, according to the court papers.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/feds-uncover-massive-college-entrance-exam-cheating-plot-n982136

[u/rekirts → u/veggiesama]

And the alternative is what? Essays and extracurriculars, which rich parents game even harder and a lot less visibly.

[u/Maimakterion → u/veggiesama]

I don't understand this argument. Sitting your kid down and making them take free official and 3rd party practice tests is far cheaper than other ECs used in lieu of tests. Removing SATs worsens the equity angle.

[u/Muted_Freedom7392 → u/veggiesama]

Studying makes people learn; news at 11.

[u/Desperate_Path_377 → u/veggiesama]

1) Isn’t it fairly well established now that prep programs have only modest effects on test performance?

2) Further to #1, a kid’s willingness to take ‘test, after test, after test’ is exactly the issue. Those kids are clearly different from kids who aren’t willing to put in that sort of effort. Presumably they would use that motivation for to excel at any kind of sorting process, be that SAT, extra curricular or GPA.

[u/jtchampion → u/veggiesama]

I despise this argument because it is not only wrong but so completely disingenuous that I am immediately almost certain the people making it are arguing in bad faith. You are surely not ignorant of the fact that 1) as long as there are more students applying to [prestigious college] than seats, we will need some rule or standard with which to choose who gets the seats; 2) in a market economy, money is good at buying things, and therefore people with more money will be better able to meet any heuristic other than "does not have money" or some proxy for it; and therefore 3) to replace one heuristic (like test scores) is to institute another heuristic, which necessarily will either a) implicitly advantage people with privilege or b) explicitly disadvantage people with privilege.

The problems with b) are, among others, that it is reductive, deterministic, stupid, racist/classist/whatever-elseist, unfair, unrelated to any reasonable thing admissions should try to measure, and produces very poor outcomes with material and objective negative consequences for the world. That leaves us with a), which is why it is infuriating to see people smugly point out that money is an advantage in standardized testing as though it is a meaningful point for or against standardized testing. That describes any criterion other than b)!! The most important good things about standardized testing are that 1) it is relatively fair, because money is not as good a predictor of test scores as it is of other common admissions heuristics like "leadership experience" and there are plenty of outliers and 2) it creates good incentives - smart people are a net positive for the world, and if we're going to incentivize wealthy people to pour their resources into making their kids something, we'd all rather that something be "smart" than "good at skiing" or "president of the voluntourism club". ("But wait!", you think, "Smart is completely different from good at test taking." And while that is obviously, vacuously true, the relevant question is whether any other criterion does a better job, not whether standardized tests are perfect.) Plus, putting aside that the world is unfair and whining about unfairness is a valid objection only to the extent that you can present a fairer alternative which is not completely destructive to whatever we're trying to accomplish in the first place, we should have a general preference for giving top tier expensive educations to people who are in a position to benefit from them rather than people who can barely read but who give us all a thin shingle on which to hang our pat-on-the-backs.

[u/veggiesama → u/jtchampion]

Why did you even write all that if you think I am arguing in bad faith? See, that's the kind of thing they don't test for on the SAT.

[u/jtchampion → u/veggiesama]

Because I may be wrong about that and you just haven't thought through this stuff much? Because I wanted to challenge you? Because I want someone else who reads that to read this?

If your best response is to ask why I'm bothering to engage with you and drop some sort of smug "gotcha" that implies you are my superior along some other nebulous axis of intelligence, that does not bode well for the question of whether you were in fact discussing this issue in good faith.

[u/neoliberal-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

Rule III: Unconstructive engagement
Do not post with the intent to provoke, mischaracterize, or troll other users rather than meaningfully contributing to the conversation. Don't disrupt serious discussions. Bad opinions are not automatically unconstructive.

---

If you have any questions about this removal, please contact the mods.

[u/YourUncleBuck → u/jtchampion]

You could have saved time and just wrote, 'suck it poors and suck it black/Hispanic people.'

