Tag: education

Education is not the answer

A study shows that the push to provide more people with college educations is counterproductive and was fundamentally misguided:

Almost half of all recent college graduates are working at jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree, according to a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

While it might have been rare to see college graduates in these low-quality jobs a few years ago, they’re increasingly the norm these days. That same New York Fed study found that more and more recent college graduates are taking low-wage jobs and working part-time while fewer and fewer of them are working full-time at high-quality jobs.

Wharton School professor Peter Capelli tried to figure out whether the problem in the labor market is because the jobs don’t require the skills that candidates are offering or because workers don’t have the proper skills that employers are seeking.

Here’s what he found. The main problem with the U.S. job market isn’t a gap in basic skills or a shortage of employees with particular skills, but a mismatch between the supply and the demand for certain skills. There’s a greater supply of college graduates than a demand for college graduates in the labor market.

This mismatch, according to Capelli, exists because most jobs in today’s economy don’t require a college degree.

“Indeed, a reasonable conclusion is that over-education remains the persistent and even growing situation of the U.S. labor force with respect to skills,” Capelli said in his study.

The worst thing is that the expense of these unnecessary educations make it harder for women to do the one thing American society actually needs them to do, which is to get married and have children. Which, of course, may have been the real objective all along.

You don’t need to know the difference between first-wave feminism and third-wave feminism, or what Sun Tzu meant by “Heaven” to work at Starbucks. Education doesn’t create jobs, in fact, many new jobs are created by men who dropped out of the educational process in order to start new companies.

I’ll bet proportionately fewer jobs have been created by people with PhDs than by non-graduates who started college but never finished.

The mystery of the missing light

Astrophysics keeps getting curiouser and curiouser:

There is a “missing light crisis” taking place in the universe with a huge deficit on what there should be and what there actually is, astronomers have said. In a statement, experts from the Carnegie Institution for Science said “something is amiss in the universe” with 80% of the light missing.

Lead author of the study Juna Kollmeier said: “It’s as if you’re in a big, brightly-lit room, but you look around and see only a few 40-watt lightbulbs. Where is all that light coming from? It’s missing from our census.”

Published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists found that the light from galaxies and quasars is not enough to explain observations of intergalactic hydrogen, with a difference of 400%. Empty space between galaxies are bridged by tendrils of hydrogen and helium that act as a “light metre”.

The scientists discovered that when looking at galaxies billions of light years away in the early universe, the amount of light present appears to add up. However, in more localised parts of the universe, the calculations fail massively….

Kollmier said: “Either our accounting of the light from galaxies and quasars is very far off, or there’s some other major source of ionizing photons that we’ve never recognised. We are calling this missing light the photon underproduction crisis. But it’s the astronomers who are in crisis—somehow or other, the universe is getting along just fine.”

With the new school year starting, homeschool parents should consider helping prepare their children to deal with this “missing light crisis” by ensuring that they are properly educated on the subject. And one of the best ways to do that is to take the Astronomy and Astrophysics course for which the curriculum is available from Castalia House. Written by Dr. Sarah Salviander, it is the best curriculum on the subject you can find anywhere.

Homeschool surpasses private school

In North Carolina:

North Carolina officials say there has been a huge increase over the past two years in the number of Tar Heel families who have pulled their kids out of public schools and begun educating them at home. The number of homeschools has jumped 27 percent since the 2011-12 school year, NewsObserver.com reports.

As of last year, 98,172 North Carolinian children were homeschooled; that’s 2,400 students more than the number who attended a private school.

While the sputtering economy is the reason families are choosing
homeschooling over private schooling, the nationalized learning
experiment (Common Core) is the main reason families are leaving the
public schools in the first place. “Common Core is a big factor that I hear people talk about,” Beth
Herbert, founder of Lighthouse Christian Homeschool Association, told
NewsObserver.com. “They’re not happy with the work their kids are coming
home with. They’ve decided to take their children home.”

One number they omit to mention is 1,443,998. That’s the number of public schooled children in North Carolina. Which means that more than six percent of school-age children there are being homeschooled, considerably up from the national average of two percent a few years ago.

Sometimes it’s nice to be able to report a positive trend for a change. And it sounds as if the numbers of homeschoolers will continue to grow.

The fakers

This rings true of my experience of the Ivy League and its uptight denizens.

