Tag: education

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.

Who can explain the mystery?

Isn’t it remarkable that despite the fact that everyone there so values diversity and agrees that it is the most important aspect of education, the San Francisco schools are highly segregated?

Each January, parents across San Francisco rank their preferences for public schools. By June, most get their children into their first choices, and almost three-quarters get one of their choices.

A majority of families may be satisfied with the outcome, but the student assignment system is failing to meet its No. 1 goal, which the San Francisco Unified School District has struggled to achieve since the 1960s: classroom diversity.

Since 2010, the year before the current policy went into effect, the number of San Francisco’s 115 public schools dominated by one race has climbed significantly. Six in 10 have simple majorities of one racial group. In almost one-fourth, 60 percent or more of the students belong to one racial group, which administrators say makes them “racially isolated.” That described 28 schools in 2013–2014, up from 23 in 2010–2011, according to the district.

But the San Francisco Public Press has found the problem may be even more stark: If Asian and Filipino students are counted together — the standard used by the Census — together the number of racially isolated schools in the last school year rose to 39.

The drive toward racial isolation in the district parallels a larger trend in the city: With many wealthier families opting for private alternatives, the public school system is becoming racially and economically isolated from the city as a whole.

Why does it matter whether schools are diverse? One reason is academic performance. Recent studies from Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, show that many students do much better on tests when placed in integrated classrooms, and that all kids are much less likely to grow up with racial stereotypes and prejudices. Far from being opposed to each other, excellence and diversity go hand in hand.

How did this resegregation of schools happen in a city where almost everyone from district leaders to parents supports the ideal of diversity?

And they’ve got studies show and everything! How did this happen to such a nice group of diversity-loving liberals? It’s almost as if… parents are choosing something other than diversity?

Homeschool or be poor

The cognitive elite are abandoning the public schools:

For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.

The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade were eligible under the federal program for free and reduced-price lunches in the 2012-2013 school year. The lunch program is a rough proxy for poverty, but the explosion in the number of needy children in the nation’s public classrooms is a recent phenomenon that has been gaining attention among educators, public officials and researchers.

 Jartstar observes: This will accelerate home schooling and private schooling. In a generation or before most of the major city public schools in the US will be like most of the rest of the 3rd World, poor, dangerous, and offering little education. There will be pockets of good public schools in select communities and neighborhoods. The real collapse will be when enough people take their kids out to kill the funding by stopping bonds.

I tend to suspect the influx of uneducated foreign children has encouraged more than a few parents to pull their children out of the public schools as well. Ironically, there is no state with an education system more segregated than Democrat-run New York.

Pity the poor professors

If this isn’t an excuse for well-justified schadenfreude, I don’t know what is:

“Deplorable, deeply regressive, a sign of the corporatization of the university.”  That’s what Harvard Classics professor Richard F. Thomas calls the changes in Harvard’s health plan, which have a large number of the faculty up in arms.

Are Harvard professors being forced onto Medicaid? Has their employer denied coverage for cancer treatment? Do they need to sign a corporate loyalty oath in order to access health insurance? Not exactly. But copayments are being raised and deductibles altered, making their plan … well, actually, their plan is still extraordinarily generous by any standard:

    The university is adopting standard features of most employer-sponsored health plans: Employees will now pay deductibles and a share of the costs, known as coinsurance, for hospitalization, surgery and certain advanced diagnostic tests. The plan has an annual deductible of $250 per individual and $750 for a family. For a doctor’s office visit, the charge is $20. For most other services, patients will pay 10 percent of the cost until they reach the out-of-pocket limit of $1,500 for an individual and $4,500 for a family.

The deepest irony is, of course, that Harvard professors helped to design Obamacare. And Obamacare is the reason that these changes are probably necessary.

Demonstrating, yet again, that nothing is more short-sighted than an activist rabbit. Give them exactly what they want, provide them exactly what they are agitating for, and they are outraged!

“When I demanded more comprehensive government services requiring more taxes, I didn’t mean that I wanted to pay for them myself!”

