Tag: education

The end of the public school

I tend to agree. As state and local money gets tighter, something is going to give. And one of those things is going to be the public schools, because kids don’t vote and elderly Boomers are much more concerned about keeping the public money flowing in their direction than they are about the future:

Public education is losing ground. It is being undermined at every turn. This is due to more than the Christian contingent. People everywhere are taking control of their children’s education. The Internet is making this possible. As time marches on, tools and information will be even more accessible. This trend will not be reversed.

Why not? Funding. The system takes gobs of money. Gobs. It inhales taxpayer money and then wastes it like any other bureaucratic welfare-state system does.

Resources flee over time from those individuals and institutions that misallocate capital. Competition eats them alive. Resources also flee over time from individuals and institutions that break God’s law. By giving the state jurisdiction over the education of our children, this is exactly what we have done over the last 300 years. We have already paid for that choice. We have more to pay. In the meantime, the institution is coming to an end.

Sometimes, good things happen for bad reasons. The end of the 18th century indoctrination system imported from Germany is an idea whose time has long past. Technology and economics are in the process of killing it.

Mailvox: how to teach evolution

Mindy asks how to teach evolution to homeschooled children:

I’m off to purchase materials at a homeschooling conference in couple days. I was wondering what your thoughts were on teaching evolution to grade school level students. I want to introduce a more formal science curriculum but all of the conventional materials are saturated in evolutionary timescales and theory. 

Personally, my thoughts on creationism are rather fluid.  I don’t know that the six days of creation should be taken literally though I don’t believe man evolved from any other animal.  I would like to give my kids a firm foundation in Bible based science before teaching the conventional theory but am not sure whether to use the literal fundamentalist version to start with. Normally, when teaching younger children, we do so from the position of having a definitive answer instead of a more or less open question and yet I don’t want to confuse my first grader with my waffling.  At some point they will need to be introduced to the conventional theory of evolution.

When would you do this and how? Any science curricula that is especially good for grade school kids? I look forward to some new ideas on this. I do so enjoy your home schooling threads.

Many parents prefer to keep their children in the dark concerning intellectual concepts with which they disagree. This is true across the political spectrum. I consider this to be a huge mistake.

If you have read RGD, then you will know that my description of Keynesian economics, which I consider to be utter bollocks, is nevertheless so complete and correct that people have described it as one of the better summaries of it that they have ever encountered. My belief is that if something is false, the best way to understand its falsity is to know it better than its advocates. So read the sources and read the current champions, then critique it.

And if you’re not capable of doing that, how do you know it is wrong?

As for the Theorum of Evolution by (probably) Natural Selection, Biased Mutation, Genetic Drift, and Gene Flow, or TE(p)NSBMGDaGF, I would recommend a child be 15 or 16 before studying it. Any younger and they won’t be able to identify the obvious flaws and will be tend to be inclined to simply accept whatever they are told, whether it is TENS, monetarist economics, or magic garden fairies.

Start with an abridged version of The Origin of the Species. Then read one or two of Richard Dawkins’s books; The Selfish Gene is much better than The Greatest Show on Earth because it is an explanation whereas the latter is an apology. That will ensure that the child is better-educated and more up-to-date on evolution than any graduate of the public or private schools.

Then introduce two or three of the critics. I can’t recommend one, because I’ve never actually read any of the various books by TENS critics as I have no need to bolster my own reasons for being skeptical of the theorum. But there are plenty out there and I’m sure the readers here can recommend a few of them.

The point is that there is never any need for those dedicated to the truth to shy away from falsehood or fear it. Hit it head on. Study it. Master it. And then you will be able to explain its weak points to others. That being said, I can see the need for an Evolution curriculum; if we can find a suitably credentialed skeptic, we will likely publish one.

Phil Sandifer explains the PhD lottery

And why it is best avoided. Let it not be said that the man has never written anything sensible:

At the end of my last class of the semester, one of my best students – one who, out of some tragically misguided instinct, actually took a class with me a second time because he enjoyed it – came up to tell me that he’d had a good semester but didn’t think he was going to re-enroll next semester. I asked why, and he explained that he had a job lined up in the family business and just couldn’t justify the loans.

Years of defending academia and the value of a college education reared up inside of me, ready to make an impassioned speech. I wanted to tell him not to. And… I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Because he was right. I could not in good conscience tell one of my best students that it was worth the loans. And in hindsight, that was the moment I decided I was well and truly done with academia.

I had been going to take one last stab at the job market this fall. With the Flood book done and maybe one or two more articles in process, and maybe even a book deal on an edited version of my dissertation. Just to answer the question, one last time, of whether I could make it in academia.