A young woman from another school wrote me this about her boyfriend at Yale:

Before he started college, he spent most of his time reading and writing short stories. Three years later, he’s painfully insecure, worrying about things my public-educated friends don’t give a second thought to, like the stigma of eating lunch alone and whether he’s “networking” enough. No one but me knows he fakes being well-read by thumbing through the first and last chapters of any book he hears about and obsessively devouring reviews in lieu of the real thing. He does this not because he’s incurious, but because there’s a bigger social reward for being able to talk about books than for actually reading them.

I taught many wonderful young people during my years in the Ivy League—bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it was a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development. Everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment’s notice.

Look beneath the façade of seamless well-adjustment, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the study’s 25-year history.

So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error.

My freshman year, I spent a few days at Harvard and Dartmouth with a Bucknell girl whose two best friends were at those superior learning establishments. Dartmouth was exactly like Bucknell, only the girls were shorter and uglier and the temperature was colder. But Harvard… I have never, in my entire life, been around a bigger group of hapless posers.

The description of the Yale guy who reads the first and last chapters of a book rings very true. It’s become a common phenomenon online, but Harvard was the first place I encountered people who regarded having heard of something as being synonymous with knowing it. That’s why I developed the habit of asking a question or two about the contents of a book someone has mentioned because I’ve learned that many people will pretend to have read things they have not.

Seriously, if you haven’t read something, it’s no big deal. There are a lot of books out there. There are hundreds that I think I should read that I haven’t and probably never will. It’s no big deal not to have read a book… unless, of course, you’re writing a review of it.

I’ve mentioned this part before, but the most egregious example I’ve encountered was the big guy who kept telling girls about how he “played hockey for Harvard”. Unfortunately for him, I happen to be from Minnesota and I also happened to know that the Harvard hockey team was in Minneapolis that night, playing the Gophers. I think one of my friends back home was going to the game or something. I asked him if he was hurt, which he denied in a puzzled manner, and promptly fell into the trap. When pressed, he finally admitted that he played INTRAMURAL hockey. Right.

Not everyone I’ve met from an Ivy League school that isn’t Dartmouth or Brown is a lying, pretentious poser, but a surprisingly high percentage of them are. And while it may be a character flaw, I’ve discovered that there are few things more entertaining than intellectually bitchslapping the unsuspecting, insecure little bastards.

Even if I was going to send my children to an American university, and I can’t imagine I would, I wouldn’t send them to any Ivy League school.

How do you say “taqiyya” in Hebrew?

In the comments, Steve offered the excuse of superior motivation and “training” to explain the inordinate amount of Jewish success, first in Germany, now in the USA:

Whenever I read complaints about Jewish success, I wonder if people really want the totalitarian control which would be necessary to stop a high IQ, highly motivated, creative, hard working people from achieving it, because that is what is necessary to stop it. You have to give up your freedom to repress the successful and promote the mediocre and that is quite a price to pay, just because you don’t like Jewish billionaires or bankers or whatever. But as America has already travelled a way down that road (promotion of mediocre anyway), it probably won’t be too much of a stretch. In any event, a little secret for your readers. When Jews succeed they do not look around and say to themselves: “so many Jews have succeeded before me, I had better stop now, because the Gentiles around here are going to get mad.” There is no “group strategy” like that, – isn’t that what McDonald calls it? No they are trained to think: “if that Jew made it, I can make it – only faster and better.” Yes, that is the “secret” of the Jews. I myself don’t think lazy and stupid and resentful would be better, but from the looks of things, I may be in the distinct minority…  I just
think [ethnic nepotism] is complete BS. Wanting to believe someone else succeeded
because someone else got the break.

I pointed out that the real “secret” of Jewish success is that Jews “relentlessly and
ruthlessly promote other Jews at the expense of non-Jews while furiously
fighting to prevent any efforts of the majority to do the same.” Steve offers zero evidence in support of his assertions, raising numerous questions such as this one: do Jews actually work more hours in six days per week than every other group does in seven?

Now, there isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with favoring one’s own. It is normal human behavior. You see it in the NFL all the time; when Denny Green was hired as the Vikings head coach, the coaching staff suddenly went from being all-white to nearly half-black. Was that wrong? One could hardly criticize Green for bringing in the likes of Tony Dungy (later Super Bowl-winning head coach), Tyrone Willingham (later head coach at Stanford and Notre Dame), and Willie Shaw (Hall of Fame cornerback, father of current Stanford head coach David Shaw). And small groups will tend to stick together more successfully than large groups. But to simultaneously attempt to deny other groups the ability to do the same, and moreover, to deny doing what is observably being done, is both wrong and mendacious.