Is it any surprise that college educations are increasingly worthless, given that idiots like these are supposedly the creme de la creme of the professoriat?

Homeschool or Die: Pakistan

4GW prefers to aim at soft targets:

At least 126 people have been killed, more than 100 of them children, after Taliban gunmen stormed a military school in the north-western Pakistani city of Peshawar, in the worst ever militant attack to hit the troubled region.

It was reported that one suicide bomber blew himself up in a room containing 60 children and a teacher was set on fire in front of pupils, with the children forced to watch.

The attack started with the gunmen, disguised as security guards, entering the 500-pupil school – which has students aged 10 to 18 – in the early hours.

The jihadists shot their way into the building and went from classroom to classroom, shooting at random.

Army commandos quickly arrived at the scene and exchanged fire with the gunmen. Eye-witnesses described how students cowered under desks as dead bodies were strewn along corridors. News images of the aftermath of the attack showed boys in blood-soaked school uniforms with green blazers being carried from the scene.

Around 160 children, aged 13 and 14, are being held hostage, with four gunmen still inside.  A police inspector said they had trapped the terrorists in the principal’s office. Many of the soldiers involved in the rescue operation are trying to save their own children.

And the world looks on… and learns. The strutting, swaggering militarized police in America have already seen their own families targeted in Los Angeles and Colorado, but they haven’t taken the lesson to heart yet and dialed down their confrontational tactics. And yet, how quickly the agents of the state stop strutting and swaggering when they finally grasp that their families are easily reached even when they live behind barricades and their children go to special schools protected with security guards….

It’s a tragedy, to be sure, and in the West, the sort of easily avoidable tragedy that will nevertheless come to West in time, as we have already seen in New York, London, Madrid, and Sydney.

There is one answer, and only one answer. Mass repatriation. If it is not enacted, then America, and England, and Italy, and Sweden, and Germany, and every other country in the West will see its children subjected to the same jihadist violence. The East does not, and never has, practice the formal Western way of war. And they will prefer to target the soft targets, the women and the children who are incapable of fighting back. Note that this sort of soft-targeting is the very subject addressed by my story, “A Reliable Source”, in RIDING THE RED HORSE.

“We selected the army’s school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females,’ said Taliban spokesman Muhammad Umar Khorasani. ‘We want them to feel the pain.'” 

Speaking of soft targets: “Over 1,000 schools have been destroyed by the Pakistan Taliban since 2010.“

The answer is not to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here. It is to send them back over there so we don’t have to fight them here.


UPDATE: Final count: “Nine Taliban terrorists attacked the Army
Public School in the north-western Pakistani city of Peshawar today,
slaughtering 132 children in the deadliest terrorist attack in the
nation’s history.”

The college experience isn’t worth it

Not if you’re going to be paying for it for the rest of your life:

Stats from the Department of Education show outstanding student loans total more than $1 trillion. A report from The Institute for College Access in late 2013 revealed the average new graduate starts his or her life with $29,400 in student loan debt. College as we know it is clearly unaffordable.

So my question is: Why do people keep embarking on the “traditional college experience” when they know it’s going to put them tens — sometimes hundreds — of thousands of dollars in debt?

And while some people say these 18-year-old kids don’t know what they’re getting themselves into, let’s not pretend we don’t know better. I distinctly remember asking my friend how he would pay off the roughly $70,000 debt he would incur to obtain a major in Ancient Greek and Latin at a liberal arts college in the Midwest. His answer? A simple shrug and flippant “It’s not something I have to worry about right now — hopefully they’ll be forgiven by the government.” Now that he’s still waiting tables four years after graduation, I’d say it’s well past time to start worrying.

I can’t pretend I completely understand how these people feel after the fun is over and the repayments begin, but I can say that I really don’t feel bad for them.

Why not? Because I worked hard to avoid taking out loans. My wonderful parents and grandmother helped me pay for my education, but in the end, it was a few decisions I made that saved me the burden of borrowing money I would never have been able to pay back. Unlike the majority of my friends who went to schools less than an hour from their parents’ homes and chose to live on campus rather than commute, my college roommates were named Mom and Dad. I chose state schools that were half, sometimes one-quarter, of the cost of the schools my friends were attending and worked a part-time on-campus scholarship job in addition to full-time hours at my retail job.