Which is, as it happens, terribly silly. Academia is not a meritocracy. It’s a lottery, in which the grand prize – a tenure track position – is dangled over the heads of everybody so that we agree to work for the appalling wages that adjunct faculty get…. Meanwhile, the odds on tenure track appointments are astonishingly grim. It’s not unusual for a job to get five hundred applicants. There were, last year, maybe two dozen jobs in my field.

This lack of employability also tends to explain why educated SJWs have so much time to comment so prolifically at File 770 and elsewhere.

I find it very interesting that both Dr. Sandifer and I have reached precisely the same conclusion about higher education, despite our vastly different perspectives. Then again, we probably have very different ideas about the solution, as his likely involves increasing the demand whereas mine would involve eliminating the larger portion of the supply.

In any case, the best way to be done with academia is to avoid starting with it unless it is necessary for your job.

Vox’s First Law at work

Vox’s First Law: Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity. Or, in this case, autism:

State therapy specialists claimed Jacob
Barnett would never tie his shoes, read or function normally in society.
But the boy’s mother realized when Jacob was not in therapy, he was
doing “spectacular things” completely on his own.
She decided to trust her instinct and
disregard the advice of the professionals. Instead of following a
standardized special needs educational protocol, she surrounded Jacob
with all the things that inspired passion for him – and was astonished
at the transformation that took place.

Following a diagnosis of autism at age
two, Jacob was subjected to a cookie cutter special education system
that focused on correcting what he couldn’t do compared to normal
children. For years, teachers attempted to convince Kristine Barnett
that her son would only be able to learn the most basic of life skills….

By the time Jacob reached the age of 11, he entered college and is currently studying condensed matter physics at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis. According to an email Professor Scott Tremaine wrote to Jacob’s family:
“The theory that he’s working on
involves several of the toughest problems in astrophysics and
theoretical physics … Anyone who solves these will be in line for a
Nobel Prize.”

Jacob also has an IQ of 170 — higher than that of Einstein.

This is an object lesson in what we discussed at the May Brainstorm. Never, ever, blindly trust the so-called experts. Respect, but verify.

The diversity camp crumbles

Anyone who has studied the history of racially and culturally diverse societies knew this was inevitable:

A complaint Friday alleged that Harvard University discriminates
against Asian-American applicants by setting a higher bar for admissions
than that faced by other groups.

The complaint, filed by a
coalition of 64 organizations, says the university has set quotas to
keep the numbers of Asian-American students significantly lower than the
quality of their applications merits. It cites third-party academic
research on the SAT exam showing that Asian-Americans have to score on
average about 140 points higher than white students, 270 points higher
than Hispanic students and 450 points higher than African-American
students to equal their chances of gaining admission to Harvard. The
exam is scored on a 2400-point scale.

The complaint was filed with the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights.

“Many
studies have indicated that Harvard University has been engaged in
systemic and continuous discrimination against Asian-Americans during
its very subjective ‘Holistic’ college admissions process,” the
complaint alleges. The coalition is seeking a federal
investigation and is requesting Harvard “immediately cease and desist
from using stereotypes, racial biases and other discriminatory means in
evaluating Asian-American applicants.”

This action is particularly significant for its symbolism; Harvard is the throne of American left-liberalism. But the nominally ideological alliance of minorities against the white majority was only going to last as long as the minorities felt they benefited more from that alliance than from flexing their muscle in their own direct interests. Based on what we’re seeing from the Asians in the political world, they are all but done with their “liberal” alliance with blacks, Jews, and Hispanics.

It won’t surprise me if Asians magically become more “conservative” in the next decade as they switch to a Yellow-White (Blue) alliance against the White (Red)-Black-Brown alliance. Politics in the USA and in the UK are becoming less about ideology and more about the straightforward racial power struggles that have historically characterized most diverse societies.

And yes, I use the Red-Blue colors in their original form; Red being the appropriate color for those of the more socialist inclinations.

Giving up on civilized standards

Even if you are a blank slatist who subscribes to a purely cultural theory of African dyscivicism, how is a retreat from imposing civilized standards on disruptive young vibrants going to improve either their behavior or their odds in life?

Board members of California’s Oakland Unified School District unanimously voted on Wednesday to cease suspending students for what they call “willful defiance.” Those behaviors can include swearing/yelling at teachers, refusing direct orders, texting, and storming out of class, to name a few.

The reason? Concern that too many black students are being suspended for willful defiance.

One sophomore student, Dan’enicole Williams, told the San Francisco Gate, “They never take time out, if someone is sleeping in class, to ask what’s wrong. They may be acting that way because they didn’t eat the night before.”