I’ve personally witnessed this in-group promotion in several different industries. To give one example, I have seen how the Littlest Chickenhawk was handed multiple opportunities to fail upward; he was nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate as a teenager despite the fact that his WND column was banal and one of the least-read; my weekly readership there was 4.1 times larger than his. Now, at 30, he is editor-at-large of Breitbart News, guest hosts regularly for major talk show hosts, and appears regularly on news channels including CNN, Fox News, and Sun News Network in Canada. Is Ben Shapiro THAT much more talented or intelligent or insightful than I am? Than every other contributor at WND is? I doubt Shapiro himself would make such a claim?

And there is considerable evidence of that relentless in-group promotion described, both anecdotal and statistical. Ron Unz exposed the corruption in Ivy League admissions offices in an article entitled “The Myth of American Meritocracy”:

Consider the case of Tiffany Wang, a Chinese immigrant student raised in the Silicon Valley area, where her father worked as an engineer. Although English was not her first language, her SAT scores were over 100 points above the Wesleyan average, and she ranked as a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist, putting her in the top 0.5 percent of high school students (not the top 2 percent as Steinberg mistakenly claims). Nevertheless, the admissions officer rated her just so-so in academics, and seemed far more positively impressed by her ethnic activism in the local school’s Asian-American club. Ultimately, he stamped her with a “Reject,” but later admitted to Steinberg that she might have been admitted if he had been aware of the enormous time and effort she had spent campaigning against the death penalty, a political cause near and dear to his own heart. Somehow I suspect that a student who boasted of leadership in pro-death penalty activism among his extracurriculars might have fared rather worse in this process. And presumably for similar reasons, Tiffany was also rejected by all her other prestigious college choices, including Yale, Penn, Duke, and Wellesley, an outcome which greatly surprised and disappointed her immigrant father….

Finally, there was the case of Becca Jannol, a girl from a very affluent Jewish family near Beverly Hills, who attended the same elite prep school as Julianna, but with her parents paying the full annual tuition. Despite her every possible advantage, including test-prep courses and retaking the exam, her SAT scores were some 240 points lower on the 1600 point scale, placing her toward the bottom of the Wesleyan range, while her application essay focused on the philosophical challenges she encountered when she was suspended for illegal drug use. But she was a great favorite of her prep school counselor, who was an old college friend of the Wesleyan admissions officer, and using his discretion, he stamped her “Admit.” Her dismal academic record then caused this initial decision to be overturned by a unanimous vote of the other members of the full admissions committee, but he refused to give up, and moved heaven and earth to gain her a spot, even offering to rescind the admissions of one or more already selected applicants to create a place for her. Eventually he got her shifted from the Reject category to wait-list status, after which he secretly moved her folder to the very top of the large waiting list pile.

In the end “connections” triumphed, and she received admission to Wesleyan, although she turned it down in favor of an offer from more prestigious Cornell, which she had obtained through similar means. But at Cornell, she found herself “miserable,” hating the classes and saying she “didn’t see the usefulness of [her] being there.” However, her poor academic ability proved no hindrance, since the same administrator who had arranged her admission also wrangled her a quick entrance into a special “honors program” he personally ran, containing just 40 of the 3500 students in her year. This exempted her from all academic graduation requirements, apparently including classes or tests, thereby allowing her to spend her four college years mostly traveling around the world while working on a so-called “special project.” After graduation, she eventually took a job at her father’s successful law firm, thereby realizing her obvious potential as a member of America’s ruling Ivy League elite, or in her own words, as being one of “the best of the best.”

Steinberg’s description of the remaining handful of Wesleyan applicants seems to fall into a very similar pattern, indicating that our elite admissions process operates under the principle of “Ideology and Diversity tempered by Corruption.” 

One wonders how many of the “honors” students shared her background. Steve and Miss Jannol may believe her “success” is the result of her innate Jewish superiority, but the facts demonstrate otherwise. And even the familiar appeals to intelligence are increasingly outdated; as the demographic math would indicate was bound to happen, Jews have been completely surpassed by elite Asians in the National Merit Scholarship program and have therefore resorted to using the very sort of quotas they once complained WASPs used to keep them out of the Ivy League.

As Unz observed: “The last 20 years have brought a huge rise in the number of Asians
winning top academic awards in our high schools or being named National
Merit Scholarship semifinalists. It seems quite suspicious that none of
trends have been reflected in their increased enrollment at Harvard and
other top Ivy League universities.”