In fairness, it should be pointed out that there is an entire predatory industry, aided and abetted by the federal government, the public school system, and far too many parents, encouraging graduating seniors to make stupid and short-sighted decisions.  This doesn’t excuse the terrible decisions they are making, but it does help explain them.

I’m a little curious about what I can only presume is a new editor at TIME. They’ve been running some surprisingly good columns of late.

Mailvox: more curricula wanted

Rabbi B is interested in our future plans for more material for homeschooling and personal intellectual development:

I recently acquired the astronomy materials from Castalia House a few weeks ago, and from just a cursory review it is evident that the material is going to be rigorous, demanding, and a lot of fun.  I was wondering if you had any plans top expand this area of Castalia House in the future?

I thought it might be nice to make more material of comparable quality available.  It may be possible that more specialized subjects such as writing, rhetoric, Latin, logic, and economics would prove appealing.  In my experience, many home schoolers tend to be relatively weak in these areas, most especially writing and rhetoric.  The material wouldn’t have to be added all at once, but could be introduced gradually to assess interest and receptivity.  Perhaps there would be a way to gauge what topics would be of interest and provide material accordingly.

Even if materials couldn’t be made available, suggested reading lists for a variety of disciplines (literature, history, mathematics, sciences, philosophy, etc) and for different age groups could be posted, not unlike the reading lists on the VP site.  Obviously, you have a better grasp of what is marketable and worth your time and effort, but I for one would love to see more educational materials of comparable quality made available.

We do indeed intend to produce more material for the Castalia Homeschool line. At present, we are working on three curricula: Newtonian Physics, Military History, and Economics. The latter begins thus:

Economics is an intellectual discipline, a field of study, and a body of knowledge. It is not, however, a science, despite the best efforts of economists to establish it as one. While it has historically been called “the Dismal Science”, the truth is that economics could be more accurately described as “the Grand Illusion”.

Science is a process that requires testing, repetition, and the production of reliable, predictable, and testable results. But due to its dynamic complexity and its enormous scale, economics does not readily lend itself to either testing in a lab or repetition outside one. And because of the tremendous complications of all the human preferences and decisions necessarily involved, the predictions generated by economic models seldom prove to be even remotely reliable. Even on the rare occasions that they appear to be initially correct, economic theories often cease to hold up well over time.

Does this mean that economics is without value or that it is a waste of time to study it? Not in the least. Economics only provides us with a very limited ability to understand the chaotic complexities of human interaction, but even a faint glimmer of light is precious in a room that is otherwise pitch-black.

We actually hoped to have Physics and Economics out this fall, but events and ambitions conspired to thwart us. The problem is that Stickwick and I are both, in addition to being rather busy, more than a little iconoclastic. Which means that we’re not entirely comfortable with any of the basic textbooks available and therefore feel the need to write our own. Fortunately for me, Tom Woods has a fairly solid Austrian textbook which was released under a license that is essentially open source and will permit me to remix it to stress what I feel is important as well as to incorporate some additional elements, such as the important and groundbreaking work of Robert Prechter on social mood, Steve Keen on supply and demand, and Ian Fletcher on free trade.

Most of the homeschool curricula presently available rely upon works that were written more than fifty years ago and fail to take into account any of the lessons we have learned in recent decades about the effects of globalization, mass immigration, and credit bubbles. And the intrinsic problem of relying upon a book called Whatever Happened to Penny Candy should not be difficult to understand when even those of us who are middle-aged cannot remember a time when candy cost only one penny.

I don’t know exactly what Stickwick’s issue with the physics textbooks were, but I trust her judgment entirely in such matters and was quite happy to accept a delay in the release of the Physics curriciulum in exchange for an original textbook. It will, I am entirely certain, only improve the end result.