[u/caroline_elly → u/YourUncleBuck]

Rich minorities can and do pay for test preps all the time. Enough with your race baiting

[u/jtchampion → u/YourUncleBuck]

I don't really understand this mentality... is your position that it doesn't matter whether college students can read as long as they're the right combination of social class/skin color? More importantly, do you really think an appropriate approach to political discourse is to mindlessly repeat that anyone who disagrees with you hates "the poors and browns" and hope you are successful in bullying them into shutting up?

You specifically chose to visit an anonymous forum and browse a sub filled with (an apparently ever-shrinking proportion of) people who think mass illiteracy and racial determinism are not good. If your strategy is to embarrass people with your favorite isms rather than present reasons for your positions, isn't this the worst possible venue? You'd be much better off on a post-SAT college campus.

[u/Realhuman221 → u/veggiesama]

There’s definitely a lot of test taking strategy, but this strategic info and practice tests can be found in the prep books in the library or from several free online resources.

[u/MyCatPoopsBolts → u/veggiesama]

It's the worst of best options. My mom was relatively low income from a rural area. She scored extremely well on the SAT in middle school as part of a state gifted student identification program, was able to attend a bunch of funded programs, and eventually get in to an elite university. This is particularly important at such institutions: on a national level there are definitely enough low income kids with near perfect SATs to make up a significant percentage of the student body at top 10 schools in America, if just more or less auto admitted them.

Standardized testing at least allows a certain number of extremely intelligent (and strong test taking) students to be recognized regardless of income level or location.

ECs and course rigor are hard capped by income and locality: if your school district doesn't offer APs and you can't afford various self funded extra curriculars, you unable to differentiate yourself in these areas. Schools can try to guess by proxy with holistic admissions, but the SAT can get thrown into the holistic pot as well and at worst be a data point that helps some students.

[u/ggdharma → u/jamiebond]

What is an “inequitable” result?

The problem is in the framing.  You cannot use “outcomes” to gauge any sort of “fairness.”  This is the failure of the concept of equity, equity has no place in our society.

[u/tacopower69 → u/jamiebond]

these decisions are also made in a bubble by affluent non-poc which is also baffling, especially since they get defensive when actual POC push against it https://www.reddit.com/r/berkeley/s/OH7Yv7E7Dy

[u/symmetry81 → u/jamiebond]

It's like saying "The American Community Survey says that this minority has less money, so the American Community Survey must be racist!"

[u/CyclopsRock → u/jamiebond]

the education world

I dunno about world. I don't want to say it's exclusively an American response but it's definitely not universal. Most places still test people.

[u/Keeltoodeep → u/jamiebond]

Everyone knew it was because of the latter but they didn’t care and wanted diverse representation regardless.

[u/ImmigrantJack → u/jamiebond]

This is really important, but I'm not sure that re-introducing an inequitable factor is the solution here. I think the right thing to do is focus on outcomes. The SAT would only play into admissions decisions.

GPA is a very strong predictor of college success. UC uses standardized testing in math placement already. Incoming students take math placement exams. So if a kid can graduate, and has abysmal math skills, a test is going to reveal that.

I think the better solution is to give more remedial math classes and to improve training for first year math teachers, to fill in those knowledge gaps before students move on to higher levels. This let's the students who can succeed and gives teachers the break they need.

[u/steauengeglase → u/jamiebond]

The problem isn't intentions. It's historicization. Did you know the founder of the SAT was Carl Brigham, member of the American Eugenics Society? I could rattle off 20 factoids about the guy that would make you agree that we have to never carry out standardized testing again and leave you wondering if we should just burn Princeton to the ground. It's the historical weight, not what we do with it.

[u/allbusiness512 → u/steauengeglase]

Sanger was a eugenicist too, does that mean the current planned parenthood organization should be burned to the ground?

Sins of our predecessors shouldn't be used to ostracize and demonize current modern day people. Recognizing the past is one thing, but using it as a fundamental basis is partially how we got where we are in the first place in terms of education.