“We’re getting pushed out of schools,” she added. “They don’t care about us.”

Along with suspensions, the new policy will also include bans on expulsions and transfers of students to other schools for multiple infractions.

This is not a society that is going to survive three more generations intact. I mean, anyone can be wrong about what the future will bring, but I simply don’t see any credible scenario where this sort of absolute lunacy doesn’t have considerable knock-on effects.

These optimistically misnamed “students” don’t want to be there and there is observably no purpose in them being there since they’re not even going to be held to minimal standards of behavior, so what is the point of denying their free will while simultaneously degrading the educational experience of all the other children?

Ah yes, preserving the narrative. The narrative must be preserved at absolutely all costs, or else Hitler will holocaust the Jews again. If I was a poor black single mother hoping that my child would somehow improve his lot by obtaining an education, I’d be up in arms about this nonsense.

The crime of failing to cower

This sounds like sheer comedy in the academic thought gulag:

Members of the Virginia Tech football team have been accused of acting disrespectfully at a campus sexual assault awareness event. Players were required to attend a Take Back the Night event on March 26. The event was organized by a campus female activism group and featured sexual assault survivors speaking about their experiences as victims. Multiple attendees accused the players of infringing upon the “safe space” the event is intended to foster, according to The Roanoke Times.

Take Back the Night is a national organization that seeks “to end sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, sexual abuse and all other forms of sexual violence.”

Several attendees wrote letters to the student newspaper, the Collegiate Times, complaining about the players’ behavior. The players arrived late, said they did not know why they were attending the event and spent much of the time looking at their phones, the letters said.

“[T]heir judgmental remarks made it very hard to feel safe,” one wrote. “When survivors took the stage, there was nothing respectful in the way the football team took it, especially in reference to transgender survivors. I am deeply offended and horrified by the disrespectful nature that the players displayed.”

I would suggest that dragging the most aggressive and athletic young men on campus into a place they observably don’t want to be and then flaunting “transgender survivors” in their faces is almost the exact opposite of a “safe space”.

Some things merit disrespect. Maoist consciousness-raising sessions are most certainly one of them.

The benefits of abolishing high school

It wouldn’t just help those on the bottom, but quite a few of those on top as well:

[A]bolishing high school would not just benefit those who are at the bottom of its hierarchies. Part of the shared legacy of high school is bemused stories about people who were treated as demigods at seventeen and never recovered. A doctor I hang out with tells me that former classmates who were more socially successful in high school than he was seem baffled that he, a quiet youth who made little impression, could be more professionally successful, as though the qualities that made them popular should have effortlessly floated them through life. It’s easy to laugh, but there is a real human cost.

I think we see some of the human flotsam and jetsam that is the result of high school shipwrecks floating through here from time to time. From the overconfident midwit who has never recovered from the experience of being the smartest guy in a room with a 115 IQ to the deluded ex-cheerleader who is now fifty pounds overweight but still thinks she’s as attractive to men as she was when she could fit into her little skirts to the bitter omega who can’t accept a compliment at face value for fear that it is another cruel trick intended to humiliate him, the psychological scars of the high school experience are often visible to complete strangers on the Internet.

I tend to include myself in that mix, although perhaps wrongly since my psychological idiosyncracies tend to trace back deeper, which is to say, back to elementary school. My suspicion is that being constantly pushed around and marginalized by one’s intellectual and athletic inferiors, and thereby simultaneously finding oneself at the bottom of some social hierarchies and at the top of others at a very young age, tends to leave one permanently unable to take any of them very seriously or place much value upon them, for good or for ill. When one is both king and beggar, how can one find one’s identity in either state?

For a while, I thought it was strength of character or innate stoicism that enabled me to so easily walk away from various attachments and obligations without looking back. But eventually, it became clear that it was not a positive attribute, it was simply that I was lacking something normal, in much the same way sociopaths lack empathy, autistics lack social cognizance, and atheists lack an intuition of the supernatural. Specifically what it is, I don’t know, but one might describe it as lack of set bonding.

So, I don’t think the abolition of high school would have made much difference to me, but I do think it would greatly benefit those who are either oppressed by the social hierarchy or crippled by too much success too soon in it. And, of course, ending the intellectual lobotomization of entire generations by maleducated, intellectually sub-standard propagandists of the State would be a desirable outcome too.

Do what thou feel

That is not only the whole of the modern moral law, it is the whole of history as well. “Do what thou feel, with due regard for the shrieking of the herd around you, for the truth is nothing more than an opinion.”. A philosopher discovers that this is a philosophy instilled at an early age, in public school:

What would you say if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that it’s wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised?