These are the facts. Facts are not anti-semitic, they are merely the truth of the world as it is. And the truth, however uncomfortable, will be sought after and observed here: the more any commenter attempts to obscure the truth, the more I will take the time and effort required to expose whatever it is he is trying to hide. I had actually moved on from the subject until commenters like Steve started showing up and attempting to pass off transparent deceit as truth. And before Steve attempts to dig himself in any deeper, it may be helpful to keep in mind that I am one of those National Merit semifinalists and I am not easily baffled with bullshit. Every assertion made will require evidential support. Every statement made will be dissected, and every retreat into rhetoric will be noted as such.

For whatever reason, Steve is attempting to hide the observable fact that the inordinate success presently enjoyed by Jews in America is not the inevitable result of working harder, being more intelligent, or innate ethnic superiority, but is primarily due to a laudable dedication to in-group promotion being expressed in a variety of means, some legitimate, and some not. I assume he is doing so in an attempt to prevent an anti-semitic reaction, but whatever his motivation may be, I will point out that deception and misinformation do not work for long on those with open eyes and functional memories.

People are certainly free to ignore my warnings. Most have in the past and I assume most will in the future. But if Steve thinks Americans are going to meekly accept the financial pillaging of their nation any more tamely than the European nations historically have, especially when they have also suffered the demographic demolition of their country, I think he is woefully mistaken. And, I note, there are more than a few Jewish leaders who more or less agree with my concerns.

It’s not a real problem yet. The difference between Israel’s disapproval rating in the USA and in France, (which is a reasonable proxy) is nearly 50 percent; 27 percent vs 65 percent. If that percentage begins to rise in the next five years, it will be an initial indication that my read of the situation is correct.

Affirmative grading

Not content with making many young blacks feel retarded after being encouraged to attend universities beyond their intellectual capabilities, the academic left is now determined to ruin the academic reputation of those blacks who are capable of earning good grades on the Asian/White standard.

A remarkable article on the University of Wisconsin (Madison) appeared yesterday on the John William Pope Center site. In it, UW economics professor W. Lee Hansen writes about a comprehensive diversity plan prepared for the already diversity-obsessed campus. The report, thousands of words long,  is mostly eye-glazing diversity babble, filled with terms like “compositional diversity,” “critical mass,” “equity mindedness,” “deficit-mindedness,” “foundational differences,” “representational equity” and “excellence,” a previously normal noun that suffers the loss of all meaning when  printed within three words of any diversity term.

But Professor Hansen noticed one very important line in the report that the faculty senate must have missed when it approved this text: a call for “proportional participation of historically underrepresented racial-ethnic groups at all levels of an institution, including high-status special programs, high-demand majors, and in the distribution of grades.” So “representational equity” means quotas at all levels. And let’s put that last one in caps: GRADES WILL BE GIVEN OUT BY RACE AND ETHNICITY.

Oh, I doubt they missed it.  I very much doubt they missed it. On the other hand, there would probably be more than a few whites in math and engineering classes, and at places like UC Berkeley, who would find themselves thinking: “you know, grading by ethnicity doesn’t sound all that bad.”

You probably thought “separate but equal” was supposed to be the epitome of racism. But there is no one more deeply racist at heart than an “anti-racist”. That’s why they’re so vehement about stamping out any appearance of it. They’re like former alcoholics ranting about the unrestrained evil of drinking a glass of wine with dinner. And, as with ex-alcoholics, whenever they slip up it tends to be messy.

Homeschool or die, vol XLVI

Pity those poor “children” crossing the southern border:

You’re going to hear plenty of people try to explain how, if a school turns such a “student” away, it’s racism. You’ve been told thousands of times that stopping illegal immigrants at the border is “hate.”  You’ve been told that even calling this a problem means you’re some kind of right-wing nut or white supremacist.

This story–grown men and women being shipped to Massachusetts at taxpayer expense and enrolling in your kids’ schools–is the real story of amnesty. Announcing that we can have no immigration laws, that none of the rules are enforcable, etc leads directly to the “every man for himself” shakedown of taxpayers by illegal immigrants who are only looting what we’re leaving unlocked.

And so…

 Isai [the guy in the photo above] and Candelaria are enrolled in the ninth grade and are expected to arrive in class this fall, Latham confirmed to NRO. When potential age discrepancies arise, Latham says city officials visit the residences of the “minors” to attempt to verify the age of the individuals in question. On one occasion that she’s aware of, Latham says a relative at one such residence identified an illegal immigrant “child” as between the ages of 30 and 35.