The Military History curriculum is being written by Dr. James Perry. A first look at the quality of his work can be seen in the forthcoming RIDING THE RED HORSE, as he has contributed a lengthy piece on Soviet strategy in Asia called “Make the Tigers Fight”. I was very impressed with the work that Dr. Perry did on the reasoning behind the strategies of WWII in the Pacific, as he pointed out some aspects that had previously eluded me despite my being a lifelong WWII enthusiast, and I am confident that his curriculum will be a solid one. Tom Kratman is an advisor on it, so I shall be very disappointed if there isn’t at least one lesson devoted to military occupations and the utility of crucifixion in pacifying defeated populations.

On the subject of Castalia House, we have a new author announcement today.

A new spin on “Homeschool or Die”

Dallas parents are pulling their kids out of school rather than risk further exposure to Ebola:

Parents rushed to get their children from school Wednesday after
learning that five students may have had contact with the Ebola patient
in a Dallas hospital, as Gov. Rick Perry and other leaders reassured the
public that there is no cause for alarm. The patient, identified
by The Associated Press as Thomas Eric Duncan of Liberia, arrived in
the U.S. on Sept. 20 to visit family. Dallas County Health and Human
Services Director Zachary Thompson said county officials suspect that 12
to 18 people may have had contact with Duncan.

“Right now, the
base number is 18 people, and that could increase,” he said. Thompson
said more details are expected by Thursday afternoon. The number
includes five students at four schools, Dallas school district
Superintendent Mike Miles said.

“This case is serious,” Perry said
during a news conference at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas,
where Duncan is being treated. “Rest assured that our system is working
as it should. Professionals on every level on the chain of command know
what to do to minimize this potential risk to the people of Texas and of
this country.”

They’ve already permitted foreigners from a land where the virus is out of control to not only enter the state, but mingle freely with a) sick people at a hospital and b) schoolchildren, but everyone is supposed to trust that they know what to do?

I don’t think so.

Liberians could see their family members if their family members were repatriated. Wasn’t the whole idea of Liberia to send Africans back to Africa? Why is the USA reimporting Africans in the first place?

The fury of the American public if white schoolchildren start dying of Ebola is not going to be pretty. Perhaps there is no cause for alarm, one hopes there is no caue for alarm, but so far, the noises out of the politicians smack more of frightened people worried about the public’s reaction if it knew the truth of the situation than of people in control of the situation. I expect we’ll find out soon enough.

Regardless, all travel from West Africa needs to be halted now. It should have been halted six weeks ago. Air France, British Airways, and Emirates stopped all flights to Liberia and Sierra Leone back in early August. Congressman Alan Grayson called for a travel ban from Liberia and other infected countries in July! So, why is anyone from West Africa still being permitted to enter the USA?

From ZEROHEDGE: Now that Ebola is officially in the US on an
uncontrolled basis, the two questions on everyone’s lips are i) who
will get sick next and ii) how bad could it get? We don’t know the
answer to question #1 just yet, but when it comes to the second one, a
press release three weeks ago from Lakeland Industries, a manufacturer
and seller of a “comprehensive line of safety garments and accessories
for the industrial protective clothing market” may provide some insight
into just how bad the US State Department thinks it may get. Because
when the US government buys 160,000 hazmat suits specifically designed
against Ebola, just ahead of the worst Ebola epidemic in history making
US landfall, one wonders: what do they know that we don’t?

And then there is this from the CDC: “Because we still do not know exactly how people are infected with Ebola,
few primary prevention measures have been established and no vaccine
exists.” 

UPDATE: The magic of diversity and geographical translocation in action.

Two days after he was sent home from a Dallas hospital, the man who is the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola in the United States was seen vomiting on the ground outside an apartment complex as he was bundled into an ambulance. “His whole family was screaming. He got outside and he was throwing up all over the place,” resident Mesud Osmanovic, 21, said on Wednesday, describing the chaotic scene before the man was admitted to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital on Sunday where he is in serious condition. 

UPDATE 2: “TEXAS HEALTH OFFICIALS INCREASE NUMBER OF POSSIBLE CONTACTS OF EBOLA VICTIM TO 100″

That’s up from 12….