I was. As a philosopher, I already knew that many college-aged students don’t believe in moral facts. While there are no national surveys quantifying this phenomenon, philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.

What I didn’t know was where this attitude came from. Given the presence of moral relativism in some academic circles, some people might naturally assume that philosophers themselves are to blame. But they aren’t. There are historical examples of philosophers who endorse a kind of moral relativism, dating back at least to Protagoras who declared that “man is the measure of all things,” and several who deny that there are any moral facts whatsoever. But such creatures are rare. Besides, if students are already showing up to college with this view of morality, it’s very unlikely that it’s the result of what professional philosophers are teaching. So where is the view coming from?

A few weeks ago, I learned that students are exposed to this sort of thinking well before crossing the threshold of higher education. A misleading distinction between fact and opinion is embedded in the Common Core.

Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.

Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.

No wonder so many millennials are clueless science fetishists who know nothing of what has gone before them. This definition of “Fact” has completely erased the very concept of history, and rendered the past nothing but mere opinion.

Public school is an unvarnished and unmitigated evil. If you are still foolish enough to be subjecting your children to it, think again. They are not only being intellectually lobotomized, they are being morally and temporally crippled as well.

There is no amount of Christian upbringing or Sunday School teaching that is capable of counteracting this philosophical programming. It will all be neatly slotted into the “opinion” category, which they are taught cannot overlap with the “fact” category. Consider the professor’s test of his own son.

Students are taught that claims are either facts or opinions. They are given quizzes in which they must sort claims into one camp or the other but not both. But if a fact is something that is true and an opinion is something that is believed, then many claims will obviously be both. For example, I asked my son about this distinction after his open house. He confidently explained that facts were things that were true whereas opinions are things that are believed. We then had this conversation:

Me: “I believe that George Washington was the first president. Is that a fact or an opinion?”

Him: “It’s a fact.”

Me: “But I believe it, and you said that what someone believes is an opinion.”

Him: “Yeah, but it’s true.”

Me: “So it’s both a fact and an opinion?”

The blank stare on his face said it all.

The idea that children as young as five are going to be some sort of Christian missionary light unto the pagans in public school was always an abysmally stupid one, but the fact that even a philosopher’s son can be reprogrammed in such an insidious way should shake even the most foolish Christian parent’s blithe confidence in public school. And the idea that your local school is “really good” is far from a panacea, it merely means that it is better at instilling this pernicious anti-philosophy into its students’ heads.

In summary, our public schools teach students that all claims are either
facts or opinions and that all value and moral claims fall into the
latter camp. The punchline: there are no moral facts. And if there are
no moral facts, then there are no moral truths.

The future looks less than bright

 So much for the self-esteem theory of education:

There was this test. And it was daunting. It was like the SAT or ACT
— which many American millennials are no doubt familiar with, as they
are on track to be the best educated generation in history — except
this test was not about getting into college. This exam, given in 23
countries, assessed the thinking abilities and workplace skills of
adults. It focused on literacy, math and technological problem-solving.
The goal was to figure out how prepared people are to work in a complex,
modern society.

And U.S. millennials performed horribly.

That
might even be an understatement, given the extent of the American
shortcomings. No matter how you sliced the data – by class, by race, by
education – young Americans were laggards compared to their
international peers. In every subject, U.S. millennials ranked at the
bottom or very close to it, according to a new study by testing company
ETS.

“We were taken aback,” said ETS researcher Anita Sands. “We
tend to think millennials are really savvy in this area. But that’s not
what we are seeing.”

The test is called the PIAAC test.
It was developed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development, better known as the OECD. The test was meant to assess
adult skill levels. It was administered worldwide to people ages 16 to
65. The results came out two years ago and barely caused a ripple. But
recently ETS went back and delved into the data to look at how 
millennials did as a group. After all, they’re the future – and, in
America, they’re poised to claim the title of largest generation from
the baby boomers.

U.S. millennials, defined as people 16 to 34
years old, were supposed to be different. They’re digital natives. They
get it. High achievement is part of their makeup. But the ETS study
found signs of trouble, with its authors warning that the nation was at
a crossroads: “We can decide to accept the current levels of mediocrity
and inequality or we can decide to address the skills challenge head
on.”

The challenge is that, in literacy, U.S. millennials scored higher than only three countries. In math, Americans ranked last. In technical problem-saving, they were second from the bottom.

This isn’t surprising to me. Generation X had to understand its toys in order to play with them. There is nothing creative about a tablet or a smartphone. You can’t do anything on it. It’s basically a dumb terminal on the mainframe of the Internet. These digital natives are actually digital cargo cultists, comfortably familiar using things they don’t actually know the first thing about.  As far as they’re concerned, it might as well be magic.