And if you’ve got the facts, this story isn’t that surprising. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, tens of thousands of adults are part of the current surge from Central America.

Department of Homeland Security officials have said that between October and June the Border Patrol had apprehended 39,000 adults traveling with an unspecified number of children. The number of unaccompanied children apprehended as of mid-June was 52,000.

You’ve been told this is a tidal wave of junior high kids wandering across the border. That’s just not true.

And that’s just the count of those who have been caught and released. What’s the over/under on public school boys and girls being raped and murdered by their overage classmates in the coming school term? All so feckless Americans can feel good about their refusal to defend their own country’s borders.

Darwin + Title IX = IDIOCRACY

I long suspected that there would be seriously negative ramifications to encouraging our best and brightest women to remain barren and pursue degrees instead of preparing them for motherhood, but I didn’t expect the effect to be quantified so soon. There is more detail at Alpha Game, but suffice it to say that it has been confirmed that education, and the education of women in particular, is literally dysgenic.

We already knew that female suffrage and higher education for women was dyscivic. But this is the first confirmation of the logical conclusion that they are dysgenic as well. The silver lining is that it is a societal problem that will eventually solve itself over time… assuming the society somehow manages to survive.

I see this as yet another indication that there is no such thing as linear progress, much less inevitable progress, and that human societies follow a cyclical pattern of eucivic structures arising from savagery that are gradually supplanted by dyscivic ones that cause the civilized society to collapse again into barbarism.

So education isn’t the answer?

Interesting that the economic performance of the USA appears to have slowed down dramatically in the last 40 years despite the much more educated state of the workforce:

Eight percent of the population now holds Master’s degrees, the same percentage that held bachelor’s degrees (or higher) in the 1960s, reports Vox. Master’s degrees in education were by far the most popular, holding at around a third to a quarter of all such degrees from 1971 to 2012, though MBAs had taken the top spot by 2010. In fact, the increase in the number of MBA degrees is astonishing: Only 11.2 percent of master’s degrees were in business in 1971, but in 2012, they were a whopping 25.4 percent.

The rise of the master’s degree is likely a product of credential inflation. As more and more people acquire bachelor’s degrees, those who wish to make themselves stand out go on to get the MA. And as Vox points out, while a Master’s degree does have a positive impact on earnings, the overall debt of people with undergraduate and Master’s degrees has grown markedly in the past decade. In fact, as we recently noted, graduate student debt is in large part driving the student loan crisis.

I was always dubious about the idea that formal education did most people any good. I mean, how many of your fellow students in high school and college would you say appeared to learn anything at all from the experience?

ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS

Today we are officially announcing the publication of ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS, a curriculum created by Dr. Sarah Salviander, a research scientist whose areas of particular interest are quasars and supermassive black holes. She is a research scientist at the University of Texas, is one of the authors of “Evolution of the Black Hole Mass – Galaxy Bulge Relationship for Quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7” and “Narrow Emission Lines as Surrogates for σ * in Low- to Moderate-z QSOs” in addition to many other scientific papers, and teaches classes as a visiting professor of physics at Southwestern University. Dr. Salviander describes the new curriculum at Castalia House:

“Look around the web for a high-quality, modern-science astronomy homeschool course and you won’t find much. There are a handful of scripture-based astronomy courses that seem to cover little more than the seasons and motions of the night sky, and one very expensive software-based curriculum. I realized there was a need for a comprehensive, modern, and affordable astronomy homeschool curriculum, and set out to develop one based on my years of teaching astronomy at the university level. A couple of years ago, I mentioned this in an offhand way to Vox Day; it turns out Vox had been contemplating offering a series of affordable, electronically-available homeschool curricula, and so we began to discuss the possibility of making astrophysics the first of many such courses.”

 So we are pleased to announce ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS, the first offering in the Castalia Homeschool line. The curriculum is available only through the Castalia House store and costs less than $60.00. No further expenditures are necessary for the course as the textbook is available online, although we recently received permission to publish the primary textbook and will soon offer it accordingly at an affordable price. Our objective is to keep the price of all curricula under $100.

The curriculum is designed for students aged 13+. It has been described as “a top-notch astronomy curriculum” by Laurie Bluedorn, author of Trivium Pursuit. As per suggestions from the readers of this blog, sample PDFs from all four books of the curriculum have been made available for free download on the relevant product listing of the Castalia House store. If you are, or if you know, a homeschool mother of teenagers now preparing the fall course schedule, I encourage you to take a close look at ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS and consider using it for the next school year.